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RENEWING THE CONGREGATION FROM THE INSIDE OUT
John Pless
The last several decades have seen numerous programs aimed at implementing congregational renewal or revitalization. Some have been designed by denominational judicatories; others by para-church or entrepreneurial organizations. The objectives vary from making the congregation more effective in evangelism to creating inclusive communities of faith dedicated to causes of social justice or ecological stewardship. In varying degrees, American Lutheran denominations were influenced by the Church Growth Movement. This movement was especially prominent in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the present century. Some thought that spiritual gift inventories held the key to unleashing the energies latent in individual believers so that they would move beyond church membership to authentic discipleship. Others thought that cell groups would be foundational in building congregations that were intentionally missional. We might add to the list the Charismatic Movement which flourished for a while in some sectors of American Lutheranism as well as the Liturgical Movement.
Renewed Life in Word and Sacrament
In my own Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, we were told that Ablaze was not a program but a movement, but its flames soon became smoldering embers, leaving little impact on the church body. No doubt, stories of similar ventures could be told of programs and initiatives in other church bodies. The purpose of this article is not to review or critique these efforts but to suggest a few ways that Lutheran congregations might think about renewed life together in Word and Sacrament. Robust renewal worked by the Holy Spirit through the means of grace will never take place through fear as church leaders beat pastors and congregations up with dire warnings about demographics and nervous announcements “unless we change, we’ll die.” The triune God will preserve and renew His church. This church has a future because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead never to die again. He lives and according to His faithful promise, He is present with and for His people in His Word and Sacraments.
It might be tempting to think of “Word and Sacrament” as an over-used and ultimately empty slogan. That would be a grave mistake for God’s Word and the sacraments instituted by Christ Jesus that are the heart and life-giving center of the very being of the congregation. Any talk of congregational renewal that overlooks or minimizes the means of grace is destined to failure. Renewal in the congregation flows from the Gospel purely preached and sacraments administered according to Christ’s mandate. This is the point made by the Augsburg Confession: “It is also taught that at all times there must be and remain one, holy Christian church. It is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel. For this is enough for the true unity of the Christian church that there the gospel is preached harmoniously according to a pure understanding and the sacraments are administered in conformity with the divine Word. It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that uniform ceremonies instituted by human beings be observed everywhere” (AC VII:1-3, K-W, 42).
The marks of the church are not uniformity in human ceremonies, nor might we add in human programs designed to contextualize the gospel and make the church grow. Growth in and of itself is not a mark of the church. Cancer also grows. In a culture that assumes that bigger is always better, Lutherans are rightly suspicious of approaches to renewal that are evaluated on the basis of whether or not they produce numerical results.
What Does Renewal Look Like?
What, then, does renewal in the congregation look like? A renewed congregation will be solid at the center and porous on the edges. That is to say, a renewed congregation will be firmly committed to fidelity in the confession of the Gospel in biblical, Christ-centered liturgy and preaching, substantial and ongoing catechesis, attentive spiritual care of its members, and an outward focus that brings together a verbal witness to Christ and works of mercy extended to those outside the walls of the church building.
In the last few decades, much energy was expended in the so-called “worship wars.” On the one side, there were those who argued that the Lutheran church would grow if free-form liturgies were created employing praise and worship songs largely borrowed from the American Evangelical community. On the other side there were adherents of the Liturgical Movement who maintained that renewal would come through a recovery of ancient texts and ceremonies. In their own way both parties ended up taking an anthropocentric stance placing greater accent on worship as a human activity rather than the Lord coming to His people in sermon and sacrament. Rather than becoming entangled in questions of “traditional” vs “contemporary” or attempting to make a distinction between “substance” and “style,” a more fruitful path might be a return to Luther’s “Torgau formula” as the central criterion for making decisions regarding liturgical practice as he says that nothing should happen in God’s house but “that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy Word and that we respond to him through prayer and praise” (AE 51:333).1
Using Luther’s formula as a guiding principle would guard against a wooden attempt to freeze the liturgy in the third century (or the sixteenth or nineteenth century for that matter) as well as an addiction to untested novelties that have no continuity with the past and change from week to week. Freed from the need to repristinate archaic forms or create new orders of service each Sunday, the pastor would have more time to focus on preaching the word of the cross.
Renewal of Preaching
Renewal of the congregation is dependent on a renewal of preaching. The sermon is not an occasion for religious “show and tell” but for the proclamation of God’s law and Gospel so that Christ crucified and risen is put into the ears, hearts, and minds of those who hear. Because the Holy Spirit is at work in the church to daily and richly forgive sins through the Gospel, the preacher cannot merely “assume” that people know the Gospel. It must be proclaimed over and over again, week in and week out. The Gospel not only brings us to Christ, but it keeps us with Him in the one true faith, to paraphrase the Catechism.
