Fish rots from the head down. . .

George Weigel has complained about the intellectual emptiness of the theological left but that has not stopped Rome from placing the mouthpieces of such folly into positions of leadership and influence.  While he did not directly say it, the head that is rotting the body must be Francis.  His uncertain leadership and his bullying style of exerting his leadership has left Rome smaller, poorer, and weaker.  Such will be the legacy of his tenure that will be a difficult task for any successor to undo.  In some ways, this explains why Rome is not quite an attractive temptation for outsiders discontent with their own tradition.  Rome is not a monolithic bastion of conservatism that takes much to move but is not a ship which has been under the influence of Biblical skeptics, theological liberals, and moral progressives for a very long time.  As much as Benedict XVI could work to resist this movement, it was a pause rather than a retreat during his tenure.  Now even John Paul II is a distant memory and some of his founding work is being slowly and quietly dismantled in favor of something which has more in common with culture than Scripture, with society than tradition.

Of course, there are pockets of resistance.  Rome has some very vibrant and growing parishes and they are not all Latin Mass folks.  Some have found a way to conduct the Mass with dignity and reverence and to preach, catechize, and pray with vigor the old faith.  I know personally of some of them.  Yes, I know it is possible to find a good and faithful Roman Catholic parish.  The problem is that the ordinary Roman Catholic parish is not quite there.  The music is abysmal, the preaching shallow, the catechesis weak, and the priests stretched too thin to do much about it all -- especially where there is a suspicious bishop who wants to curtail anything that does not look modern and contemporary.  I will readily acknowledge that there are wonderful Roman Catholic parishes that typify what could happen everywhere but doesn't.  My point is that in this, Rome is no different than the Missouri Synod.

Everyone in Missouri knows that the majority of our people attend larger congregations more likely to be on the evangelical end of our faith and practice.  No, not everyone.  No, not all people.  But a significant contingent, we must all admit.  Some of their names are well known for having long ago abandoned the word Lutheran.  This is a source of great concern but also a little relief to the rest of us.  Even in the worst of Missouri, there are pockets of faithfulness.  Missouri has some very vibrant and growing parishes and I was privileged to be the pastor of one of those for 32 years.  It was not always that way but it has become an example of wonderful and faithful church music, reverent and faithful liturgy, solid Biblical preaching and teaching, and it grew from a small and struggling congregation into one that is large and solid.  We also have a myriad of other congregations, large and small, in the same boat.  So what do you gain by leaving one communion with serious visible issues but pockets of faithfulness for another with the same characteristic?

The sadness that many faithful Christians endure is that every church body has its problems and every church body has its own pockets of faithfulness.  Though it is certainly true that many of them are so corrupted by a disdain for what Scripture says, tradition witnesses, and creeds confess that they are for all intents and purposes lost, even in some of the worst you will find small signs of hope.  I had hoped at one point in time that there might be a great realignment in which the serious Christians might coalesce in one body.  Now I am pretty sure that will not happen before the parousia and maybe that is God's intent.  In any case, unless you find yourself in one of those terrible excuses for an orthodox Christian church body, it is up to you to find the pockets of faithfulness and gravitate there.  If you cannot, then it is your calling to work to make your current church home into one of those or to start a new parish where it is possible to be faithful without apology.  So if you are looking to find a perfect church home, the search may be over and not because you have found many choices.  Look around you.  See what is available.  It may be that the best any of us have is a pocket of faithfulness amid a sea of something less.  But that is enough.  God is not present among us as the reward for doing something right but as the God whose rescue comes to sinners who deserve nothing of His mercy and yet it is His gift to bestow such grace upon grace through His Word and Sacraments.  At some point in time, we learn to admit that this is enough even if it is not all we want.