Take the Landscape Assessment
Please take a few moment to share your thoughts by filling out the Landscape assessment. Landscape is designed especially for strategic review for middle judicatories like our synod, and provides a snapshot of the current state of the synod for the work of evidence-based discernment. Your participation will provide us with information to better understand where are, so that we are able to make plans for the future.
Who should take the Landscape?
Pastors & Deacons
Synod Assembly Voting Members
Congregation Council Members
Lay Worship Leaders
Synod Council Members
Synod Staff
Synod Leaders
From Wayfarer, the synod’s magazine:
Studying a New Landscape
Bishop Kurt F. Kusserow
Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod Bishop
kurt.kusserow@swpasynod.org | 412-367-8222
Our synod’s oldest congregations were founded in the early 1770s. These early faith ancestors spoke German and purchased the land for their church buildings with British pounds. Their long histories mark transitions we find hard to imagine today: their first pastor to drive a car rather than ride a horse, the year they sold all their oil lamps and put electricity in the building, and the pain of parting ways over whether or not to use English in worship. Early illustrations and somewhat later photographs reveal a landscape unfamiliar to us—small log or frame buildings with front steps leading onto dirt roads, and often without a tree in sight.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine what our lives will be like 250 years from now, but we do share with the generations that have come before us with and those who will come after the experience of going through significant transitions. At our best, in every age, we learn to engage times of transition as opportunities to refresh the pursuit of our central purpose.
I am reminded of the poetic exhortation that opens that great hymn by F. Pratt Green, The Church of Christ, in Every Age:
The Church of Christ, in ev’ry age
Beset by change, but Spirit-led,
Must claim and test its heritage
And keep on rising from the dead.
To help us realize just such a resurrection today, our synod council has authorized a second Landscape Study to be conducted throughout our synod this fall. Our first was in 2017, at a time when the whole Lutheran world was celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. We are not currently facing so significant a milestone, but as we look to the horizon we can see, among other things, that in 2025 our synod will elect a new bishop and the Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church will bring its report to the churchwide assembly. (Yes, we will also celebrate the very significant 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed in 2025, but that’s not the prime motivation driving this project.)
The Landscape Study is designed to listen to the voices of synod leaders: pastors and deacons, synod staff and congregation staff, congregation council members and synod council members, synod assembly voting members, and other synod leaders. In 2017 we had 485 synod leaders respond to the survey’s 58 questions.
What we learned then was that on the whole, our synod placed squarely mid-pack. The Landscape Study measures energy and satisfaction, and then locates the results within the context of dozens of other middle judicatories that have taken the survey. (A middle judicatory is a synod, diocese, presbytery, annual conference, or other regional grouping within a national church body.)
At first glance, it seemed a little anticlimactic to go to all the effort of distributing and collating the survey only to discover that our synod is perfectly average. But then we broke out the results and found that our lay leaders scored very high in energy and satisfaction, while our rostered ministers scored very low. That certainly caught the attention of our synod council and synod staff!
With this result rather clearly demanding some kind of response, we studied the results more closely and held focus conversations. We dedicated a synod council retreat to this work and developed four Strategic Initiatives. The shock of discovery and the work of response has led to notable and positive changes in our life and ministry as a synod.
Here are a few of those changes:
We hired a Director of Communications.
We sold and relocated our synod office.
We produced a book responding to the question, “What is the Gospel?”
We moved to a near-paperless synod assembly.
We increased the frequency of day-long continuing education events.
Now we’d like to do it again. And we’d be very glad for your voice to be included. In the same way that a congregation seeking to call a new pastor conducts an internal study and produces a ministry site profile, our synod is seeking to use the Landscape Study to produce a public-facing document about where we are headed at this moment in our faith journey.
The instrument tests for energy and satisfaction, not orthodoxy or solvency. So it does not evaluate every aspect of our life and ministry. But it does provide a clear assessment of the level of community engagement around our synod’s shared work. In some respects, this second Landscape Study will be like receiving a report card on our synod’s response to the first results. More importantly, the study will identify those needs to which we are currently paying less attention than we ought.
When you see the link to the survey show up in your e-mail or Facebook feed, take a moment to respond. Your voice will help shape our future.