Genuine preaching will be more than a lecture about Christ but handing Him over in words: “The Gospel not only gives information concerning a new relationship between him who hears it and God, but it brings this relationship about―only, however by calling attention to Christ.”2 Preaching that renews the church will proclaim both law and Gospel according to the contours of the biblical text and centered in Christ Jesus in whom we have the forgiveness of sins. This means preaching has its own language. Richard Lischer, a Lutheran who taught at Duke Divinity School for many years, reflected on his own experience as a seminarian at Concordia Seminary in the late 1960’s: “What language shall I borrow? An odd question when you stop to think, and one with a long and controversial history. Over the years, preachers have not been satisfied to speak from the embedded position. They have not been content with the starkness of the New Testament's theology of the word. They have sought other language to communicate the gospel. When I was a seminarian, we all preached 'existentially' after the manner of Bultmann, in the confidence that the existentialist analysis of the human predicament was pretty much the same as Paul's. When we weren't preaching existentially, we donned our white coats, lit our pipes, and preached therapeutically, in the equally misplaced confidence that psychologist Carl Rogers’s view of the person was not all that different from Jesus.“3
In recent years, some Lutheran preachers have sought a different language as Lischer notes and in doing so, the church suffers. In an attempt to get behind the biblical text or to make it relevant, Christ is not preached and the only One who can renew His church is silenced. Robert Kolb aptly reminds us “The oral proclamation or confession of God’s Word must proceed from the biblical text, Luther believed, and that oral event depended on the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity in contemporary hearing and reading and proclaiming of the Bible. Luther regarded Scripture as the source of the church’s delivery of God’s power to save,”4 and we might add the renewal of His holy Christian people.
Robert Kolb
Preaching requires a preacher. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the causes of clergy “burnout” or to assess the challenges that pastors face in our culture, but an article on renewing the congregation would be incomplete without saying something about the need for pastoral renewal. Pastors need the Word of God, too.
In a perceptive essay, Richard Lischer notes that the categories of professionalism may leave space for spirituality but not for the Word of God: “Today we find the church cautiously distancing its ministry from the word of God. It does so under the modern pressure of professionalism and the postmodern impulse to pluralism, both of which are offended by spoken affirmations of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As a matter of public policy, the wider culture wants something like ministry, much in the way it encourages volunteerism and philanthropy, but it thinks it can have it without the word of God. Faith-based initiatives are welcome, preaching is not.”5
It is good for pastors to be reminded of the uniqueness of their calling. “Faithful preaching of Law and Gospel is difficult work, forged out of the crucible of prayer, meditation, and spiritual attack (Luther’s oratio, meditatio, tentatio) as they engage the life of the preacher. Preachers call upon the name of the Lord, imploring Him to open their lips that they might show forth His praise [Ps. 51:15]. Preachers meditate on the Scriptures, digesting and absorbing the Spirit who has implanted in their letters His own power to save and sustain. Preachers learn endurance from what is suffered as Satan contradicts the promise in his beguiling effort to pull them away from Christ. Yet these spiritual attacks (tentatio) are used by the Holy Spirit to urge preachers back into deeper meditation on God’s implanted Word and out of this meditation to call upon the name of the Lord in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.”6
The pastor’s own life in the Word of God and prayer is essential. Oswald Bayer has provided a helpful diagnostic tool, “Twenty Questions on the Relevance of Luther for Today.”7 By returning to core aspects of Luther’s theology such as the distinction of law from Gospel, God’s justification of the ungodly by faith alone, and the theology of the cross, Bayer directs pastors to the theological resources that shape and sustain the life of the pastor.
Flow
God’s gifts given in sermon and sacrament flow from the very center of the church gathered in Jesus’ name in the daily lives of His people and out from them into the world as they live out their various callings in creation. Mark Tranvik has helpfully picked up on Luther’s use of the imagery of “flow” as a metaphor for this movement noting the Reformer’s fondness for pictures of God’s grace as a fountain, river, or stream: “In his first commentary on Galatians, Luther links the flow of God’s love with a sense of freedom and spontaneity. The law can frustrate or block the love of a Christian, even when those admonitions aim at the improvement of the self or of the well-being of the neighbor. But the heart liberated by the gospel streams forth into the world for the sake of the neighbor. It is no longer hemmed in by the law.”8
Richard Resch vividly captures this imagery of the flow of the Lord’s gifts to us in his hymn, “The Gifts Christ Freely Gives” (LSB 602), especially stanza 2:
“The gifts flow from the font where He calls us His own; New life He gives that makes us His and His alone. Here He forgives our sins with water and His Word; The triune God Himself Gives pow’r to call Him Lord” (LSB 602:2).
The post-communion collect used in Lutheran liturgies since 1526 accents God’s self-giving in the Sacrament received with faith in Jesus’ words as the source of the Christian giving himself/herself to the neighbor in love: “We give thanks to you, almighty God, that you have refreshed us through this salutary gift, and we implore You that of Your mercy You would strengthen us through the same in faith toward You and fervent love toward one another; through Jesus Christ…” (LSB. P. 166).
