When the Church Loses the Compassion of Christ

One Sunday in September of 2024, the deeper conflict I had been carrying became impossible to ignore. After worship, a parishioner came through the receiving line, extended his hand, and suddenly yanked mine toward him. He grabbed my wrist with his other hand, twisted my arm and shoulder, and drove his weight downward while shouting, “You can’t do this to us! You can’t do this to us!” just inches from my face.

From 2004 to January 2026, I served as a pastor in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS). I was largely formed by it and spent much of my ministry preaching the Gospel and caring for people in its congregations. I write not as an outsider, but as someone who loved the church and had hoped to remain in it, even as my concerns deepened.

The confrontation did not come out of nowhere. That morning, I had preached on “the tongue is a fire” text from James 3:6.  I lamented the mocking and cruel rhetoric directed at trans people online, including by some LCMS pastors. I said it is not the way of Christ to bully another human being. That parishioner who assaulted me had made his condemnation of “trans” and “homosexuals” clear before. Those nearby could hear his anger growing during the sermon. 

In spring of 2025, several congregants contacted my bishop seeking charges against me because I attended an interfaith immigration vigil after several local ICE raids. I was accused of “bringing politics into the church.” Yet I did not go as a partisan. I went as a pastor, to listen, to pray, and to stand with neighbors living in fear.

Across the church body, the spirit I encountered was becoming harder, more fearful, more grievance-driven, and less recognizable to me as the spirit of Christ. No less disturbing was the quiet indifference of so many to the suffering around them.

I think often of the hypocrisy in the public words of LCMS President Matthew Harrison. In a letter dated January 6, 2017, he wrote, “We have and will continue to stand with Jesus’ mandate to ‘love your neighbor’ in the case of immigrants, documented or not, even as we provide assistance within the bounds of the law.” That sounded (and still sounds) to me like the voice of the Gospel.

But in a letter dated February 6, 2025, Harrison wrote, “The LCMS is a law-abiding and patriotic church body. We don’t invite or support illegal immigration.” That language stood in painful contrast to his 2017 affirmation of Jesus’ mandate to love our neighbors, “documented or not.” Jesus measures faithfulness not by fear or judgment of the stranger, but by welcome: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). When the church begins echoing partisan rhetoric as though it were Christian faithfulness, it risks losing its prophetic voice.

The same pattern appeared in a letter before the 2024 election, warning about the “gay and trans agenda” and urging Christians to vote accordingly. It was a thinly veiled endorsement of a particular political choice. Even worse, that kind of language turns human beings into threats. It teaches Christians to meet whole groups of people not with compassion, curiosity, or humility, but with suspicion.

I did not leave the LCMS because I wanted less faith, less Scripture, or less Jesus. I walked away because I could no longer reconcile what I was seeing in the church body with the compassion of Christ I had been called to preach. That means helping reshape our culture in the love of Christ, not allowing the church to be reshaped by the fear, cruelty, and hunger for power of our times. Jesus’ command is simple: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34; 15:12).

I remain certain in my call to serve Christ, but the spaces where it is safe for pastors like me to serve has become more finite by the day in the United States. My hope in writing this is not to condemn. It is to open eyes and hearts. When the church loses the compassion of Christ, it loses far more than members. It loses its credibility, its witness, and part of its soul.