Something's Missing!

Call me cynical.

I'm a member of a Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod congregation, and under the leadership of our current Synodical President, Rev. Gerald Kieschnick, there is a lot of talk about changing the organization and structure of our church body (or is it an association of church bodies?) including changes to the Synod's constitution.

In 2005 (a year after being elected to his second term), President Kieschnick formed a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Synod Structure and Governance. Their mission is to "do a thorough, zero-based assessment of the entirety of the system of governance and" bla bla bla you can read the rest here.

And I would argue that this period in our Synod's history is marked with an unprecedented amount of marketing and public relations (emphasis on amount). This shouldn't be a total surprise given that our president was the LCMS Texas District's PR Director for nearly a decade.

Here's what I'm driving it... If you go to the official Synod website, right there on the front page you'll see that the Blue Ribbon Task Force has its own logo. Here's what it looks like:


Ok, it's green, maybe green leaves? I guess we're going for green means growth and growing is what we want to do, especially since membership is doing the opposite of growing, the Synod and many congregations are spending more money than is coming in, and if we reorganize the Synod by centralizing power and putting fewer people in charge of more things, everything will turn out all right. Call me cynical.

But here's what first jumped out at me. This logo is not a cross. It is the absence of a cross. Four groupings of leaves, connected by nothing. No cross.

I don't know - maybe I'm overthinking this, but a PR guy knows the importance of graphic design. It's President Kieschnick's Task Force, and whether or not he approved this logo or not, I think it sends the wrong message.

Or maybe the logo is supposed to function that way.

Words mean things. Symbols mean things. To my eyes, this logo is devoid of a cross. Not that the cross is empty, but there is no cross. The emperor is wearing no clothes.

Maybe this logo is the perfect picture of the diagnosis of what is wrong with our Synod today: we' re supposed to be theologians of the cross, but somehow we've gotten away from that.