So dangerous. . .

I wrote long ago that the most dangerous thing on earth is a theologically orthodox person -- both those inside the Church and those outside cannot abide such orthodoxy.  Politically, it would seem that anyone who remotely resembles a traditional view of marriage and family is at least that kind of dangerous person.  Frankly, I do not hear the Church universally promoting that traditional view of marriage and family as urgently and passionately as it should.

Imagine that.  In the space of a few generations in which it was nearly a universal assumption that the goal was to have a world where as many people as possible can get married, have stable marriages, and raise children, this has become anathema to the modern mind.  Indeed, the liberal and progressives are not only not choosing marriage for themselves but insisting that anything close to a traditional view of marriage and the family is the worst kind of bondage and unreasonable in this day and age.  How quickly the time has passed.

A world where as many people as possible marry a member of the opposite sex ought to be normal.  It is surely the expectation of government.  Where is the government going to find the money to take care of people who do not have a spouse to take care of them -- whether in illness or in old age?  Not all the tax money in the world could provide for the people to replace where spouses do for each other and to replace the caregivers who enable perhaps 80% of those over 65 to live on their own.  Yet somehow this is deemed more dangerous than the idea that marriage is patriarchal and unreasonable.

Stable marriages should be a practical value as well.  Though divorce, and particularly no-fault divorce, has created an industry of people trading in their spouses for a different model or abandoning them for a life without marriage, stable marriages are the bedrock of society.  Every child of divorced parents and every child who grows up without one parent or the other knows the blessing of growing up in home with a stable marriage.  Our culture so filled with constant and urgent change would benefit from good and stable homes in which marriages work out their problems and remain stable amid the chaos that too often passes for everyday life today.

Children raised not by daycare or government program or other institutional settings is not some sort of gold standard but the most basic norm of all.  Strangely enough, we live at a time in which people too often presume that parents are not well equipped to care for their children and so-called experts must intervene.  That usually happens among those who did not know a stable home with both parents and so have no idea that this is not only the norm overall but the least a child should be able to expect.  Yet this has also become a radical idea as well.

These are not American goals but universal standards for all nations and peoples and are generally espoused by all religions as well.  Well, at least they used to be.  Man for woman and woman for man, marriage until death parts you, and parents raising their children and imparting values and faith while also providing good examples to them.  But, I am sad to say, this has become a racial thought in America today and in the world overall.  It is no wonder we are in trouble. 

Everyone has a voice -- even God!

The value attached to diversity requires that everyone has a say or at least an opinion -- except, of course, where that opinion violates public standards or is deemed offensive.  Modern societies define themselves on the basis of how well diversity is practiced and how broad the diversity within the parameters of what is deemed the public good.  Even churches have come to define diversity as an element of the Gospel and almost a mark of authenticity.  Why else would their be the constant scrutiny given to how white or how diverse the membership is or how broad the latitude given to dissent or doctrinal disagreement?  We present ourselves as Christians as models of toleration and abhor the hierarchies that would rein in any disagreement or dissent from the doctrine confessed and the practice sanctioned.  Even in a church body like Missouri there is push back against too much uniformity and there is an inherent stripe of rebellion against the idea that we march in lock step the walk of the Synod.

Everywhere everyone has a voice. We give the same honor to personal experiences and individual preference as we would fact or universal truth.  That voice is a mixture of feelings and facts that makes it hard to forge the unity once the hallmark of the Church's identity.  Those who favor such insist that this is evidence of the pastoral character of the Church, not dogmatic (bad word) community but a pastoral one.  We even speak of pastoral liturgy as if worship were more about the worshiper than the One worshiped.  We do not give much more than a momentary nod to the faith and practice of those who went before us except, of course, to prooftext our own deviation from the norms of doctrine and life.  We act as if we were the first Christians, the ones still forming from the fluid diversity of the moment any norms for the future and too often fail to acknowledge that we are those lately come who have inherited a massive witness of faith and practice from those who went before us.

It seems that even God has one voice in this conversation but not a final voice or even a definitive one.  We seem to be perfectly comfortable with the contradiction of view and practice that violates not simply tradition but even the clear word of Scripture.  We find it rather easy to suggest that what others have said uniformly about the Scriptures and what they mean does not apply today and we are free to suggest new and novel interpretations of the Bible which do not conflict with modern norms and values and morals.  Indeed, because God's voice is only one voice among the many voices heard, His voice has almost no authority at all anymore.  That is the consequence of a diversity in which no voice is given priority over others and all voices are equal.  The function of tradition is to preserve the voice of God and the voices of those in the past who have given witness to the unchanging testimony of His voice.  When the present takes priority over the past and God's voice is but one of the many voices heard, every age reinvents itself and every Christianity is reinvented to fit that self.  It ends up being a state of all things being new but with a newness that no longer holds the promise of eternity.  It is for this reason that diversity and everyone a voice cannot is not a mark of the Church nor a sign of its catholicity and apostolicity.  Yet this is what liberal and progressive Christianity has left us -- God must vie for our attention as one of many voices and without any deference given to those who went before us, we end up deciding if God's voice fits us and our times and so will be heard or if God's voice will be dismissed without fear.  So tell that to a room that finds any hierarchy of voices suspect or wrong.

