Live local. . .

The byword of the day is local.  It might seem that everywhere their are hierarchies trying to sell us on a program or process, usually new, to fix what ails us as a church.  The true believers are sold on the idea that this program or emphasis will actually do what they think -- it will fix what is wrong, repair what is broken, and focus what is distracted in the church.  Protestants know all about this.  It has been the bread and butter of our jurisdictions for the better part of our corporate lives.  Now Rome is finding out about this.  Sure, there have always been themes and programs to capture a moment even in Rome but this synodality thing is the institutionalization of the very thing that has been the bane of Protestantism for nearly 500 years.  Ordinary people smell a committee and either they run away or they figure out a way to ignore the whole thing but the larger church loves a committee or task force or program or emphasis or theme.  We live by managerial principles and its own busy work.

In response, some say we ought to give up on the jurisdictions.  Even among Lutherans there are those who say the real business of the churches is and has always been local.  Yes and no.  Depends on what you are talking about, I guess.  But the local stuff we dare not displace or compete against is not a program or a theme or an emphasis or a committee.  It is our weekly gathering around the Word and Supper of the Lord.  If by this you mean live local, then by all means.  For this is not simply one thing we do but that from which all good things come.  There is no fruit to the work of the kingdom that is not borne first of our common life together hearing the Word of the Lord, being absolved, standing as baptismal sponsor and recalling our own baptism, interceding before God's throne of grace in the name of Christ, and receiving the gifts of His table in the bread and wine that are His flesh and blood.  It all starts here with the gifts God gives and the faith that receives them.

Let me give one example.  Don't be so foolish as to believe that you as a pastor or congregation needs to write your own hymnal or catechism or Sunday school curriculum or VBS or whatever.  These things certainly can be improved upon and there is no guarantee that our publishing house has it fully under control but your time and labor to duplicate what others have done will only result in the main reason and function of your life together as a congregation suffering.  Go ahead and improve on it and adjust the offerings for your parish but your life together should be marked by and consumed by the fullness of the life together of God's people around the Word and Sacraments.  You ought to be (if you are not already) busy connecting the lives of God's people to the source of their life in the Divine Service.  You should not be writing programs that duplicate what we already have.  Think of worship and how much time and energy is put into writing and putting together a new worship service week after week.  Why?  Why invest in making new what is old and new at the same time?  All I am saying is that the effort and energy is better spent in connecting people to the Divine Service and not in trying to make it new and different every week.  Live local not by trying to do all that we do together as a Synod on that local level but in doing on the local level what Synod cannot do and is not given to do.  Be the Church where you are, using the full measure of the resources of our life together applied to where you are now.

As you might have guessed, I am wearied and worn out over the constant production of programs that inevitably compete with our attention for the fundamental foundation of our life together -- the Divine Service.  To live local is not to duplicate the kinds of things Synod would do but to do what all the resources of Synod can never do -- preach and teach God's Word to the people who are there, call them to remember their baptism, urge them to weekly and faithfully receive the Lord's body and blood, catechize them so that they are not without resources for the building up of the faith and the faithful in their homes, warn and protect them against the enemies of the world, the devil, and their own sinful flesh, and call them to repentance when they fall.  Live local does not mean to forget the district or Synod but to do what district and Synod cannot do and should not do in the local congregation.  It has everything to do raising up the fullness of our life together in the Lord's House on the Lord's Day and the catechesis and life of faith that flows from this Divine Service and not isolation from or hibernation within the world or your brothers and sisters in Christ across the nation and the world.