New Hope Lutheran Church

Information may not be reliable

I’ve finally recovered (I think) from last week’s activities, so I think I can post some thoughts now.
Last week I participated as a staff member at AFFIRM 2010. AFFIRM is a 5-day long youth event sponsored by theEvangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Southeastern Synod (SES). This year’s AFFIRM event consisted of 300+ youth participants and 80+ staff worshiping and learning on the campus of Berry College in Rome, GA. It was both exhausting andinvigoratingall at the same time.
To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect leading up to AFFIRM. I’d heard mixed reviews. My friend over at soulmunchies.com is completely in love with the event, even with its flaws. Other friends had sworn the event off, saying it wasn’t worth the time. I did my best to stay open-minded about it as the staff training weekend approached.
I first heard of AFFIRM through Bishop H. Julian Gordy. Bishop Gordy was visiting my home church a few months ago and I was leading worship at the contemporary service as usual. He stayed for a lunch at the church and I had the pleasure of sitting with him and chatting a bit. He mentioned AFFIRM to me and it definitely piqued my interest. A region-wide synod youth gathering with young leaders from across the southeast? Sure… sign me up.
Most anyone who knows me knows that I’ve felt a bit jaded by the Lutheran church, especially in the southeast. I realize that in other parts of the U.S. where there are larger numbers of Lutherans, things sometimes work differently. But here in the southeast, it seems like most local Lutheran churches are taking small strides backward even as a new generation of leaders is begging to push things ahead. I often feel tension, even in my own church, as suggestions for forward momentum are often ignored or directly opposed. I’ve felt very alone in my efforts, a feeling only recently remedied through someacquaintancesmade through Twitter and other online communities. Meeting other like-minded young, energetic Lutherans rekindled some hope in our church.AFFIRM served a similar purpose.
For me, AFFIRM served as an assurance that I am definitely not alone in the SES. There are indeed other young, energetic, forward-thinking Lutheran leaders in my synod. Many of them are as annoyed as I am with the way things are in our church, but they haven’t given up. They continue to press ahead and hope and pray for change. At AFFIRM, we were free to shape worship however the Spirit moved us. We didn’t have to deal with disgruntled traditionalist members coming up and whispering in our pastor’s ears. We didn’t have to deal with church councils or staff asking us to “dial it back”. We didn’t have to deal with worrying about our worship being “Lutheran enough.” We went where the Spirit took us without hesitation. It was beautiful.
Back home now, I’m settling into a post-AFFIRM depression. I checked my e-mail yesterday and saw the order of worship for this Sunday in my inbox. It’s another copy and paste from last week, just with slightly different music, dialog, and scriptures. It lacks excitement. It lacks energy. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing for years. I’m trying hard not to let my experiences last week make me feel even more jaded than I felt before, but it’s admittedly tough. I’m trying to look back on AFFIRM with a hopeful eye, realizing that there are others out there like me… expecting great things from our church and willing to press on until we get there.
I’m not alone… I’m not alone…

This past weekend I finally caved to pressure from some of our church youth and attended a “Teens Encounter Christ” TEC weekend. I had practically no expectations going into the weekend. Prior to attending, I’d simply heard a lot about it from some of our members and had been encouraged to go.
TEC is a pretty unique experience, I have to admit. As a youth growing up, I went on countless retreats and trips with our youth group. In most cases, these events had huge numbers of youth and really only a handful of leaders and supporting personnel. Similarly, in my experiences as a leader on such trips, I’ve found that same paradigm to be true. Leaders are typically overworked andunder-resourced.
TEC, on the other hand, seemed completely lopsided by comparison. As the weekend progressed, I realized that the event is “supported” behind the scenes by a seemingly countless throng of people. One such supporter told me that the ratio is nearly 4-to-1. 4 supporting personnel for every attendee.
This particular TEC experience was based on a Lutheran modification of what began as a Catholic youth ministry. While the “liturgy” of the weekend was Lutheran, several churches from several different denominations were represented. What a great model for ministry: a diverse body of Christ gathering together for a single united purpose, led and supported by laity with only a guiding hand from the ordained.

