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Oh I feel this so much personally. I'm a lifelong member of the LCMS, a Concordia University grad, and I taught in Lutheran Schools for seventeen years. I just found out that I've now been officially removed from roster. It is both painful and freeing in a lot of ways. I'm glad that your congregation has found the other side.

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Sarah, I can only imagine what you feel after having been removed from the roster of LCMS church workers. To have been removed must cause enough LCMS-rostered folks to shudder because they feel it's a moral blight; they have failed in some regard. It's a reaction to the Law, writ large, an indelible knee-jerk response to keeping workers in lock step.

Foucault might have compared the phenomenon of group control among church workers to his archaeology of prisons. Certainly, Doris Lessing {'The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside') considers it an excellent reason to be on the outside looking in instead of the other way around. You're on the outside now but can recall having been on the inside even before you discovered it was a prison that kept the sane out and the tragically impaired and dependent within.

In a state or territory's licensed professions like medicine, teaching, or psychotherapy, one's name is not erased or removed, but instead retained with further notes about why agency or licensure from a given person was removed for cause.

There is something more sinister that happens to rostered church workers. A church worker's name, like memory, has been erased. It is akin to the church worker never having existed, never having served in good stead for seventeen years as did you, perhaps the worse of the punishments.

Yes, I can appreciate the ambivalence you report between emotions related to suffering and freedom. I can also speak the truth to the erasure and the demagogues who sanctioned your name by removing it. Wouldn't it be a great gift to the LCMS or any church with similar practices to create a full list of current and former church workers, how long and where they served? For the living, it is rewarding to have been remembered for one's service, even if a church worker and the politicos of a church's institution parted ways.

I see the injustice of erasure, likening it to erasing the native American names of persons who were assigned European identities, or to the long and agonizing decline of losing one's identity and cherished memories to a disease like Alzheimer's. Any actions as these that rob personhood to any extent or in any way are not Christian.

Among us, there walk and have passed thousands of saints whose name are known only to God, never commemorated on All Saints' or All Souls' Day, and never recollected by name and biography to help succeeding generations of the faithful to hold fast to the gospel and sure hope of their salvation.

If I have made too big a deal out of yours or anyone's name erased from a roster, then forgive me, please. But I would hate never to have passed this way without having become acquainted with the baptized Sarah, whose name she shares with a great matriarch of the faith, and who is known as the leader she remains and always will be long after the LCMS and every earthly institution called 'church' bows its knee to the resplendent Lord of glory.

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