Waiting for a voice. . .

The world seems intent upon governing by poll.  Business seems to hang upon every survey it can invent both those who are its consumers and those who are not.  Morality tries to find consensus of opinion but ends up tolerating nearly everything.  Even the Church believes that the world will respond if we offer them our ears and listen to their point of view and preference.  What fools we are.  Do we really believe that everything hinges upon listening to those not yet of the Kingdom or are we so desperate that we simply ape what the world around us is doing in the hope that it might make us relevant again?

The world is not waiting for yet another group to promise to listen to its concerns and people are not withholding their faith because they feel they have not been heard by the Church.  There are too many who already hang on their every word or whim.  The world is awaiting a voice.  The world is looking for a Church built with conviction upon what God has said and bold enough to present this truth without apology or embarrassment.  The world is not withholding their attention or their faith because they have not been heard but because the Church has too often failed to speak with courage and confidence the Word of God that endures forever..

The world and people are filled with uncertainty.  They do not know where to turn.  They live in a world which seems devoid of real meaning and purpose.  They put on identities like a change of clothing only to cast them off disappointed because they do not fit.  They cannot trust their bodies or their emotions and yet are told to turn inside themselves for answers, meaning, and purpose.  They are connected digitally but ache with longing for a personal connection and are captive in prisons of loneliness.  They have watched marriage turn from the norm into an exception, children from blessing to burden, and the family broken by divorce, infidelity, and individuality.  They have traded real intimacy for pornography and an idealized sexuality which is both perverted and false.  They have been told the artificial intelligence is smarter then than people and the only hope for the future.  They have trusted technology and been disappointed by the failed promises of newer, better, faster, and more entertaining screens.  They have become consumers of information as well as material things but no longer find satisfaction in what they have.  Death has become normal and yet they fear death and long to know that there is something which lasts beyond the grave.  In the end, life has become fragile and transient and anticlimactic in a world of so many broken promises.  Then the Church comes along to say "we hear you" and expects that to make the difference.

The world is not looking for a God with big ears but one with a strong voice to cut through all the disappointment and overcome all the disillusionment that seems to define our every day.  The world is waiting for a Church which will stand up and sound forth with truth that endures forever and the powerful voice that speaks and something actually happens.  Why else would a liberal world be so attentive to an Islamic voice which conflicts so profoundly with the values the world esteems so highly?  The world is hungry to hear someone who speaks something other than a weak and faint echo of their own words and choices.  This is our opportunity.  We have the voice of God in His Word, not some static voice from the past but the living voice that speaks forgiveness, life, and salvation into the emptiness and noise of our world.  We worry more about being winsome than welcome, friendly than faithful, and offending rather than calling to repentance.  It is no wonder that our pews are empty and our churches passed by in pursuit of other things to give meaning and purpose to life.  But it does not have to be this way.

The world might be happy if someone could make their load lighter or give some direction in time of uncertainty but it would find redemption and rebirth in the promise of the God incarnate who came down from heaven to confront our sin when we would not and to offer Himself in a sacrifice we could neither supply nor afford.  His path of salvation led Him through death to life everlasting and will lead those who hear His voice to walk with Him the path of everlasting life.  But we need to stop acting as if God has called us to make the worst of things in this moment a little better and start manifesting the eternal Kingdom amid the pain and suffering of this life.  This cannot happen by borrowing the voice of the world or proving to be a faint echo of what everyone else is saying.  This can only happen when we rediscover the voice of Him who speaks and the sheep hear, recognize, and follow.  Only then will we have something of substance to offer a world in need, listening for the sound of its Master's voice.

Whether you call this the synodal way or you vote yourself into a position of authority over the Word of God does not matter.  What does matter is that the world is not waiting for us to put on our listening ears or a God who is attentive to the sound of our own opinions, but to speak forth the powerful Word, giving absolution to the guilty, life to the dead, and hope to the hearer.  A listening Church is silent -- silent when the Lord has called us to address the world with His Word of life.

The problem with "churchly" NGOs. . .

 

So, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is in reality simply a non-governmental agency of the US government.  No matter if you think they do good work with the money or not, the false impression given is that they are a religious agency, one which furthers the aims of the Roman Catholic Church in the US.  That is not the case.  The money they administer is done within the parameters of the granting agency and therefore cannot be used for religious purpose but only for a secular one.  It is high time that we cease and desist in calling such organizations churchly and admit that they are but a fancied up name for any other group the US government gets to do its work.  If you are going to do the government's work, then at least be honest and remove the name USCCB from the title of the group and label it appropriately.

