Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod

The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS), also known as the Missouri Synod, is an orthodox, traditional confessional Lutheran denomination in the United States. With 1.7 million members as of 2022 it is the second-largest Lutheran body in the United States, behind the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). In 2025, Pew Research Center estimated that 1 percent of US adults, approximately 2.6 million people, identified with the LCMS and evangelical Lutheranism in contrast with 2 percent, or approximately 5.2 million people, who identified with the ELCA and mainline Lutheranism. The LCMS was organized in 1847 at a meeting in Chicago as the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States (), a name which partially reflected the geographic locations of the founding congregations.

The LCMS has congregations in all 50 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, but over half of its members are located in the Midwest. It is a member of the International Lutheran Council and is in altar and pulpit fellowship with most of that group's members. The LCMS is headquartered in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb west of St. Louis and is divided into 35 districts—33 of which are geographic and two (the English and the SELC) non-geographic. The current president is Matthew C. Harrison, who took office on September 1, 2010.

Provided by Wikipedia