What issues did it take up?

They took up their usual issues of declaring church fellowship with new churches, which is always a great opportunity for rejoicing.

They also spoke on some other less happy situations, issues with partner churches.

They didn't name any specifically, but generally understood to be the AALC and the SELC in Germany having some struggles, and some others as well on issues as diverse as apostolic succession, meddling in the affairs of other church bodies, and just not conforming their doctrine and practice with the Missouri Synod.

and basically called on the president and the CTCR to continue working on those and report back.

There was a specific resolution targeted at the AALC, which has been a lot of flaming back and forth on social media.

Jordan Cooper went on Facebook almost immediately to denounce that, and we will see if there is ability to have reconciliation there or if that is going to be a bridge too far.

What's the takeaway, Mark, from the 69th regular convention of the LCMS?

[laughs]

[laughs] So, so the first thing I do is, is, is I have, um, positive affirmations on my phone.

So my morning routine is wake up, don't check my phone, say good morning to your better half if you're lucky enough to have one, and immediately start your day.

Shower, do what you've gotta do.

And then before you really get anything going as such, then I start.

Now, I'm not a religious man, but I do totally believe in God because why not? It's a positive affirmation, feeling that you are not solely responsible, that there's somebody else, a parent in a way, that you've got someone to turn to.

So the first thing I'll do is I'll pray.

Yeah.

How, how is, uh, Blood and Chrome shaping up?

I, I love Blood and Chrome.

And you're right about Caprica.

Caprica was a heartbreaker, especially whenever you put up something that you really believe in and you love and you think is high quality and then the audience doesn't show up.

That's hard.

Um, Blood and Chrome is really gonna be a, its own animal.

That's ...

Uh, I mean, how does it feel now, all these years later, to that decision when you, you guys gave it a go and what it's become?

We can't talk about all of them, obviously, but give us a little context on how it goes from a resolution that gets submitted and printed in the workbook that's been out for a couple weeks or perhaps a month to the convention floor for a vote.

Sure.

Those of us in Generation X may remember the schoolhouse rock about how a bill becomes law.

That is not entirely how the synod process works.

The synod process starts at the grassroots.

And overtures, which are recommendations for action, come in from congregations, from circuits, from districts, from agencies of synod, a couple other sources.

So those overtures are suggestions.

Mark, before we get into the particular resolutions you wanted to highlight, is there anything missing from these resolutions that you believe should have been included?

absolutely

yeah yeah and i was thinking about this because um you know one of the things we think about when especially on the retention front for a lot of people the name of the game is not to always be in this acquisition world but when we think about customer journey how are we onboarding and delivering our services more importantly how are we retaining this client so they don't want to look anywhere else and when i was in corporate consulting with deloitte for for many many years I lived in Chicago at the time and I was very loyal to United.

And the reality is the only reason I was loyal to United was they had a loyalty program and I had status.

But there was nothing about United at the time that made me like United.

It was just convenient.

Then another airline came back and said, hey, if you meet these parameters, we'll match your status.

And so when I had that, they made the friction of switching so much easier because what did I really care about? I cared about status at the time.

So how do we make prospective clients within this landscape industry? How do you make Or in general, how do you make them realize that something was designed very specifically for them?