Is that really so?

It is common for people to say that the most important thing about a church is not contained simply in statistics.  Of course!  Faithfulness cannot always be distilled down to numbers.  But does that mean numbers don't matter?  Is it possible that the Church can do everything else right in doctrine, witness, outreach, worship, and service and still not grow?  Or, even worse, decline?  Sure it is.  But does that mean that decline is normal or normative for the Church?  I don't think so.

Before going further, let me simply say that hoping, praying, and working for the growth of the Church does not mean you are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it grow.  That is the lie of evangelicalism in which nearly everything is up for grabs in the quest to pack the pews.  Indeed, the mega church side of this seems to suggest that those things that you must hold is smaller than those things you can discard for the sake of growth.  I am not saying this.  I am not at all suggesting that fidelity to the Scriptures, doctrine and creed, worship and piety, and service to others are less important than reaching out.  Indeed, what is the purpose of reaching out (except numbers) if you are not reaching out with the faithful Gospel of Christ crucified and risen?

What I am asking is not what you are willing to give up in order to get more folks in the pews.  What I am asking is whether or not we have become so accustomed to the decline of Christianity (or at least orthodox Christianity) that we suppose that this has become the new normal for us?  Has it?  Have we give into the idea that growth is either not possible or not normal anymore?  Does Jesus not care if His Church grows or declines?  Do we?

I am not at all holding myself up as an example.  The Lord has granted success despite my many failings, to be sure.  But He has granted success.  My first parish was in a local that long ago had seen its better days.  The main drag was pretty empty and in disrepair.  The industry that once fueled the economy was in tatters and there was nothing to replace it.  The congregation was also in rough shape -- afflicted by division over doctrine and practice, accustomed to disappointment, not sure that Lutheran was a positive word or negative one, and suffering from a building in disrepair and an empty checkbook.  I was convinced that the reason so many pastors showed up at my installation was to see the guy who was foolish enough to accept the call (which I did and was though it was my first placement out of seminary).  By the end of nearly 13 years there, doctrine and practice was solidly Lutheran, the congregation was united, the building was in better shape, and the numbers were up (attendance and membership).

In contrast, my second and last call came to a city on the move but a congregation which was not moving at all.  Divided, overcome with disappointment, short of people and funds, with a building debt and in disrepair, and known as a congregation which was for people who were not from here, the congregation was barely keeping the doors open.  Somehow we became one of the most liturgical congregations in Synod, built and paid for an impressive building and a huge pipe organ, and became well known in the community.  Even more surprising, we grew by 250% and continue to see new people walk through the doors each week.  Again, I am not at all lauding my example or gifts.  What I am suggesting is that faithfulness in preaching, teaching, and worship along with a warm welcome bear fruits.  Are we surprised?  We should not be.  Sometimes the dynamics around us leave us with little except decline (like my home congregation in a rural area where the numbers of people and especially those under 65 continues to decline significantly every year!).  But that does not mean that we should become so comfortable with decline that we no longer expect to grow.  I fear that we as a church body have become resigned to the fact that we can do our best but will not seem much happen.  My own experience is that this is not the case and I am confident we are but one of hundreds of examples of congregations and pastors whose faithfulness brings new people into the pews every week.

So what am I saying?  Expect the Lord to grow His Church.  Even when you do not see it and labor faithfully through the years, expect the Lord to grow His Church.  Pray for it.  Do not trade off faithfulness in doctrine or fidelity to God's Word or liturgical worship for the promise of bodies in the pews.  Expect that faithfulness in doctrine, fidelity to God's Word, and faithful catholic worship (like our Confessions expect) will result in growth.  We should not be consoled by the years when our decline is less than in other years or less than we predicted.  We should only be consoled by trusting that He is Lord of the Church when we are doing everything we can in faithfulness to the Lord's Word and will and growth does not come.  But we should not get used to it.  It may be safer to expect less and be surprised by more but that is not the way of the Lord.  Trust does not mean resignation to the things that disappoint us.  Trust means hoping against hope, when nothing gives a sign of that which is to come, that the Lord will grow His Church. 

The first job of liberalism. . .

Some might think that liberalism promotes error.  It could and does, at least in some cases, but it does its worst by promoting uncertainty and trading clarity for ambiguity.  Indeed, that is all liberalism really has to do to set adrift the bark of Christ's holy Church and undermine the foundations of Christian doctrine and faith.  The first job of liberalism is to ask the questions designed to create doubt about the fundamental moorings of Christian faith in Scripture and tradition.  

