My people back in Wisconsin belong to the Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church.

The Wisconsin Synod is a pretty conservative outfit.

The Smallholder clan has a lot of history at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Elkhorn Wisconsin. My Grandparents attended when the services were still auf Deutsch. I was baptized there.

But my cousin wasn’t married there.

When the church’s aging population declined, the church moved to one service instead of two. And, being an older arish, kept the early service. The cancellation of the late service made it impossible to attend on Sunday. He is a dairy farmer. Dairy farmers cannot play around with milking times.

My cousin falls in love. They decide to get married in the church he has attended since childhood. In a church that has seen five generations of his family. His father is an usher and on half a dozen committees. But the pastor won’t marry him because he hasn’t been coming to services.

Missing the point.

None of my children will be baptized by a pastor so out of touch with the essential core of the Christian faith.