Delegates at the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, meeting in Houston, Texas, voted Monday to radically alter the structure and governance of their 2.5-million-member, St. Louis-based denomination.

After three days of debate, 2,000 delegates gathered at the 163-year-old church’s triennial convention here voted 52 percent to 48 percent to streamline its operations by dismantling its several boards and commissions in favor of just two boards.

The seven old boards were governed by independent directors in consultation with the denomination’s president. The functions of those boards will be folded into one national and one international board. The church’s annual budget is about $85 million, and the new structure will save it about $1.4 million per year, according to its vice president for finance, Thomas Kuchta.

The change will mean an elimination of about 40 administrative jobs in the church’s St. Louis headquarters, according to the Rev. Larry Stoterau, president of the church’s pacific southwest district and chair of the committee in charge of the structure debate.

Critics of the change, and of the Kieschnick administration, have suggested in the months leading up to the convention, and in debates throughout the weekend that the massive structural changes amount to a centralization of power in the office of the president.

The LCMS has a congregational structure where authority comes from a congregation, in contrast with church bodies with an episcopal structure where a hierarchy wields authority.

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