Nobody has to say that Scripture is wrong.  All the liberal has to ask is if Scripture is fully believable on every point or that there might be another interpretation or another perspective equally valid to the one that has been believed and taught since the beginning of Christianity.  Are all the miracles of Christ factual and historically true or might they simply be stories to make a point?  Nobody is really saying that the miracles are not true -- God forbid -- but that they do not have to be true to do what they were designed to do.  Nobody needs to say that they were fabricated but simply illustrations of the principles that matter and always matter more than truthfulness.  This is the real danger of God's Word in the hands of liberals.  The Bart Ehrmans of this world simply raise questions about whether what has always been believed is the only way to take God's Word or interpret the events of the Biblical narrative.  That is enough.

Nobody has to say that doctrine has been wrong all these years and that the creeds are not reliable.  No, indeed.  All that needs to be said is that what is being preserved and proclaimed are not events or facts or history but principles of love, well illustrated and symbolized by the words of these affirmations.  The creed is not wrong but neither are the words to be taken at face value.  The Virgin Birth is a prime example.  It is proclaimed not because it is literally true but because it preserves the mythology of Christ's appearance out of nowhere and His unique status as the Son of God.  You can say it on Sunday morning without being bound to it as facts or history or truth.  What is being preserved is the idea of it all and not the specific words and their literal meaning.  It would certainly be wrong to dispense with them but there is no need to do so if you simply view them as symbolic words and not as words tied to actual facts or events.

Nobody has to say that it was wrong all these years to affirm that God made them male and female or that marriage and family as traditionally defined are normative in the eyes of God.  No, indeed.  You simply suggest that what we have today was not known in ancient times and therefore could not have been condemned or affirmed.  You blame it on the institutional sin that is the convenient scapegoat of nearly everything bad and refer to the enlightened state of things today in which women, gays, lesbians, trans, and the whole plethora of the alphabet used to define the diversity of sexual desire and gender were repressed by the patriarchal and hypocritical institutions propped up by sin in in the past.  But no more.  No, we have moved beyond these simplistic and tainted positions to see things that were never seen or granted legitimacy in the past.  Jesus would surely not have said anything against what we are affirming today because His Gospel is generally a liberation to feel and be who you feel you are or want to be.  Right?

The liberal Trojan Horse is to let the past stand and simply to move on.  It happens in religion, in history, in sociology, in psychology, and nearly everywhere else.  The danger is not that what was believed will be contradicted but that it will be written off as simply naive or out of date or one of many interpretations.  The liberal will use the same vocabulary but redefine the words.  In the end the damage will have been done without directly disagreeing with anything.  Sure, some liberals have the courage or the integrity to admit that things are changing but most are content to let things evolve gradually as the past and its witness is moved aside and the possibilities of the present and future stand as legitimate and authoritative in their own right.  Ambiguity will end up doing all the work that open contradiction and dispute cannot safely do. 

There is no leverage in loss. . .

For a very long time we have lived with the false idea that in order to raise up someone, another must be torn down.  That surely shows in the bitter political and social divide which is not merely the competition of ideas but the terrible idea that trashing our opponent automatically makes us look better.  It has also shown itself in the battle of the sexes where it is almost universally assumed that we must tear men down in order to lift women up.  That is not the path to respect or appreciation of difference nor is it any road to the equality that so many say they want.  But it will be the path to the destruction of whatever might be good that remains among us.  

I am not at all saying that we should refrain from calling a sin a sin or condemning wrong.  Of course not. But the goal of calling a sin out or even calling out a sin is not as a means to gain leverage over them.  It is, as Matthew 18 reminds us, to gain back our brother or sister.  As good as that sounds, the reality is that too often we will settle for putting someone else down in the hopes that it will lift our boat as a result.  How has that been working?  To demonize our enemies or those with whom we disagree will seem to make us and ours a righteous cause but it cannot mask the selfish desire that is at the root of it all. 

In education as well as in the job market, we have lived for a while with the shaming of men and their characteristic traits of providing, protecting, and working.  Ambition has become a bad word in our vocabulary where everyone shares in everything no matter what they do or do not contribute.  We say we want to float all boats but the reality is that we are simply emptying the stream until there is nothing left to float any boat.  Then we call that progress.  What does winning look like?  Apparently it looks like men abandoning the fight so that women alone are left in it.  Look at the graduation rates and who wears the gold cords of achievement in high school and college graduations.  It is a sea of feminism.  But in that sea, have all the boats been raised to float or have we settled for merely some?  Is it wise or even accurate to frame every male success as a female loss?  Or, the other way around?

