(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “2Lent: An Answer to Institutional Decline”, originally shared on February 21, 2024. It was the 299th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
How do we reverse the institutional decline
of the Church in the Western world? Lent. Today, we’re going to see why.
The
American humorist and satirist of all things Lutheran, Garrison Keillor, once
said that, for Lutherans, every Sunday is in Lent. I hope that he meant that
every Sunday points to the love and grace of God in full exhibition and
accomplishment on the cross, and not to our storied reserve.
This coming Sunday will be the second Sunday
in the Church’s season of Lent. One of my colleagues posted a meme recently
quoting Lamentations 3:40,
40 Let us test and examine our ways,
and return to the LORD.
He commented, “And that’s what Lent is all
about, Charlie Brown.”
So, let us examine our ways.
We all know that the Church is in decline in
the Western world. And if we don’t know that, we can see it for ourselves in
our own local churches.
Reasons for its decline are many. Distrust
of institutions in general, the isolation of social media, identity politics,
the decline of Western civilization, radical individualism, the influence of
science as a philosophy, the sexual revolution, youth sports, the
Enlightenment, relativism, and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (what some think is
our actual religion), just to name a random few.
And then there are the problems we have
created for ourselves. The rise of the Church as a social club, as an advocacy
and social service agency using religious language, as a small power base
protected by its stakeholders, as a cheap imitation of our culture, as a
business, and/or as a political powerhouse, the disconnect between denomination
and church, the sexual abuse scandals, the professionalization of the clergy, cynicism
and doubt as virtues, and many, many more. Our sins are legion.
How can the Church move forward? Does
calling oneself “progressive” mean that their beliefs will lead to progress?
C.S. Lewis once said, “We all want progress,
but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking
back to the right road; in that case, the man (sic) who turns back soonest is
the most progressive.”
I’m not saying that the Church should return
to a time when it was pure. That never existed.
I am saying that the church should consider
moving forward along the lines of the reading from the Gospels that will be
read in the vast majority of churches this coming Sunday, Mark 8:31-38.
One day, just before these verses, Jesus was
in a non-Jewish area outside of Israel. He was walking along with his disciples
when he asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” His disciples answered with
some popular theories.
Then Jesus asked them, “But who do you say
that I am?” Peter said out loud what many had been thinking and hoping, but no
one had had the nerve to say, “You are the Messiah.”
Then, we see this at the beginning of our
Gospel lesson for this week, in Mark 8:31-33,
31 Then
he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be
rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and
after three days rise again. 32 He
said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But
turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind
me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human
things.”
Peter went from having a really good
encounter with Jesus, to having about the worst.
Many people in Peter’s day believed that
when God sent a deliverer, the messiah, an anointed one like the great kings of
Israel, like King David, he would be a great military leader who would deliver
them from the Roman army. That’s one of the reasons Jesus drew such an
enthusiastic crowd as he rode into Jerusalem on the day we call Palm Sunday.
People are people.
We all tend to want Jesus to serve us, and
on our own terms.
When Peter heard that Jesus was going to
suffer and be rejected by the religious authorities, and be killed and then
rise again, this just sounded nuts to him. He began to rebuke Jesus!
Jesus looks at his disciples and in turn
rebukes Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” Why? Because Peter was thinking
only of human things, not on the things of God. Jesus, who was at the same time
fully human and fully God, came to die.
One of my favorite Christmas stories
happened when I was serving at Faith Lutheran Church in San Dimas.
We had an excellent pre-school and one day
one of the pre-school moms stopped by my office to ask if I had a minute to
hear a story.
She said that a friend of hers had invited
her family to attend the Christmas-eve midnight mass at a Roman Catholic church
and school in a nearby town. The church was full and there were a lot of
children.
Just before the sermon the affable local
priest invited the children to come forward for the children’s sermon and her
son, a student in our pre-school, went forward.
The priest gathered the 20 or so small
children around him and asked if they knew what they were celebrating.
“Christmas!” they all said,
“And who can tell me what happened at
Christmas?” About half of the children volunteered, “Jesus was born!”
“That’s right”, the priest said. “And who
can tell me where Jesus was before he was born?” Some fewer children said, “In
heaven.”
“That’s right,” said the priest. “But heaven
must be a terrible place for Jesus to want to come here.” “No,” even fewer
children said. “Heaven is a wonderful place.”
“Well, why would Jesus leave a wonderful
place like heaven to be born here on earth?”, the priest asked. No hand went up
except for that one visiting child’s. The child said, “So he could die for us.”
The priest was very pleased, and he asked,
proudly, “And where did you learn that?”
