A Unified Theory of Lutheranism Today
(This is a longer post, so if you need to step back from Lenten
reading today or just skim things, that’s totally understandable, take a
breather if you need to)
A Unified
Theory of Lutheranism Today
Years
back I led an intergenerational educational series called Learning, Lawn
Chairs, and Lemonade, and we thought about the Future Church.
Each week I come out with three
props to start things off: a pair of glasses, a hammer, and a map. These three
props represent the three considerations of Aristotelian Ethics (but if I’d
told everyone meeting we were going to talk about Aristotle, no one would have
showed up): determine where you are at, what tools you have to get where you
are going, and know where you ultimately want to end up.
Glasses
(Where we’re at):
I think where we are at, as both a
church and a nation, can be defined by 3Ds: Disestablishment, Decentralization,
and Demographic Shift.
Disestablishment:
The
Church is (or in some regions of the country, is becoming) disestablished here
in the USA; we have a different voice in our country and in our culture than we
once did. There was a time when our society saw the church as an integral part
of the social fabric and treated us as such. For example, there were blue laws
that kept businesses closed on Sundays, so employment wasn’t a barrier to
worship. These days most people don’t equate Good Christian with Good American,
the distinction between those two things has grown and changed.
Decentralization
The most quoted line of poet
William Yeats comes from the beginning of his poem “The Second Coming” in which
he writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
There is no center to things
any more, everything has cracked open and separated out. At one time, everyone
got their news from one straightlaced news man, a single source, and that was
the reality everyone bought into. At one time, you were likely to live next to
a neighbor with a differing political opinion from yours and that was okay. At
one time, people regularly bowled in leagues and regularly joined organizations
of all sorts.
Now, there are news channels that
cater to any viewpoint, everything is looked at through a partisan lens and
there are literally now “blue” and “red” neighborhoods—a great sorting based on
ideology, the same number of people bowl as before, but alone, because league
attendance has plummeted, and any organization that takes serious commitment
has taken a serious hit. In short, we’re feeling the effects of
decentralization.
Demographic
Shift
There has been a great demographic
shift going on in America for a while. For example, people identifying as Asians
went from 0.2% of the population in 1950 to 5% in 2010 to 6% in 2020. The Latino
population in the US rose from 2% to 16% to 18.9% in 2021, and “multi-racial”
wasn’t even a category in 1950 but was the identity claimed by 2% of our
population in 2010 and 10.2% of the US population in 2020.
While these ethnic and racial
changes have taken place economic changes have occurred as well. There are now
10% fewer people in America considered middle class, and at the same time the
cost of everything has risen dramatically, while incomes have not.
Finally, it is worth noting that
different generations behave, learn, and communicate differently from each
other. As the Silent Generation ceases to exist and the Baby Boomers reach old
age, the Xers and Millennials wrestle with retirement and middle age, the
Zoomers enter the work force, and the Alphas arise, it creates a whole new world
in which we minister!
These 3D’s represent the landscape
in which we are doing ministry. George Orwell once wrote: “To see what is in
front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” And it is; the day in day out
stuff of ministering in this time and place can make us lose sight of the
ground we are on and the realities we face. But if we know the landscape, we
can find firm footing and show forth God’s love rightly. And the reality in
which we find ourselves living together as church isn’t bad news, at worst it
is neutral, it is just where we are. In fact, there are some real positives!
Without the social pressures of
being a good citizen and a good Christian, those of us still in the church are
here because we really want to be here, not because there is social pressure to
be here!
There is a power to
decentralization—a small group of people can do giant things. That should be
good news to us, after all we are a small group of people tasked to do nothing
short of being God’s hands in the world!
Non-Europeans are the majority of
new immigrant to this country, and Lutheranism has traditionally grown with new
immigrants from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway… Well guess what,
there are now more Lutherans in either Ethiopia or Tanzania than in Sweden,
more Lutherans in Indonesia than Denmark, more Lutherans in India than Finland,
Norway, or the USA, more Lutherans in Nigeria than the Netherlands. For that
matter, the majority of Namibians are Lutheran. You get the picture, our country’s
ethnic demographic changes should only scare us if we see Lutheranism as being
about Lederhosen and Lefse instead of Grace and Word and Sacrament and Cross.
As for the economics of it all,
maybe this jolt to the middle class will help us hear those in poverty in a new
way. Perhaps it can make us more thankful for those things we do have. Could we
maybe become more creative in response to our limits? Even more generous?
Hammer (what
tools do we have):
On one hand we have some really
solid theological centers in Lutheranism—Grace and Faith, Scripture as the two
edged sword of Law and Gospel, the Christian as both Saint and Sinner at the
same time, the Cross as the lens with which we look at everything… these are
incredibly important… but they can also be rather abstract… so it is worth
looking to the other hand, and finding more concrete tools—specifically, those
things we do in worship.
They are the practices of the
Church that have existed since the beginning—in Luke’s Gospel on the road to
Emmaus (Luke 23:13-35) they gather, read scripture, share a meal, and are sent
back into the world. In the Didache (an early Christian handbook for worship
probably written by Christians who were especially fond of Matthew’s Gospel)
and in Justin Martyr’s description of what Christians do in worship, they all
spell out the same thing. At base, Christians gather, read the word of God,
share a common meal, and are sent out to bring the Gospel to the world, by
whatever means they can.
Gathering, Word, Meal, Sending.
These are our tools to use in the world in which we live.
Gathering, how revolutionary today!
We’re a people who don’t do it alone; who insist upon community, even when it
is hard. We are centered in Christ’s death and life for us, our Baptismal
identity, and practice confession and forgiveness in it.
Word, we are challenged and
comforted continually by God’s story. There are many stories in our culture,
many of them unhelpful, so we cling instead to those stories in which Christ
found his being. We tell them and are transformed by them, sacred story shaping
who we are; God’s story is our story.
Meal, one of thanksgiving and
celebration, one in which we receive true nourishment, Christ himself for us.
Grace physically present to us. Thanksgiving and community around a meal from
God!
Sending, the church does not exist
for itself, or its members, but for the world which God loves. We are filled,
to be emptied. We have practiced being community, found how our story
intersects with God’s story, been thankful and fed, so we may now be that
outside the church walls, loving our neighbor.
Map (Where
we want to end up):
Finally, there is the ultimate
question—what’s the point of all this? What’s Lutheranism for? What’s the goal
of church?
Taking a look at my handy dandy
Small Catechism, I can look to Luther’s description of the 10 commandments and
from it gather humans are to love, trust, and be in awe of God. That’s it
right there! Our goal is to help people love, trust, and be in awe of God! We
are making wonder filled, beloved, people who are confident that God has got
them!
Putting it
all together:
The ultimate goal of the church is
to help people be in awe of, love, and trust, God. The practices of Christian
worship are the main tools we use to get to that goal. The disestablishment of
the church, the decentralization of our society, and the demographic shifts in
our country, present both challenges and opportunities to reaching this goal.
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