Oddly enough, there was a time when women and children were more regularly in worship -- bemoaning the men who were at work, asleep, or on the golf course.  I have a famous Norman Rockwell print of the family heading to church while the husband and dad in pjs is reading the paper while smoking a cigarette.  Now it seems that we are headed the other way around as more young men are heading to worship while their female counterparts are existing.  Of course, it is about faith but there is also a cultural move here.  As young women pull away from institutional authority, traditional marriage and family, historic values, and clear morality, young men seem to draw closer to the same things.  Sadly, it is as if one part of the equation must lose in order for the other to win. 

AI and the promise of machines to replace us not simply from the menial jobs we do not want to do but from the nobility of work in general seems a dream but is it?  Is it good for humanity to be rich in leisure and poor in labor?   Ambition is not a problem to be solved but an energy to be directed.  We have many needs but chief among them is purpose.  Ambition does not need to be replaced by a dream of a mechanized egalitarian society in which machines do our work and we are left with the jobs that AI and technology cannot do?  Ambition within the cause of God and for His purpose is always directed away from self and for the sake of others.

Jesus does not choose sides, elevating one over another but dies for all that all who live should not live for themselves but for Him.  That is both the gift of this Gospel and its call to shape us and our lives by that Gospel.  Our Lord made man for woman and woman for man, having in His creative love His own selfless love as source and example.  The future for us all will not be built by choosing one over another but by the love that loves as Christ has loved us -- at least until that love finishes its work and delivers us unto the Father.  But until then if Christians are to be a leaven in this competitive world in which you succeed at the cost of others, then we need to honor and respect the differences of male and female not as better or worse but as God's own creative will and purpose -- a goodness grace teaches us to sin where sin sees only a race.  There is no leverage to be won by choosing men over women or women over men.  Each is itself a false choice that would deprive us of the essential values of home and family that God meant us to know and enjoy from the beginning.  Diverse roles, to be sure.  Different characteristics, of course.  But together more than apart.  At least when it comes to men and women, boys and girls, neither will gain at the cost of the other. 

Greater sin. . .

While catching up on things, a reader of this blog sent me what Pope Leo, on a flight back from Africa.  In response to a question, he told reporters that “we tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue”.  Some of Leo's greater sins might be described as institutional, societal, and humanity's failings and they have, indeed, been labeled in this way.  But sexual sin is largely personal and individual.  I suppose one might charitably suggest that he was merely drawing the attention of people away from pointing the finger at one or several people and reminding them that nations and societies have been complicit in the ills that afflict us as well.  That is probably not what he was doing, however, and I think he was trying to put out a Francis fire by deflecting attention from the absurdity of blessing proposed by the then pope and now everyone wishes the furor would go away.  It will not go away by doing what Leo proposes.

It was sexual sin that was the first poisoned fruits of Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden and it has been pretty high on the list of wrongs with which we are continually tempted and complicit.  To try and put sexual sin down the list of errors and failings of a sinful humanity is to forget the Biblical record.  Our culture is not enamored with sexual sins as side hustles to bigger wrongs.  It is precisely sexual sin that has taken hold of our hearts and minds and led to the destruction of marriage and family, to the casual way we treat life in general and the child in the womb specifically, and to the use of sex as an entertainment avenue most of all.  The Bible speaks eloquently of this sexual sin and gives any number of examples of sexual sinners whose individual sin brought down a nation (David) and bring Jesus into what is profane (Paul).  For this pope to try to deflect attention away from sexual sin is to miss exactly what Scripture tells us about it and its terrible consequences through the ages (from the sexualization of children to the abuse of women to the infanticide that have remained even as technology makes it more rampant and much easier).

