This is a trimmed portion of a letter I wrote to a friend today, with the personal bits trimmed out.
I appreciate your own caveats and views about the nature of the Lord's Supper and I'm glad you hold them. I also think that what the Lord's Supper *is* is as important as what it *does*, which is deliver grace [1 Cor 10:16, John 6:53-57] and forgive sins [Matt. 26:28]. I also think, as you've expressed in other ways, it's important for a local church to hold doctrinal unity. Therefore, if you believe that the Lord's Supper is the Body and Blood of the Lord, your private view is in contradiction with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 Article 7, your church's confessional statement, which directly describes Baptism and the Lord's Supper as "symbolic." Statements of faith and confessions are bright and clear lines, which are very important when dealing with eternal matters outside of a supposedly divinely ordained hierarchy. While I wouldn't mind visiting a church that holds different views, I wouldn't take communion with that church because we don't agree. In my mind, taking communion can't be separated from believing and confessing what it is and does.
When you say that you accept the baptism of infants, that's great, but there are deeper diverging views here about what exactly baptism does in this instance. Many people in Baptist and Calvinist circles hold the maxim that "repentance precedes faith," and while that sounds right to reason, it unintentionally diverges from a true monergistic perspective, which holds that salvation is wholly of God and not of man [Eph 2:8-9], as it implies repentance is something man has to do to receive faith given from God. God can and does create infant faith; see John the Baptist leaping in his womb in Luke 1. Children do not require reason to apprehend faith; it is a gift. God uses many means to deliver faith, ordinarily, this is Baptism. Just personally, I cannot remember a time in which I did not believe to one degree or another. We also view justification as not a one-time act (when you "got saved") but an ongoing act by which God continually saves the believer, which can also be resisted and eventually lost through ongoing, unrepentant sin [Gal 5:4, Heb 10:26-29, John 15].
I think there is a balance to be had between a Baptist-style complete flattening of the church body, where the preacher is simply one of many gathered believers, and a rigid, divinely-ordained hierarchy, as the Catholics do. The synod trains the pastor, our congregations call the pastor, the congregation and elders are primary in decisions about procedural and budgetary matters while the pastor is still under the authority of the denominational leadership. Every single day, we hear about pastoral abuses on the news. This is a great hindrance to unbelievers as they start to believe that corruption is a feature rather than a bug of Christianity. I want shepherds looking after other shepherds, and I want more than those under the pastor's authority to be able to call him to account should things go very wrong. The only way to achieve this that I'm aware of is some degree of hierarchy.
Lutheran Two Kingdoms theology maintains a robust separation between the sphere of the church and the sphere of the state. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 says "All Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society." I fundamentally don't agree on the latter point. Christ is over all, but the church's role should be to encourage believers to be good citizens, stress the importance of the lives of human beings made in God's image, and then leave political acts and opinions to conscience and the personal workings of the Holy Spirit, because scripture is mostly silent on contemporary political issues, and when the church tries to teach on politics, not everyone puts the same theological frame on them.
It's no secret to you I've diverged significantly from standard Republican and Libertarian political views and I want to be able to worship and be enouraged in my faith apart from reminders of disagreements about temporal matters. (If you're interested in where I'm at on that, go to "solidarity-party.org/platform" and you'll find the broad shape of my politics now, though I do have a few personal disagreements with them.) Just in my personal experience, Baptists have little preventing them from preaching Nancy Pelosi's dirty laundry from the pulpit, either from a premillenial perspective (this is proof the world is going to Hell) or a post-millennial perspective (we must save the culture for Christ from the evil Demoncraps so He can return!). The Lutheran amillenial perspective allows us to say "we know not the day nor the hour of Christ's return, our call is to love God and serve our neighbor until then, seeking peace with everyone."
We believe in the priesthood of all believers just as you, but do acknowledge the vocation of the Pastor, Elder, and Deacon/Deaconess to serve certain functions distinct from the membership, which is customary and can be changed circumstantially. I believe in the necessity of ordination, which includes both an internal call (I feel Jesus wants me in the ministry) and an external call (other pastors see my sincerity of faith, my commitment to theological rigor, the shape of my life, and my fitness to the vocation as well as meeting the qualifications set out by scripture). When Uncle Bob decides to be a pastor for himself, there's a danger to his flock both in teaching error and committing unaccountable abuses. (I don't know if your pastor went to seminary or not but my previous pastor didn't. He just listened to a lot of John MacArthur sermons as his training, and it showed sometimes.)
We both agree Baptist prohibitions on alcohol are judaizing nonsense and I would not hold to them.