Lest any Lutherans here be smug, I could say the same for the the work of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Resettlement Service or even Lutheran World Relief -- both of which might do good  work on the government's dime but are hardly worth labeling as Lutheran.  If it is Lutheran, then it ought to be supported by Lutherans.  At least the LIRRS has rebadged itself to Global Refuge Connect.  Lutheran roots, yup.  Lutheran history, yup.  Lutheran identity, no more.  Lets all have a little more honesty in packaging.  FWIW, this does not apply to the LCMS World Relief and Human Care work done by the LCMS which is done separately and with Lutheran money.  Please send your offerings there with confidence that they are a churchly agency doing churchly work.  But the formerly Lutheran agencies conceived at a time when Lutheran work was cooperative and more Lutheran are but a shell of their former selves.  We all know it.  Let's simply admit it.  Whether or not they do good work on the government's dime, they are not Lutheran agencies doing Lutheran work.  Once you accept the government's money, all religious character to the work ceases and you become, for all intents and purposes, a government employer employing government employees on the government's dime.  So if these NGOs do a better and more efficient job of that work, fine.  Just don't hide behind the Lutheran name and make us forget that it is not Lutherans doing mercy work.

Things are that bad. . .

When things are really bad, small improvements become monumental occasions.  So it is that I read in the diocese of Charlotte that large numbers of men had been ordained this year.  Unpack those statistics and you find that they went from 7 to 6 and then this year to 10.  Percentage increases are more impressive than actual numbers.  Remember if you had 1 and increased your numbers by 100% that is still just 2.  This is not quite a revolution.  It is an increase worth nothing but with a more sobered nuance.  Rome is still in trouble.  Contrast this with the dioceses that are wholesale closing down churches because they have no priests and have less people than ever before.  Not so good.  Which brings me to my point.

Headlines love to herald dramatic numbers -- either positive or negative.  The issue here is not the current numbers but the trend overall and the reality is that things are pretty bad in Rome, along with much of Christianity.  So bad that even slight increases can cause us to celebrate.  We should not be watching the numbers like some sort of stock market ticker but concentrating on what is happening in the pews.  The health of any church is not defined by its leadership or even its clergy but by the numbers and faithfulness of those in the pews.  They are not unrelated, to be sure, but they are not the same.  Rome could have a wonderful pope and still be tanking in the pews.  We Lutherans could have great national leaders and still be closing the doors on too many small congregations.  The investment in the renewal of the Church is made not by buying leaders but by nurturing the parish where people gather around the Word and Table of the Lord.  That is the barometer to which we ought to be paying attention.

There are all sorts of things going against us -- demographics, location of churches, a powerful secular society, the decrease in marriage and birth rates, etc...  All of these are addressed not by national programs but by the work that happens with pastor and people in the parish.  Can you imagine a national campaign for more babies to be born?  How would that look?  Can you imagine a local congregation in which the families there are encouraged and supported and live as role models to those not yet married?  We know what that looks like.  For all the good talk from national leaders -- and there has been much good talk -- the reality is that success in the Church trickles up from the individual parish to the union of many parishes.  The barometer of our success has always been the health of the congregation, the relationship between faithful pastor and faithful people, and the witness to the faith that is given on the local level.

It is great to be supported by national leaders and national programs but sometimes we confuse those with the place where the real work is to be found.  Rome can have great bishops and lousy congregations.  Missouri Lutherans can have great national leaders and crumby parishes.  Our investment needs to be on the ground and in the local congregation.  That is where the future of the Church lies.  We are filled with voices insisting to know how to merge congregations or close them or decentralize seminaries or put them online or to offer dozens of ideas about everything else.  The talking heads on social media distract us from the real issue.  We need vibrant communities of faith in which the focus is on the Word preached and the Supper distributed to baptized people who understand they have a vocation to live out in home and at work.  The boom of our past did not happen because our leaders knew what to say or what to do but because their was great confidence in our Lutheran confessions, great conviction in the abiding and eternal truth of the Scriptures of which those confessions testify, and great commitment to their local community where this faith was lived out, catechized, nurtured, and accountable.  We have plenty of great print resources and online resources but what we seem to be struggling with today is the focus on the local congregation, on the sense of beauty that is manifest with the people of God gathered around the Table of the Lord and their pastor distributing God's gifts of Word and Sacrament every week.  Where this happens, fruits will abound.  When it does not, no national program or leader can save us. 

