The 2026 Convention Workbook lands roughly six months after a triennium of reporting bodies have done their work. Officers, boards, commissions, districts, and the Commission on Theology and Church Relations all submit written accounts of what they have done since the 2023 Convention. The result is a corpus of ninety-six reports running to roughly 333,000 words. The 2023 Workbook before it carried ninety-seven reports running to roughly 271,000. The two corpora overlap structurally on most of their entries; the question this piece addresses is how much of the actual prose of the 2023 reports survives, sentence for sentence, into 2026, and which authoring bodies recycle the most.
The full data and an interactive Sankey diagram are at /compare/reports. What follows is the editorial reading of what the data shows.
Method
Each pair of matched reports — same R-number, plus three explicit aliases for cycle-to-cycle renumberings (the CTCR theological documents block as R66.x → R62.x, the Commission on Constitutional Matters opinions as R65 → R61, and the Human Resources sub-report as R5.1.3 → R5.1.2) — was scored by the share of twelve-word phrases from the 2023 body that reappear verbatim in the 2026 body. Twelve-word windows are long enough to ignore the kind of fragmentary overlap that any two pieces of ecclesiastical English will share by coincidence (greetings, proper names, biblical allusions) and short enough to catch paragraph-level boilerplate that an authoring body has carried across cycles without revising. A reuse rate at or above ten percent indicates substantial cut-and-paste; below two percent the report has been effectively re-authored.
The topline
Of the eighty-nine matched pairs, seventeen show ten percent or more verbatim reuse, sixteen show light revision in the two-to-ten-percent range, and fifty-six are below two percent. Across the whole 2023 reports corpus, roughly 80,000words of text reappear word-for-word in 2026 — about thirty percent of the 2023 reports’ total length. Most of the carried-forward material is structural: mission statements, board composition clauses, organizational descriptions of long-running committees and entities. The reports that read freshest in 2026 cluster around exactly the offices where the actual subject has moved most in three years — the President, the Chief Mission Officer, the Pastoral Formation Committee.
The largest carryovers
The single most-recycled report is the Board for International Mission (R7), where thirty-five percent of the 2023 prose reappears in 2026 — the clearest example of the institutional-description pattern. The International Lutheran Laymen’s League / Lutheran Hour Ministries report (R56) carries twenty-eight percent forward; the Praesidium report (R3), twenty-five percent. The Concordia Seminary, St. Louis sub-report (R13.1) and the Pastoral Formation Committee umbrella (R13) both come in around twenty-three to twenty-five percent.
Two patterns explain the cluster. First, organizations whose structureis stable across cycles — committees with the same composition, boards with the same legal mandate, seminaries with the same academic structure — recycle the organizational summary that opens their report each time. That is not in itself a problem: the structure has not changed, and re-paraphrasing it would be its own kind of distortion. Second, bodies with a small permanent staff and a heavy reporting burden — Lutheran Hour Ministries especially — find it efficient to update the deltas and leave the rest. The carryover rate is therefore as much a measure of the report author’s economy as it is of the body’s narrative movement.
The thorough rewrites
The reports that come in below two percent verbatim overlap are a more interesting list. The President’s report (R1) and the Church Relations sub-report (R1.1) are essentially new prose — that reflects a change in administration and a change in the global ecumenical situation in three years (the SELK question moved, the Lutheran Church of Australia moved, the Japan Lutheran Church question hardened). The Office of National Mission (R1.2.1) is also re-authored. So is the Office of Pastoral Education (R1.2.3), where roughly half of the 2023 material is gone and a new account of the SMP / residential question takes its place — appropriately, since R13.3 through R13.6 (entirely new in 2026) are the formal study reports the 2023 Convention’s deferral effectively commissioned.
Dropped and new
Eight reports filed for 2023 have no 2026 counterpart. The biggest is R15 Concordia Historical Institute, which moved out of the report stream entirely. Three districts — Minnesota North, North Dakota, and Texas — filed in 2023 and not in 2026. The Office of International Mission (R1.2.2) was folded into other R1.2 sub-reports. The First Vice-President’s separate report (R2) is gone in 2026 — apparently absorbed into the President’s. The Ecclesiastical Visitation reports of Concordia University Wisconsin (R63) and Concordia University Texas (R64) have no successor — the visitation type is no longer filed as a standalone report, and Concordia University Texas itself was wound down during the triennium.
Three 2023 report streams that look dropped at first glance are in fact renumberedrather than discontinued. The CTCR theological documents block was renumbered en masse from R66.x to R62.x. The Commission on Constitutional Matters opinions moved from R65 to R61. The Human Resources sub-report under the Chief Administrative Officer moved from R5.1.3 to R5.1.2 — the 2023 extraction caught the printed-page kerning artifact in the title (which read “R5.1.2 Human Resources” even though the report was numbered R5.1.3 in the workbook’s own numbering), and 2026 settled it at the canonical R5.1.2. These three blocks count as carried-forward, not dropped.
Nine reports new in 2026 have no 2023 predecessor. The prominent cluster is R13.3, R13.4, R13.5, and R13.6 — the four Pastoral Formation Committee study reports on the Specific Ministry Pastor program and the residential-formation question, which the 2023 floor sent to committee for further work. Three districts that did not file separately in 2023 — Rocky Mountain, SELC, New Jersey — are back in 2026. The Colloquy Committee for Commissioned Ministry has a new R2.2 report. And the Board of Directors report stream gains an R5.1.2 on Human Resources that was previously folded into R5.1.3.
What the pattern says about the corpus
Two things, neither of them surprising but both worth naming.
Boilerplate is not a vice. The Synod has a permanent institutional skeleton — boards composed in the same way every triennium, committees with the same charter, seminaries with the same academic structure — and the report stream that describes that skeleton is, properly, the same description from cycle to cycle. The reports where the descriptive prose is most stable are usually the bodies whose work is most stable. The cluster at the top of the carryover list (Praesidium, Board for International Mission, Concordia Plans) is exactly the cluster of bodies whose work is bounded by long-running mandates rather than by the news of the previous three years.
Where the work has moved, the prose has moved. The re-authored reports — President, Chief Mission Officer, Office of Pastoral Education, Pastoral Formation Committee — are the report streams whose underlying subject matter moved most between 2023 and 2026. The corpus reads, on the whole, the way a careful institutional record should: stable where the institution is stable, fresh where it has had to be.
The full pair-by-pair data, with overlap percentages and direct links to both years’ texts, is at /compare/reports. The two-column Sankey there shows every flow at a glance — and sized so the eye can register, immediately, that the 2026 corpus is roughly a quarter longer than the 2023 corpus despite having one fewer report.