I’ve been thinking a LOT lately about worship services and I’m admittedly uneducated about the whole topic. In a way though, I’m sort of glad I’m uneducated about it. When I talk to other people who are perhaps more educated on the topic (pastors, church leaders, etc.), I get the impression that the education has tainted their impression of worship services. They’re so integrated with the services they’re a part of that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a church visitor, looking for a church and a worship experience that is appealing.
Yeah, I said it. I used the word “appealing” in the context of worship.
I bet some people just stopped reading.
I typically get a lot of backlash when I use words like “appealing” to describe worship services. Usually the argument is something like this: “Looking for an ‘appealing’ worship service is a self-centered approach and worship is supposed to be God-centered.” My problem with this argument is that while a worship service may be created as a God-centric time, the choices made while designing the service are based on human appeal and preference.
Let me describe what I mean. Some churches I’ve been to have fancy (ostentatious?) lecterns or pulpits from which readings and preaching take place. Other churches have little to no supporting “props” to support such activities. One extremely large and very local church (it’s maybe a mile from where my wife and I live) typically has just a simple stool and a small table where the pastor is able to lay his Bible down while he’s preaching. Is either approach more “God-centric”? Is either more worshipful? What drove the decisions to choose such decor?
Another example is music. The church I mention above uses loud, energetic, contemporary worship songs complete with drums, electric guitars, huge projection screens, moving lights, etc. Other churches use pipe organs and choirs. Which is more “God-centric”?
Yet another example is language. Some churches employ flowery or archaic words when they craft (yes, craft) their prayers or select their opening call and response texts. Others use simpler or more modern (more straightforward?) language.
Is an organ holier than drums?
Is a robe more Godly than jeans and a t-shirt?
What role do personal preferences play in designing a worship service? How much do the personal preferences of church leadership and members influence a typical worship service? If personal preferences drive the choices we make when we design a service, does this make our services self-centered?

Part of it is making the pulpit a place where perplexity, where doubt is spoken and shared in the community. Where we really face darkness together, where we really stare down darkness in the thickness of life. [...] I think part of the reason younger populations of people don’t hear much in preaching is because they don’t hear anything that’s at stake and there’s no one that seems to, in this moment, bare reality.

I find myself thinking a lot about relevance and what it means to be relevant. Specifically, what it means for a church to be relevant. There have been a few blog posts over the last couple of weeks to address what young people are looking for from a church. Obviously, items like modern worship made the list. But oddly enough, theology seemed to play an important role. Young people seem to crave not just cultural or generational relevance, but theological relevance.
I find what Andy Root says here to be quite significant. How often do you hear real perplexity or doubt or darkness shared from the pulpit? These are things that are plaguing young people on a daily basis, and yet are often missing from the sermons of many pastors and preachers.
One word that keeps getting lodged in my head is accessibility. Today’s young people are amazingly accessible. They’re on Twitter and Facebook and blogs. They’re used to sharing openly and they expect such openness from others. Consider this from a 2004 article on the subject of the online disinhibition effect:

It’s well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, feel more uninhibited, express themselves more openly. Researchers call this the “disinhibition effect.” [...] Sometimes people share very personal things about themselves. They reveal secret emotions, fears, wishes. Or they show unusual acts of kindness and generosity.

This new generation is comfortable online. As a result, they’re more open and accessible than any generation before them. How open are we, as a church? How open are we when we preach Christ? Are we tackling real issues head-on? Are we embracing perplexity from the pulpit? Are we facing the doubt and the darkness?
Are we speaking out of the thickness of life?

Justin over at BeDeviant.com recently posted an entry titled What the Needs of Young Adults Will Mean For Your Church. It came on the heels of an entry where he asked what young people look for in a church. Justin summarizes what young people want from a church in one word: community.
He expands on this a bit by providing the following “five quick predictions” on what the church will look like once today’s young people find themselves in church leadership positions:

Home groups, cell groups, mid-sized gatherings will move to the forefront as the primary evangelistic tool for churches.
Large group gatherings will still have a place in the local church, but they will be seen as icing on the cake, instead of the cake itself.
Because of the shift towards smaller communities, pastors will take on bi-vocational roles for A.) budgetary reasons, B.) evangelistic reasons.
Denominational seminaries will become a thing of the past. Most theological learning will move online or become highly contextualized and internalized by the local church itself.
Sinners prayer evangelism (i.e. linear evangelism) will give way to a more messy form of discipleship that includes dips and valleys; doubts and discussion.

This tiny list of prophesies speaks volumes. I wonder how many churches understand the shift that’s taking place even as we speak. You don’t have to look hard to realize that there is a new generation of eager young Christians just chomping at the bit to get their shot.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “catalyst” lately, and what it means to be one. What I’m finding is that the more people talk about what the church will look like at some undefined point in the future, the more I want it to happen now.
I want the shift to happen.
I’m getting tired of just talking about it though. I want to take action. The shift is already happening, but I think we can find ways to give it a push. I have some ideas for specific actions I can take to become a catalyst for change.
What ideas do you have?

