Gathering in a 3D world

 

The original uploader was Wittkowsky at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

Disestablishment—There is an apocryphal story in Baltimore about the Archbishop of the city dictating when the Baltimore Colts could play on a Sunday. Then when the Ravens (by the way isn’t it cool that there is a football team named after a poem?) came to town the Archbishop went to the coach and owner and told them when they could play. The owner laughed in the Archbishop’s face. That anecdote is Disestablishment in summary. There was a time when church and society were in sync; the Christian life was easy because society marched to the beat of our drum.

              And gathering together on a Sunday has gotten harder now that society isn’t propping up our worship. Gone are the days when people organizing marathons and youth sports take Christian worship into consideration, gone “Blue laws” that kept people from shopping when society said they should be praying. This is a genuine loss.

Choice can be freeing, but it also can be overwhelming, and that liberty can easily be transformed into the libertine. If businesses don’t have to consider sabbath and rest any longer, they won’t. If coaches have one more day a week to exert control over a player, they will.

Despite all that doomsaying, let me also affirm that disestablishment can also be an opportunity to gather. It can be a calling for us to find ways to meet that we’d never been able to before. All these places are open, let’s meet in them. Let’s take church out of hallowed walls and into streets and cafes, superstores and homes.

Demographic Shift—A common mission strategy for Lutherans was to ask the question “Where have the new Germans (or Swedes or Danes or Norwegians) moved?” and that’s where a Pastor would be sent and a church set up, and that’s where Lutherans would gather for worship. As immigration patterns have shifted in this country, the question of where to set up new gatherings of Lutherans has also shifted. No longer can we ask, “Where are the Danes, and are they the happy kind?” instead we get to listen to what the Spirit is doing now. We also get to notice some of the things the Spirit has been doing all along, but it was a minority report so we didn’t focus on it.

Hey wait, people from Guyana seem to be fairly Lutheran, and they’re some of the most ethnically and racially diverse people on the planet! Wait immigrants from Ethiopia and Namibia, Indonesia and India, Madagascar and Finland—are all seeking to gather and worship with the Lutheran tradition as foundational! Wow!

Decentralization—Front and center to our experience of the pandemic was being decentered. How do you gather when you have to be dispersed? How do you gather when the average person isn’t a “joiner” like the Greatest Generation was? How do you gather around central things at a time when everything we might center our lives on is looked at with skepticism?

              Well, the pandemic showed us we can get creative when we need to. Most every Pastor became a youtube, zoom, or facebook “star”—every Pastor a Televangelist—all in rather short order. We recently had a “snow day” at church, and we now have the infrastructure and habit in place that the majority of folk were still able to gather, abet electronically. Perhaps too, the impulse not to join things is now facing the same skepticism that belonging once did—we all had a harsh dose of forced isolation. Perhaps the precious nature of human connection and community is clearer than it was 4 years ago.