Looking for blame. . .

There are probably many reasons for some of the problems facing the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod today but it has become rather fashionable to look as much for someone to blame as it has for real solutions.  It is tiresome to me that some of the typical culprits in these scenarios have been overplayed to the point where too many actually believe that these are the real reasons for our lack of growth or the problem of filling pulpits.

I am tired of hearing the blame placed upon small congregations.  I am weary of those who spill ink and vitriol against congregations they believe should be closed or merged because they are consuming too much of Synod's resources of both money and pastors and serving too few people.  How odd it is that we have made these small congregations the bane of our existence as if the Word and Sacrament was deserved more by large communities of people than small!  Sure, we have lots of small parishes and so do many denominations these days.  While I suppose there are those who can and maybe should close, the reality is that they are not the reason for a pastor shortage nor are they taking pastors away from places where they might better serve.  Most of these very small congregations do not depend upon full-time pastors but have tapped into the market of retired pastors and those on candidate status or those who are serving in non-parish situations.  You could close them all and it would not free up a ton of pastors to fill the vacant pulpits we have.

Furthermore, many of these congregations are not simply small but isolated and do not have close or reasonably close options for their people if they were to close.  The rural landscape of America has seen an overall decline in people and this is part of the reason these parishes are small.  It is not that they have failed to keep their people or win new converts but the pool of people is diminishing every year as the towns in which they have been planted grow ever smaller.  My own hometown is one such example.  The school is small, main street is deserted, and the population is aging.  This is not due to bad people or bad planning but mechanized agriculture, the fruits of technology, and less need for boots on the ground, so to speak.  The small congregations are surviving because they are serving the population that remains and working hard and creatively struggling to find solutions.  While some dual or triple or even quadruple congregation share a pastor, that presents its own particular need for a certain kind of pastor and sharing arrangements not always possible or beneficial.  God bless them when they work but these are not the end all solutions for every circumstance.

Some think that merging congregations is the answer to all the problems.  Is it wrong to expect that people's loyalties to congregations where they have worshiped for many generations, have multi-generations of family members buried in the parish cemeteries attached to these congregations, or have been taught and believed that this was their church where they belonged for many years could be transferred to other places?  Should we be punishing them for their loyalty and devotion?  Is such loyalty and devotion to buildings or is it to the heritage and history of people who have taught them the faith and and passed on the sacred deposit to another generation?  Should we expect that loyalty is easily shifted to a new place and that all the history and legacy they felt for one identity should be quickly surrendered to be attached to another place?  Ask the legions of Roman Catholic parishes which have merged over the years only to find that the merged parish was empty of the fierce loyalties and associations that were not so suddenly transferred because administrative reasons justified it.  We want our people to be loyal and devoted to the places where they receive God's gifts so should we treat those places as mere access points for such grace?  Merging may work in some places and may not work in others.  It can be useful but will not fix all the problems.

Pastors are sometimes blamed for being unwilling to go where they are needed or for expecting fair compensation as they support their families.  Are those pastors the problem because they have familial ties to certain regions or concerns for the places where they must raise their children?  I am writing as someone who has never served any a congregation closer than a two day drive to my family or a one day drive to my wife's family.  It was a sacrifice to be that far away from parents and grandparents, siblings and extended family and not to be free on the holidays when others would travel home.  There is no denying that it costs the pastor and his family something.  If I had gotten a call closer, who knows if I would have taken it.  But I didn't and yet I am not quite ready to blame every pastor who considers the family factor in their decision to accept or decline a call.  Neither am I willing to condemn pastors who take into the consideration the availability and cost of housing in the calls they receive.  It is a real factor of life for a church body in which parsonages are probably now more the exception than the rule and areas in need of pastors which have housing costs beyond what typical pastors can afford will need to find creative solutions to that problem.

What I am saying is this.  Don't blame small congregations or the pastors and their families for the problems of decline or the pastoral shortage in the LCMS.  Instead of looking for someone to blame, we need to look for answers and solutions to serve all the places where we have parishes and to help them grow as much as they are able.  Along with convenient scapegoats mentioned above, we would be wise not to blame doctrine or the liturgy as the reasons for our lack of growth, shortage of pastors, or struggles as a church body.  For what it is worth, I do not believe all the statistics that say that non-denominational evangelical congregations are the only ones doing better.  In a culture of people looking for transcendency, it is hardly logical to conclude that churches that give people what they say they want over truth are going to win any of the battles before us.  But some of these are probably fodder for another post on another day.

For whom the bell tolls. . .

I lifetime ago a member of my first parish had died and the family was looking for a fitting memorial.  They had a connection to an electronic carillon company and so it was settled that we were getting a carillon.  Well, it was not really a carillon but a player that played tapes of bells over a loudspeaker set up on the steeple of the church.  We were thrilled, however.  At first we had it playing every hour with a hymn and then we toned it down to a bell on the quarter hours and an extended bell on the hour with a full hymn at 9 am, 12 Noon, and 6 pm.  We thought it was great.  Apparently a neighbor did not.  Although you could not hear it everywhere, it did carry through the very small town and even out in the country.  It carried too well for some ears.  They complained.  To their credit, the town officials did not bother with the complaint.  We were hurt, however, that anyone would have the audacity to complain about a church bell.