The cost of deferring to others. . .

For a very long time now and evolving only slowly over that time the family began to defer more and more to others.  This is especially true of education as the family receded while the role of the state and its institutions of public education took over raising our children.  While there were times in history when this was an easier and symbiotic partnership, it has increasingly become a more challenging relationship.  

For the family side of things, it has not all been sunshine and roses.  The rise of the single parent family has presenting a significant challenge to the publish school teacher and classroom, enrolling children who now come without the requisite background and preparation the home once offered.  The growing dysfunction within nearly all the homes and the loss of a multi-generational context have left the school to try and parent and socialize as well as teach.  The loss of any real moral consensus in America has left the educational endeavor without a direction and without a clear foundation on which to build.  The pressure upon schools to serve as incubators of current societal and educational thinking has left less time for for more core educational pursuits and changed the way schools are evaluated.  The view of the school by the community from treasure to drag or financial burden has moved to the many new homes without children or grandchildren and introduced new stress points to the whole task.  The rise of vocational education in which success is viewed neither as knowledge nor the ability to think but readiness for the job market has also produced cracks in the once impenetrable wall of primary and secondary education.

For that matter, the educational industry in America has grown increasingly distant from those who have the children and those who tax dollars pay the freight.  The rift is more than mere competition but suspicion and distrust of those institutions once proudly among the most revered in America.  This has created resentment and antagonism between the teaching enterprise and those who are taught -- along with their family constituents.  The educational industry has always skewed more left of center everywhere but this is pronounced at the university level and in urban settings.  The rights of the child in the classroom are championed over and against the rights of parents, family, and home.  All of this is  happening amid a growing number of alternatives and choices in the marketplace of options -- including home schooling.  While religious schools are not yet dead, they are no longer as vibrant or secure as the home schooling option increases even though religion is hardly the sole or even more important reason for families to make this choice for their children.  Classical schools hold a promise that is attracting people from all economic classes and from every social background.  For that matter, home schooled kids have shown their stuff and proven to be exceptionally prepared and profoundly successful.  All of this raises the question of whether dollars thrown at the problem will solve anything and might the cheapest option (in real dollars) be better than the expensive one.

Another aspect of this deference of family to school reveals the struggle of the home to present to their children a cohesive worldview, solid moral values which can endure over a lifetime, religious foundation to keep the kids in the faith, and a perspective on the world which, though challenged in teen age years is usually found again as those kids marry and have their own children.  The Church has also been complicit in this.  Sunday school was an American invention for the sake of those children whose parents were not in the Church and yet it has become a population nearly exclusively for those whose parents do.  In the same way, catechetical instruction was done in the home and examination at the Church but now that is largely the domain of the professionals.  How is this working?  Sadly, even worse than the success of the public school over against the home based educational programs.  Yet in the Church we continue to be tempted to mirror in our own schools the modern trends and ideas of the public school and to promote diversity as a sacred truth to accompany the Gospel itself.  We in the Church have learned to be both suspicious and unsure about the value of religious instruction over all and especially that which is done in the congregation by a professional teacher of doctrine.  All of this has accompanied the increased statistics of those lost to the faith in early childhood or immediately post-confirmation.  We say we are not competing with the home and family but it sure sounds like we are saying that professionals know better than parents.  If that is not what we want to say, then it might be time to change our stock speech.  Maybe we need to help the family and home more than compete with them or push them out of the equation.  Home schooling may prove to be the way to do both and versions of home school with co-ops or other partnered endeavors with the Church may be even more important going forward than actual brick and mortar religious schools.

The point is this.  There is a cost to deferring to others what is the rightful domain of the family and the home.  It is high time we recognized this and admitted it.

Tradeoffs in time. . .

Oddly enough, those Lutherans pushing for more ceremony in the liturgy have been joined by those pushing for less in searching out the past to find examples to prove their points.  The problem is that those looking for more have the long view of history behind them and the solid words of confessional integrity to support them.  Those pushing for less have a skewed version of nostalgia on their side.  For my part, I lived through both.  I was a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s when TLH was king and I was a pastor when WS 1969, ILCW, LBW, LW, HS 98, and LSB came along to coax Missouri into a more authentic liturgical identity on Sunday morning.  There were tradeoffs along the way and these are some of them as I see them.

