From a Roman Catholic: how’s the Missouri Synod faring these days?
Depends on what you are examining.
Our membership like most, is decreased, not at a rate of ELCA’s or more liberal churches. We tend to lose youth when they go off to secular colleges. Many don’t come back after college. At least not right away.
On theology, pretty strong. The one problem we have isn’t about homosexuality but about keeping membership. We are currently approaching it IMO the wrong way. THe Ablaze initiative is more interested in numbers and statistics and is more a purpose-driven approach, rather than the traditional approaches that do not place so much emphasis or concern about numbers and trying to quantify things.
No denomination is immune from unionism and syncretism. We tend to do pretty well in this regard, but it would be foolish to think without constant vigilance we are immune from these things happening to us.
This data is a bit dated. But here is a very nice web site with denominational data. Association of Religion Data Archives. http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/US_2000.asp Evangelical Lutheran Church in America theology: Mainline Protestant congregations 2000: 10,739 adherents 2000: 5,113,418 adherence rate per 1000: 18.2 congregation change 1990-2000: -173 adherent change 1990-2000: -113,380 percent change 1990-2000: -2.2% Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod theology: Evangelical Protestant congregations 2000: 6,077 adherents 2000: 2,521,062 adherence rate per 1000: 9.0 congregation change 1990-2000: +57 adherent change 1990-2000: -82,663 percent change 1990-2000: -3.2% This data for the Missouri Synod is a bit surprising. See the full chart for a comparison of evangelical denominations to mainline denominations.