My wife and I managed to get married without receiving a blender as a wedding gift. I know I know, you’re shocked. Ultimately, we ended up buying a cheap one which we use very rarely. I mean really, how often do I need a mush of multiple ingredients? We use it for fruit smoothies on occasion, but that’s about it.
The thing about a blender is that what you pour out of it is only as tasty as what you put into it. A fruit smoothie is good because the flavors you’re putting into it are complimentary to each other. All the blender does is combine them.
Blending, in and of itself, doesn’t produce positive results. The results come from combining flavors that work well together.
“Blended worship” is a phrase which is often overused, especially in the Lutheran church. For a church that’s historically slow to change, blended worship sounds like a great idea. You take aspects of a contemporary service and aspects of a traditional service and combine them for a tasty frappuccino of worship goodness. It’s a compromise. Everybody wins, right? And, it means we don’t have to commit! We’re not contemporary, so we don’t scare off the traditionalists. We’re not traditional, so we should see droves of young people flocking to our services any day now.
Seriously! Any day now. Really, any moment. Just wait, they’re coming… No really, they are!
What happens if you take a banana, a handful of strawberries, and a jar of pickles, and blend them all together? All are fine on their own, but combining them might not produce appealing results. Worship is much the same. Worship music, song lyrics, dialog language, prayers, sermons… all can have various and unique flavors. Combining them in a way that encourages worship requires similar skill and instinct as that of the chef knowing what ingredients to combine and, more importantly, what ingredients not to combine.
Many churches seem to move to this blended approach because they’re trying to make everybody happy. The end result, at least from my experiences, is the exact opposite. Nobody is happy. The folks over at stuffchristianslike.net bring up this phenomenon in #424 of their list of stuff Christians like. The author hits the nail on the head when he mentions that both parties lose when you compromise. I sense more frustration in blended worship services than I do in worship services that seem to commit to a single consistent style and language.
To make matters worse, I’ve seen many Lutheran churches claim to have a contemporary service only to walk in and find a blended one. This seems to happen a lot as these churches try to transition from traditional to contemporary. Many of them create an additional service for the contemporary approach but a combination of factors might prevent it from reaching its full potential. It may be that they have worship service planners who still think traditionally. It may be that they have a mixed bag of attendees at the contemporary service and they feel the need to cater to all of them. It may be that they just don’t understand what “this contemporary thing” is all about.
Whatever the reason, I often see these services becoming a confusing mix of language, music, lyrics, and “vibe”. The best advice I can give is this: commit. If you’re helping to plan a contemporary service, start fresh! Don’t just take your traditional service and add a few Hillsong tunes and call it a day. Don’t just take your traditional responsive readings and try to spice them up. Think creatively. Find other creative people in your church and get them involved. Take risks!
Don’t blend things that shouldn’t be blended. Some flavors are better on their own.

I had a couple of interesting conversations today over Twitter. For me, it started with @troyneujahr tweeting the following from a pastor’s conference:

“Money given by people in the pews is largely spent on the people in the pews.”–David Buegler #MIpastors

I mentioned in response that I often “flag” my offerings to the church for specific ministries that I see value in, a comment that sparked some discussion.
It got me thinking about church budgets and how ministries or projects in churches get approved and funded. I know from my own experiences that a lot of money is spent on what I would call “ineffective ministries”. In churches I’ve been a part of, I’ve seen some very odd “projects” soak up a lot of dollars. As a member, I just scratch my head and think of how that money could be put to much better use.
My own passive-aggressive method of dealing with this is to divert my own offerings to ministries that I see as having more value within the church. Some still goes to general, but the bulk I flag for ministries that I feel are more deserving. @rayjgentry called me out on it:

@newlutheran could that be a way though to keep control of your money? that you don’t completely trust the church?

I thought about trying to defend myself but I had to be honest. The answer to both questions is “yes”. It’s definitely a means of controlling “my” money. However, I don’t see it as being any more controlling than choosing to give to my local church as opposed to some other ministry. The second question he asks was much more profound though. And I have to answer: no, I don’t completely trust the church.
If I could write a check directly to God, I would. But as it stands now, I put my offering in the hands of people. I’ve seen what people do with money, even well-intentioned Godly people. There are a lot of moving components in the financial machinery of a typical church congregation. I’ve seen how church projects and ministries get funded. I’ve heard silver-tongued committee members weave a stories about how whatever it is they want to fund is somehow tied to the ministry goals of the church. I’ve seen ministries get line items in the church budget year after year, with very little fruit to show for it.
So I ask: if God was a member of your church, would he vote “yes” on your budget?
My guess is that He’d want to trim the fat and cut out nonessential and ineffective “ministries”. How much of your church’s offering money is distributed to ministries that have little impact on the community around you? Are we diluting our effectiveness by stretching our congregational resources across ministries that don’t bear fruit? Are our churches becoming jacks-of-all-trades, but masters of none? Are we trying to do so many things that we do none of them well?
Imagine what could happen if your church completely cut off ineffective ministries and limited themselves instead to just a handful of mission-driven efforts. I urge you to take a long hard look at your church budget next time you get a chance. Pray over it. Ask yourself what God would do if He could get his hands on it.