Yes, until talk of a pan-Lutheran hymnal and service book became official, Lutherans looked very much alike on Sunday morning -- no matter their choice of left or right on the doctrinal spectrum.  They followed the same order with slight musical variation and there was little of the now vaunted diversity among Lutherans across the nation.  We simply opened the book and followed it.  For those who openly disdain the book and for the myriad of variations within it now, it can be tempting to long again for the days when we were all Lutheran people of the book (be it TLH or even SBH).  But there were also things not so rosy in that picture of our past.

 LCMS communing statistics first appear in 1930 and report an average communion of 2.10 times a year per member. At that time, most congregations offered Communion four to six times a year. In 1950, 1970 and 1990, LCMS members communed on average 3.22, 5.91 and 8.44 times per year. Through these decades, most congregations increased offering the full Divine Service to at least twice a month.  (From a LW Article in 2021)

For all the uniformity in rite and the general reverence which accompanied the execution of those rites, we were people of the Word but not so much of the Table.  When I grew up, it was common enough to be normal for Lutherans to go without the Sacrament in rite all but 4 Sundays a year and then either to depart the pew prior to the Eucharistic liturgy or to sit in the pew rather than commune.  For those who want to remember this period fondly, it is also worth remembering that we were ceremonially low, the black gown prevailed, sacramental piety was almost non-existent, nobody even talked about private confession, and the most uniform principle of liturgical ideal and practice was whatever was not Catholic.  Coincidentally, that also turned out to be non-catholic and against our own confession.  That is a fact conveniently forgotten.  Even in the hymn section of the book, the people were probably more comfortable with generic hymnody than either the Lutheran chorale or the offerings of the pre-Reformation variety.  It would be hard to even distinguish a Sunday in Lent from one in Easter except for the note in the bulletin or the hymn slide announcing the day on the hymnboard.  But there was uniformity and the person behind the rail and those on the other side did not treat worship as a casual or indifferent thing.

The lost opportunity of the liturgical movement was not the rites that could have been or should have been or should not have been.  No, the lost opportunity of the liturgical movement was the failure to marry a high sacramental practice, manifest uniformity of look and feel throughout the congregations, an appreciation for the ceremonies which could not be commanded to an existing reverence, a commitment to the hymnal, and high view of the Word.  That was the loss I lament.  Not a book or a setting of the Divine Service but the loss of how this might have been real renewal.  Sure, we did increase both the number of times the Sacrament is offered and how often folks commune.  That is good, right, and salutary.  But somehow we managed to do so while devaluing the shape of the rite and its words at the same time.  Sure, we have more pastors in albs and chasubles than I would have ever imagined half a decade ago but at the same time we seem to have lost the idea of what the ordained pastor is and does along with a confusion of what complementary role the laity play in this thing called worship.  Sure, we have more people now in the same book than when the liturgical experimentation began but we have turned from the book to the screen even where liturgy is still king.  Worst of all, we have somehow labeled all the stuff of worship from the rites and music of the absolution to the liturgy of the Word to the the liturgy of the Sacrament adiaphora.  Astonishingly, we have somehow said that Scripture is silent about what ought to happen in worship or how it might happen.  We somehow cannot even find it within ourselves to bind us to the confessional norm of every Lord's Day receiving the flesh and blood of Christ and then conveniently forgot to fight back when the government said liquor stores were essential but the gathering of Glod's people around His Word and Supper was not.  All of this confusion and tom foolery has left us very similar to where we were before the liturgical movement took hold -- arguing the basics again.  This time the basics are the ordo of the Divine Service, reverence, and the value of uniformity.  Really?

We traded one set of problems for another and in so doing admit that we remain more driven by minimums than by fullness, by settling for rather than striving for, and by utility over beauty.  If we had better learned the lessons of Covid, we might just have kept it all but put it on the screen rather than in person.  It is not simply our mess, Rome is suffering as well.  Canterbury also.  It is hard to find a real Calvinist anymore and it is hardly more of a memory the fundamentalism of the past against the evangelical gold standard of worship that seems to prevail where once the tent revival was king.  My point is that we cannot waste our time picking and choosing a moment in time which looks better to our sensibilities than another without failing again in the opportunity to hold to a high understanding of the Word and a similarly high understanding of the Sacrament.  We should never be bound by minimums except to rein in the erring but should all be working for the much more that belongs to our rich theological and liturgical history and heritage.