The little boy leaned into the priest’s
microphone and said loudly, “Faith Lutheran Church.”
The mother said that the priest laughed. A
lot.
Jesus
gave his life for us on the cross. That’s the main event of the Christian
faith. And sacrifice for others is central to the Christian life that is
produced by that faith.
Then Jesus spoke to the crowd about
sacrifice, in Mark 8:34-37,
34 He
called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become
my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For
what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed,
what can they give in return for their life?
Jesus speaks about money more than any other
subject except the Kingdom of God. Why? He knew the power that money has to
warp our true selves, and to shift our values from our focus on the gifts of God,
to a focus on ourselves; from eternity, to only now.
Leo
Tolstoy, the Russian author of War and Peace and other classics, wrote a
short story with a similar message called, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”
A man who is greedy for more land hears
about a group of simple farmers with a lot of land. He offers to buy their land
for a low price. They counter by saying that, for 1,000 rubles, he can have as
much land as he can walk around from sunrise to sunset. But, if he doesn’t get
back by sunset, he loses his money and gets no land.
The man is ecstatic thinking that he has
gotten the bargain of a lifetime from these simple farmers. He starts walking,
but every time he thinks about circling back, he thinks that if he walks a
little farther, he can get more land. He keeps walking. Then when he is far,
far away, he makes his loop and starts walking back. But now he realizes that
he is way far out, and he starts running to get back in time. He runs faster,
and faster. Faster, and faster. He makes it back to the starting point just as
the sun sets, but he is fully exhausted, and he dies on the spot.
He is buried in a hole 6 feet long and three
feet wide. All the land that a man needs.
Jesus knows that his teachings are going to
be unpopular with some, even counter-intuitive and counter-cultural.
He addresses this in the concluding verse of
this week’s Gospel reading, in Mark 8:38,
38 Those
who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,
of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his
Father with the holy angels.”
Sometimes I consider the state of the world
and the condition of the Church and I think that maybe we just need to consider
that we also live in an “adulterous and sinful generation” and withdraw from
it.
Maybe we need to build small, local,
self-sufficient schools that teach farming and the trades in addition to the
great ideas, moral education, critical thinking, and higher learning.
Maybe we need to build Christian communities
that are defended against and serve the local communities.
And maybe not.
Jesus did not abandon the world in its
sinfulness. He came to serve, and he died for us. And he calls us to do the
same.
Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the
United States Senate, once said,
“In the
beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living
Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it
moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where
it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an
enterprise.”
Would it be better for the Church today to
re-focus, to be “a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ”?
Near the end of his book, Bad Religion,
Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, observes that the Christian
Church has been in decline several times in its history and two things have
brought it back: holy living and the arts.
We can see the great music, literature,
dance, painting and sculpture that has conveyed the Christian message through
both inspiration and patronage over the centuries. We can do it again, today.
What would “holy living” look like?
I think that a part of that would be in
living who we have been called, equipped, and sent to be by the power of the
Holy Spirit, who precedes us and struggles with us in every mission field.
I read an article last week on why Finland
is sometimes rated the happiest country in the world. It points to the research
that identifies these three characteristics:
1.) a strong sense of
community and relatedness
2.) doing good deeds for
other people
3.) finding a clear
purpose for oneself
Are not all of these at the heart of what is
means to be a Christian? And yet they are not, by themselves, enough to make
people happy.
I read another article, by a Finnish
psychologist, pointed to the high rates of depression among Finnish people.
Can both be true? It certainly is true among
Christians. And it is at the core of holy living.
Part of our worldview, our understanding of
reality, is that people were created for a living relationship with the one
true living God.
We rejected it.
Jesus died to restore it. That relationship
of faith is free to all who turn away from their rejection of God and open
their hearts to receive it.
Living the Christian life is not about what
we do, but who we are. Or, better, living on purpose as whose we are. That
reality is what produces what we do. Works are an outcome of faith.
Are we living from faith? Are our minds not
on human things but on divine things? Are we grateful for the cross? Do we have
what we need?
We still live in a fallen world, where sin
continues to separate the world from God, and we experience the negative
aspects of life as a result.
But they are not the final answer. Jesus is.
We may sometimes be depressed, or angry, or discouraged. But beneath those
things lies an indestructible joy that is at the core of holy living. It comes
with the recovery of our true selves, a gift from the cross.
Jesus said, in John 16:33,
33 I
have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face
persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!”
What is the answer to institutional decline?
It’s our emphasis during Lent, as in Lamentations
3:40,
40 Let us test and examine our ways,
and return to the LORD.
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