Forward about 30 years and my last parish got two real bells on a bell tower with ropes that had to be pulled and with the sound not of a loudspeaker amplifying something but an authentic sound piercing the neighborhood.  We rang it only for worship and funerals.  It did not ring hourly nor did it sound out a familiar pattern.  Just a couple of bells at different pitches, sounding better or worse according to the guy who was pulling the ropes.  I do not know if anyone has complained.  The neighborhood is already loud with the sound of a five lane highway in front of the Church, motorcycles speeding down the asphalt, ambulance, firetruck, and police sirens, and the occasional truck using the engine to brake.  The bell probably gets lost in all that noise.  I am sure that somewhere somebody is thinking I wish they would stop ringing that dang bell.  Oh, well.

We do not hear bells much anymore.  The noises of a busy life and crowded roads have taken over and bells have fallen out of favor—even in churches.  It is secular noise without the intrusion of the sacred.  I am sad about that.  I think back to the small city of Hudson, NY, across the river by the same name from where I served.  At one point, it had 8 different Lutheran congregations (from Estonian and Latvian to German to groups that broke off for one reason or another).  Now but one Lutheran remains and it was a break off group that managed to survive.  The others do not even have buildings to remind us of their past anymore.  Once, however, they had steeples and bells along with the other Christian churches in that small but very old city.  Even the Roman Catholic parishes were divided—Italian, German, Polish, Irish, etc... Now those steeples are quiet and with that silence comes another sadness as we remember what was and is no more.  The once thriving ethnic congregations and those who broke off for real theological reasons and not simply because they could not get along with the pastor all had bells to sing out their presence.  Now there is the awkward silence of mergers, consolidations, closures, and demolished buildings. 

The sound of Christianity has exited America with the buildings and communities that once thrived in them.  We are too enlightened to let ethnicity or language or culture or even doctrine divide us anymore.  Strangely enough, the forced marriages of need or aspiration inevitably led to decline and not to success.  That is certainly the track record of Lutherans.  With all our grand plans has come the tragic reality that the bell tolls no more in most places—except in memory.  Kingdom building did not lead to victory but to defeat and Christians are struggling to remain orthodox and to remain a presence anymore.  The greater sadness is that too many who once appreciate churches and what they did are relieved by the silence and the faded echos of their presence on the streets, roads, and boulevards of America.  I wonder if it would have been different if we were not so apologetic about presence, about the sound of that presence in bells and in conviction, and about passing on that legacy more proudly to those who followed us.  I would like to think so.

There are communities still flourishing—and not simply the ones who have turned their churches into living rooms filled with people seeking entertainment along with their inspiration.  I was privileged to be a part of two of those.  They each grew during the time I was there (though I am not taking credit for that).  They were intentional communities of faith, keeping their conviction vibrant and their confession of doctrine full, along with a faithful practice of our liturgical maximums.  At this point they remain strong, filled with the sounds of people, babies crying, instruments playing, kneelers dropping, choirs singing, hymns sung with gusto, chant and, yes, with bells.  We do what we can to make sure that we are not too quiet.  I hope we are all doing that. 

 

Good camera work, great subject material. . .

I happened to run across this link to a spectacular set of photos from Peter Li whose work capturing the sacred spaces of England and other lands is simply amazing.  You can look at it here although there may be other websites to showcase his gift and the wonderful churches he photographs.  The subject material of the camera is itself amazing space.  Beauty is certainly not an end in and of itself for Christians but why on earth would beauty not be an ally and component of faithful Christian worship?

If there is a cause for beauty, is not that cause the Gospel of Jesus Christ?  At one time the Church was not simply the place for art and beauty but its patron and cause.  I fear that age has escaped us.  It is hard to justify spending money on beauty when construction budgets exceed plans and dollars are short and the urgent need for missions ever present in each spending decision.  We seem to have forgotten that we ought to be building not for a moment but for a long span of time in which the faithful will be gathered into that space, nurtured there in Word and Sacrament, and children raised up into the faith.  We seem to have forgotten that the Church is not simply another place where beauty lives but the place where an exclusive beauty lives -- the beauty of that which serves the Word in the same way music does.  The Word can have several servants and we need not choose.  The glory of song and instrument along with the glory of art and beauty (even in ceremony!) raise us up from ourselves to behold in eye what the ear hears.

While it might be nice to be able to build a space from the ground up, there is no more urgent cause than to make the structures we have serviceable to the liturgy and a gift to the eye while the people gather around the Word and Table of the Lord.  It can be done.  It is being done -- though not often enough.  We have a gift to give the world and Christ has entrusted that gift to us to preach and teach and also to present in visual form.  Let us raise the eye to God, give testimony to the voice of the Gospel in the beauty of the place where that Gospel has called us, where the Spirit works to enlighten and sanctify us, and where we receive the gifts that nowhere else can be found.