Catalyst was conceived as a Next Generation Leaders Conference in 1999 by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, John Maxwell, Lanny Donoho and several young leaders. Catalyst was created to meet the felt need that existed within the church leader space for a leadership event that was focused on a new generation of church leaders. Everything within this space seemed built around a forty to sixty year old mindset and medium. This team was convinced that this needed to change.

The focus, then, for the Catalyst team, was to create a leadership conference specifically for church leaders (ordained, laity, and everything in between) under 40 years of age. What a wonderful opportunity for young church leaders to gather and seek and learn from others. This year the list of speakers read like a who’s who of modern churchdom: Andy Stanley, Rob Bell, Chuck Swindoll, Louie Giglio… the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t there. You know who else wasn’t there? Pretty much every Lutheran I know.
Lutherans, on the whole, seemed to be woefully missing at the event. Twitter was a decent indication of this. For the duration of the conference, I followed the #cat09 hashtag on Twitter, a hashtag established to track posts related to the Catalyst 2009 conference. Throughout the day, the #cat09 hashtag bloomed into a fully trending topic on Twitter, meaning that it gained such popularity and momentum on Twitter that it became a featured topic. It generated buzz, even among people who had no idea what Catalyst was all about. I noticed many tweets in the #cat09 stream from people that were just trying to figure out what Catalyst even was. (As a side note, it was awesome to imagine people clicking on the trending topic just to get a face-full of Jesus for their trouble!)
In addition to following the trending #cat09 hashtag, I also currently follow hundreds of people directly through Twitter. Most are Lutheran. Most are leaders. Many are young. Of the people I follow directly through Twitter, only a handful were attending or talking about the conference. Of those, only one was a Lutheran.
12,000 in attendance, yet finding a Lutheran was like finding a needle in a haystack.
I tweeted to this young Lutheran to ask if she knew of any other Lutherans in attendance. She replied that she’d only seen one: the person she had come with.
So I ask: are we missing out? There seems to be a nation-wide movement to empower young leaders within the church, yet Lutherans seem to be on the outside looking in. The site soulmunchies.com is maintained by the one Lutheran I managed to track down at Catalyst. Her Catalyst-related blog posts are representative of the types of experiences I’ve had at similar events: moving worship, challenging scriptures, energized young people, and the clear presence of the Holy Spirit. Why are we not flocking to events like this?
The author of soulmunchies.com summed my feelings up best: “if we combined this creativity with Lutheran theology we could rock the world”. I couldn’t agree more.
I can only think of a few reasons why the Lutheran church is largely missing from events like this. And sadly, none of them are good.
It’s possible that we, the Lutheran church, are simply unaware. It’s possible that we just don’t know about events like this. It’s possible that somehow we’ve just missed the boat and that, given the opportunity, Lutherans would jump right into an event like this. Yes… it’s possible.
But it’s also possible that we’re purposefully isolating ourselves. Lutherans like to stick together and don’t often cross-pollinate with other denominations (unless our synods are forming “full communion” partnerships of course). We have our own Lutheran conferences and assemblies right? What could some non-Lutheran conference possibly teach us? What if their theology is lacking? What if they lead our young people astray? Valid concerns I suppose, but false prophets can be found everywhere and we must trust in the Holy Spirit to help us discern truth from lie. Do we have so little faith in your young people (or in the Holy Spirit) that we want to shield ourselves from “non-Lutheran teachings”?
I believe it’s also possible that we’re scared of this new generation of leaders. I mean come on, they’re loud, right? They’re full of energy. They play the drums. They have tattoos. They’re blogging and tweeting. They lol and brb and ftw. They don’t even know all the lyrics to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God! They’re everything Lutherans usually pride themselves on not being. Is it possible that we don’t even want to be a part of something like this because it doesn’t look like the Lutheran church that we’ve come to know and love?
Are we missing out?

Action Baptism Catalyst Churchwide Assembly Community ELCA Emerging Church Funny Lectionary Liturgy Lutheran Church Ministry Music Relevance Social Networking Social Statement Technology Thelology Tradition Worship young adults

The views expressed in articles linked and archived on NewLutheran.com are not necessarily those of the Lutheran church or any affiliated synod, Lutheran church leadership or members, friends or family of Lutheran church members, Lutheran hamsters or labrador retrievers, etc. Nor does the content reflect the views of any other affiliate of the author of any particular post. Views expressed are solely the opinion of the author.