Bruce Church has left a new comment on your post "TS Asks Joe Krohn":
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The whole CG paradigm is starting to make sense now. It's all about statistics, as we know. The reason CG pastors don't visit their flock is so they have fewer occasions to take people off the rolls.
The CG idea is to increase membership by adding people to the rolls even if they show minimal commitment, such as darkening the door of the church occasionally. The Lord's Supper is also observed less frequently so a person can skip it altogether for years and no one would notice, or at least that would be par for the course.
The CG pastors think, "Let the next pastor be the one to tell the church council the bad news." the CG pastor wants a raise, but his shrinking the congregation might get his salary docked. Also, they figure that they'll get a better call if people look at the congregational reports and see that their church has more and more members.
It took one CG pastor I knew 17 years to visit everyone in his congregation once, and it wasn't a large congregation by any standard. Also, when the elders finally figured out they couldn't contact someone, they sent persons letters over a period of two years warning them they were about to be taken off the rolls. Quite lenient.
What finally clued members in that something was wrong is when attendance started to drop, and the church had a hard time paying its bills. Then people started talking about how everyone had lost touch with people on the membership list. It was as though they were looking at the White Pages rather than the church membership list.
What this leads me to believe is that the WELS total membership stats are hollow. My first clue is that if you search WELS.net on the terms: WELS attendance statistics sunday worship, the last time anything is mentioned about attendance figures is 1995, and at that time they were declining ever since 1984. (Of course, besides for a few snippets, they hide the whole report from public view.)
The second clue is that Pr. Schroeder said, when reporting on the 2009 statistics, that in the last decade the only category that had a big drop was infant baptisms. So we are led to believe that the membership didn't drop, but it did become less fertile?! My theory is that the WELS shrunk in membership 1% per year same as the LCMS did, and the same as other churches are doing, but the CG method of not visiting members means that many have left the WELS and the pastors don't know it, and they don't want anyone else to know it for the aforementioned reasons.
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2009 WELS Statistical Report
http://www.wels.net/news-events/wels-statistics-released
Schroeder says, "Perhaps the most interesting thing to note is that over the past ten years, nearly all statistical categories have remained virtually unchanged, with one very clear exception. Infant baptisms have declined significantly from a decade ago, reflecting the fact that WELS families are having fewer children. This alone seems to account for our overall drop in total membership, as well as declining enrollment in some elementary and high school programs."
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2010 WELS Statistical Report
http://www.wels.net/news-events/synod-members-down-about-one-percent
The 2010 WELS Statistical Report has been released, and it shows the baptized membership in congregations across the synod is down by about 4,200, or about one percent, from 389,545 in 2009 to 385,321 in 2010.
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GJ - The figures are beefed up on the plus side, also by neglect. The best number for actual membership is - how many are there on a Sunday.