No less that St Augustine, reflecting upon his own wayward life, said that in liberty a man has as many masters as he has vices.  It is not the pursuit of this liberty that we are ennobled but in refusing to succumb to what might be possible but is surely not beneficial that we are sanctified.  To put it bluntly, self-control and God's grace to rescue the fallen and weak are the means to freedom from the entrapment of self-desire and the domination of prurient interest.  We do not find release from this sin by indulging in it nor does the focus on other sins put this demon its its place.  It reminds you of those who would insist that the greater sin is self-denial of this passion and desire rather than self-control.  Be true to yourself no matter what it costs you or how it hurts others is the convenient lie we tell ourselves when we want to justify the feelings we know are wrong.  No, Leo, the sins we need to hear about are not the bigger plagues upon our humanity that are called isms but the secret sins of the heart and the darkness of the mind that leads us into the path of temptation where we willingly surrender to that desire.  I am not saying we Christians should be silent on those other things but we were sent to preach primarily to people and not to the halls of political power or the ballot box.  The cause of Christ is not the redemption of humanity but the saving of one sinner.  It is over this repentance which heaven rejoices.  The Good Shepherd continues to seek the lost one sheep at a time and continues to stand watch over the horizon for the prodigal son and daughter to come home broken and dead inside.  We preach Christ and Him crucified and in that preaching is the call to repentance and faith in the God whose mercy cannot be bought and whose grace is sufficient for our every need. 

 

Too much information. . .

We live in an information world -- a world driven by information.  We have so much information at our fingertips.  As a child I was thrilled when we got a set of Grolliers Encyclopedias.  I never even tapped the wealth of information in those books.  Sure, I used them for curiosity, school, proof, and to win arguments but there were too many words for me to absorb.  Now we have so much more at our beck and call in this thing called the internet.  We hear news from across the world, browse through catalogs of things to buy and choices to make, and learn the names and affectations of people around the planet in social media.  

It is too much information too absorb and it teaches us to be rather passive about the things we learn.  In days gone by people learned what they need to know and used that information for their jobs or families or purchases or the like.  Now we simply accumulate information as if it was what made us wise.  Plus, we live in a time when it is almost impossible to know if what you see or read or hear is actually true or a fabrication or a complete invention of non-human so-called intelligence.  We guess at what we see, hear, and read and hope that what we like is true and what we don't like or what feeds our fears is false.  I wish there was an easy way to figure it all out.

Information is just information.  It is too easy to mistake knowing something as important and good in and of itself and forget why knowing that information is important.  We treat life as as a time to accumulate information and it has become the digital equivalent of all the stuff our grandparents collected in their lives and we donated to a thrift store.  It has become a wildly successful industry.  Think of how little Facebook contributes to our world and how valuable it is as a company and how rich you or I might be if we had invested in it early on.  This is not simply true for the world.  Spiritual information has become  something of a cottage industry and it has not escaped notice of the marketers who are leaving the churches in the dust as they speed ahead to become the source of spiritual information for the masses.

Wisdom and experience were once the province of the old.  In our youth culture, it is not exactly a highly valued commodity -- age and experience, I mean.  Where the Biblical landscape had an honored place for the gray haired, now they are largely seen as liabilities or problems the younger folks wish would either shut up or go away.  Was I too harsh?  There are always brilliant young minds in every discipline but they are largely less knowledgeable and smart about life.  That is the premise of how many TV comedies? It is not hard to know what you do not know but it is not so easy to know what you don't.  I do not claim to be gifted in much and my expertise is usually less than my ambition.  If we only spoke about what we really knew, the rooms of our lives would be rather silent.  The passive information we suck up as if it were something real and valuable often leads us to the false conclusion that we know whereof we speak.  That is realm of age and experience and it is what contributes to the wisdom in so much short supply today.

It is probably good advice to tell ourselves and others not to speak as if we knew everything but it is advice seldom taken.  As evidence of that, I point to the increasing intolerance of diverging views on the unsocial social media and the violence that too often becomes the first response rather than the last.  We would do well to learn a little patience.  I am particularly speaking about those who insist that it is their job to inform the stupid masses of all the things they have gotten wrong without at all considering that they might be included among them.

Stick to what you know is good advice.  Stick to what God says is better.  Oddly enough, the plethora of information that surrounds us has led us to listen less to the voice of God and more to the gut feelings we have in the moment.  That is a particular danger we have fallen into in this world today.  We know something about everything but just enough Scripture to make us dangerous.  Lutherans were once prone to advise people to read the catechism.  It sounds like a put down.  It is probably one of those voices of wisdom we no longer pay much attention to anymore.  There is a great temptation to believe that you can know everything but in so doing you end up knowing not much and even less about the very important things of this life.  I fear that this has contributed to our quest to redefine gender, marriage, family, etc, and it has left us with a definite void in our education.  When the most basic things to our lives are largely strangers to us, it is typically the moment when we replace them with unsuitable substitutes.