The collect echoes Luther’s 1520 treatise, “The Freedom of a Christian” where he concludes: “Christian individuals do not live in themselves but in Christ and their neighbor, or else they are not Christian. They live in Christ through faith and in the neighbor through love. Through faith they are caught up beyond themselves into God; likewise through love they fall down beneath themselves into the neighbor.”9
Living outside of the self through faith in Christ and through love living in the neighbor, Christians are not evacuated from the world but live in the world as salt and light (see Matt. 5:1314). It is the world that Christians as members of the royal priesthood (see I Peter 2:9) proclaim the work of the triune God who has called us out of darkness into His light made manifest in Christ Jesus. It is in the world that Christians offer their bodies as living sacrifices for the good of the neighbor (see Romans 12:1-2). This has been called “the liturgy after the liturgy” as the fruits of God’s service to us in the Divine Service are now extended outside the chancel and nave into the home, civic community, and workplace.10
Formation
This leads to the final point of this essay. Renewal in the congregation will take on a catechetical shape so that disciples of Jesus are formed to live in God’s Word and so are so equipped to live as His people in their various callings. Such a renewal will rediscover or perhaps discover, Luther’s Catechisms both Small and Large. Luther did not see the Small Catechism as a replacement for Holy Scripture but as a guide that would take readers to the heart of the Bible’s message of repentance and faith in Christ. Charles Arand has called the Small Catechism a “theological Swiss Army knife,”11 as it has multiple uses for instruction in doctrine, prayer, and Christian living.
Charles Arand
Teaching the Small Catechism in the congregation is vital in an age of biblical illiteracy, doctrinal indifference, pluralism, and so-called denominational ambiguity. The Small Catechism is much more than a textbook for confirmation class. Based on his reading of Deuteronomy 6:4ff, Luther also intended the Small Catechism to be used in the Christian home, “as the head of a family should teach it in a simple way to his household.”
Catechesis is the vital link between evangelism and incorporation into the life of the congregation. Such catechesis will be intentional and should not be rushed or reduced to a “new member orientation.” It will provide a setting for the catechumen to learn the Scriptures more deeply and come to an understanding of the Christian faith as confessed by the Lutheran church. Luther’s Small Catechism along with the Large Catechism provides something of a “worldview” oriented by the First Commandment and centered in the Second Article of the Apostles’ Creed that allows members to continue to grow in understanding of Christian faith and life even as they also engage apologetic questions that they encounter in our culture.12
In summary, renewal in the congregation centers in the font, pulpit, and altar as the word of the cross has free course daily, richly forgiving the sinners of believers, reviving faith, and sustaining the new life in Christ Jesus. As this Word has free course it also makes its way on the lips and in the lives of the Lord’s people out into the world:
“Sent forth by God’s blessing, our true faith confessing, the people of God from His dwelling take leave. The Supper is ended. O now be extended the fruits of this service in all who believe. The seed of His teaching, receptive souls reaching shall blossom in action for God and for all. His grace did invite us, His love shall unite us to work for God’s kingdom and answer His call” (LSB 643:1)
John T. Pless, M.Div.; D. Litt. Assistant Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Mission Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN
Endnotes:
1Here see Steven Paulson, “What is Essential in Lutheran Worship?” Word & World 26:2 (Spring 2006), 149-161.
2Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, trans. Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1962), 65.
3Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 12.
4Robert Kolb, Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 83.
5Richard Lischer, “The Called Life: An Essay on the Pastoral Vocation” Interpretation (April 2005), 168.
6Matthew C. Harrison and John T. Pless, “Introduction” to Lutheran Preaching? Law and Gospel Proclamation Today (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2023), x. Also see “Luther’s Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio as the Shape of Pastoral Care of Pastors” in Pastor Craft: Essays & Sermons by John T. Pless (Irvine, California: 1517 Publishing, 2021), 249-262.
7See Oswald Bayer, “Twenty Questions on the Relevance of Luther for Today” in Lutheran Preaching? Law and Gospel Proclamation Today ed. Matthew C. Harrison and John T. Pless (St. Louis: Concordia, 2023), 20-23.
8Mark Tranvik, “Martin Luther on the Flow of Faith” Lutheran Quarterly 37:2 (Summer 2023), 130.
9Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” translated by Timothy J. Wengert in The Annotated Luther: Volume I- The Roots of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 530.
10“Vocation: Fruit of the Liturgy” in Pastor Craft: Essays and Sermons by John T. Pless, 447-460.
11Charles Arand, That I May be His Own: An Overview of Luther’s Catechisms (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000), 57. For more on these multiple uses of the Catechism see, John T. Pless, Luther’s Small Catechism as a Manual for Discipleship (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2019) and Praying Luther’s Small Catechism (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2016).
12Here see Luther’s Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Applications edited by John T. Pless and Larry Vogel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2023). It was an explicit aim in the production of this book to engage theological, ethical, and apologetic concerns faced by the laity in our day. The more than seventy “excursive essays” could easily be used in adult forums or Bible study groups.
