While this should be of interest to Lutherans, we do not necessarily represent the demographic of those who contributed to the increase along the way. Ours was an immigrant fueled growth that was accompanied by a religious culture of home, school, and church. That said, the decline has not exactly skipped over us. In fact, for Lutherans the decline seems to correlate with our integration more into the fabric of the American people and community. With the loss of language and culture and church, our people were literally set free to sail the seas of the American religious environment. We lost them less because of the factors driving up the nones and more because of our own failure to catechize and build a piety within our people, particularly our kids. As Lutheranism lost its distinctiveness and began to blend in with the landscape of our suburban environment, the faults of our rapid growth and presumption of catechesis began to sow the seeds of our decline. At this juncture, the ELCA has lost its identity and become a liturgical expression of the United Church of Christ. The more conservative Lutheran groups an irrelevant and microscopic statistic worthy of an asterisk at the bottom of the page. Missouri is still finding its way. Officially it still looks and sounds like a confessional and liturgical bulwark of Lutheranism but its tolerance and acceptance of evangelical style worship and its eroding doctrinal consensus on the group have made it hard to see which way the wind is blowing the good ship Missouri. That said, Missouri remains the last and greatest hope of Lutheranism in America.
The dechurching of America also corresponds with the decline of marriage, family, and children in our homes. I am not sure how much of this is taken seriously. The pundits laugh at the idea that less babies caused our problem and more babies might help but the reality is our fortunes are directly tied to the traditional understanding of marriage and home, children and family. Missouri and some of her conservative cousins sometimes admit and talk about this but those looking at the state of American Christianity have not exactly made the tie between the decline of marriage, family and children and the faith and faithful church attendance. Though surveys suggest half of the dechurched evangelicals said they might be willing to go back to church, those seeking solutions tend to focus on the church going people as both the problem and the possible solution. It comes down to whether churchgoing people are willing to seek understanding, relate with wisdom, build healthier institutions, embrace our exile nature, and seek a true, good, and beautiful gospel. The problem with that is that it remains an individualized decision and connection to the faith -- one that is just as easily jettisoned as rekindled.
Our approach as Lutherans needs to do better than to mirror the blame on the churches and to put it to the church going to see if they will work to get back those who left. We must confront the breakdown of marriage as an institution important to and even essential to people and to the nation but especially the Church. We must work to bring having and raising children as the focus of marriage and encourage and support families in what they do -- not try to replace them. We must catechize with more than an intellectual understanding and assent to the doctrines we confess but to a Christian worldview in which faith is essential in knowing who you are the your place within the world and your purpose in life. Until this happens throughout our jursidictions, we will be left tinkering with things that maybe should not be changed in the hopes that if we get the recipe right, some folks might come back.
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