Look where?

A while ago a report was issued on the condition of the LCMS.  It was nothing new but with the opinions were facts born of statistics and comparisons year over year through the last couple of decades.  In the report was the question of whether the LCMS was going to accept the orderly extinction which the facts and figures had charted or whether there was a plan to begin fixing what is wrong.

After some days of thoughts on and off about the report, it occurs to me that we are all looking for a plan and some sort of planner to tell us what to do and then to inspire us to do it.  It would be nice.  It would be good if it all came printed in the mail in full color or downloadable from some website or presented in visual form for all of us visual learners.  It would be nice but it is not going to happen.  Renewal seldom happens from the top down.  This is no different.

What the statistics tell us is that the problem and the solution lies not in some office in a headquarters or from the latest book off the presses or even from the halls of academia.   Both the challenges and whatever response we have to those challenges are squarely on the parish level.  The decline overall is born of a decline in the parishes of our Synod.  Quite bluntly, we have fewer people coming to worship than we have had since our earliest of days.  The number of congregations is declining but at a very slow rate and one that looks bigger because the number of mission starts is also very low.  Though the last two decades have seen the total number of folks in worship on an average Sunday drop to half of what it was, the actual number of altars and pulpits has not dropped as precipitously (2.8%).  In fact, the numbers of active clergy on the roster is a bit higher than a generation ago (2%).  No, the problem is that we are no longer a culture of church going folks as the ratio from those baptized members to attendance is now only 3 out of 10.

The fact that we are not alone or that we are doing better than some should not be consolation to us.  We have to admit that the loss is being felt first of all on the ground level with the congregation and any renewal will begin on the ground level with the congregation.  Furthermore, we will need to face the hard fact that innovation and creativity are not the answers anymore than doing what we have been doing wrong over the past 20 years or so will help us reverse the trend.  Books and programs and experts are not the means to reversing this decline.  We all know that but none of us wants to believe it.  Neither will we reverse the decline by finding convenient suspects to round up and accuse.  It is a fool's errand for Rome to blame all their problems on Vatican II and it is a fool's errand for us to blame all our problems on any one thing or any one group (not even the Boomers so many love to hate).   

Our problem is that we simply have forgotten how to be the Church.  We have engaged in so many different activities over the years that we have either been distracted from or lost confidence in the one way the Church grows -- the means of grace.  Luther's explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles' Creed has become a shibboleth of orthodoxy but we may just have forgotten to actually believe what we insist upon saying.  Worship has become merely one of many programs within the congregation and the style of worship has become the battleground.  We have made worship into a toy that little children are fighting over in the sandbox instead of the awe filled moment of Christ's epiphany to us and His gift to us of the food of everlasting life.  We argue over sins as if any one of us were righteous and we confess more the vague generalities or systematic sins that do not accuse us instead of praying for mercy before the Lord who is rightfully offended by what we have said, thought, and done.  We entertain people to death and then insist to them than unless they are leading something or taking part of the service, they are not really participating.  We have more Bibles than any one but do not read them and plenty of great religious books that sit unopened.  

The reality is that many of our congregations have forgotten why they are there in the first place and the Lord's visitation has been bumped down the list while relevance and feel good emotions top it.  Covid is hardly to blame but the mere fact that it happened and we acquiesced to the reality that the liquor store is more important than our gathering on the Lord's day in His house only sealed the deal.  We have lost more than people in the pews; we have lost our reason for existence.  Without a renewal that is built upon this positive and powerful affirmation of who we are as the people of God and what we do gathered around His Word, water, and table.  We do not have to draw people to this unless what we are doing is no longer this glimpse of heavenly glory and this taste of the food of immortality.  As long as worship is merely optional, it will become occasional and as long as it is occasional it will become irrelevant.  There is no apology or embarrassment for this statement of fact.  Renewal begins on Sunday morning.  Is this a radical thought?  It should not be and if it is then all the programs and technology on earth will not save us.  We will have condemned ourselves.