Even when I was in the LCMS, I thought this. What we all waked together in, what we were really a synod in more than name only, was the Concordia Health and Retirement Plans. A confessional pastor observed after I made this remark in the 1990s, “Oh, like the Roman burial societies.” Christians formed these legally because they were not church, per say. And synodical health and retirement plans aren’t church either but are they even good business?
Synodical health plans always seemed to work well-enough for my family. Since it was the only one I ever knew, I have nothing to compare it with. Even after leaving the synod in 2019, we were still on the plans. But what about the retirement plans? I have always maintained any investment in the LCMS Church Extension fund was foolish because no one ‘invests’ in a totally unsecured investment. How sound do you think the Concordia Retirement plans really are?
In the 1980s an insurance agent who was also a member of a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation told me that all of the LCMS churches he worked with operated in the red. He believed that if any of them went bankrupt on their Church Extension loans the other investors would have a legitimate claim to any persons or churches who also had investments in that church extension fund, and might force the Synod to use other funds the synod had on hand, say the retirement plan funds. Hmmm?
In 2016 a member of the LCMS Board of Directors for the Concordia Plans told me: “I shouldn’t really be talking out of school about this, but you need to know that the majority of people contributing to your retirement plan are day care workers, and they make a lot less than pastors do. It’s hard to see how long it can be funded that way.”
I called Concordia Plans and asked them. They confirmed that the majority of those contributing to the retirement plans were in fact day care workers. That’s the bad news. The good news, they said, is that the majority of them never collect any benefits. They put in never to take out.
In 1988 when the LCA, the Big Liberal Dog, swallowed up the ALC, the Moderate Little Dog, the real world issue was that the ALC had a fully-funded pension plan. The LCA did not. I know. I know. You respond with the Sinclair Lewis title, It Can’t Happen Here. Oh, yes it can.
The retirement plan people tell you that once you stop contributing to the retirement plans – You have to if you leave the LCMS. – they purchase an annuity that guarantees your funded for life. So my defined benefit plan is safe and funded till the Lord calls both my wife and I home. But what about those not retiring for years or decades?
The Concordia Plans – of which I was a member for 32 of the 40 years of my ministry – is de facto a burial society. But it won’t be those with the “golden parachutes”, it won’t be those who meet at plush conferences ‘for synod business’ who will be buried if something goes awry. It will be parish pastors. And then we (myself included) will see how wise putting earthly benefits before faith was even for this life.
