An example of the media reach of a mid-size congregation

We now livestream all morning at http://www.gslcfayetteville.org

This was our first year streaming Christmas Eve, 24 live viewers

All countries listed are active participants in our Facebook page

All of this is just the reach of the specific media from the congregation. A map of the reach of individual content producers and sharers, like our members, this blog, the pastoral presence in media, would show an even wider ministry.

5 Disruptive Church Trends That Will Rule 2016

2015 permanently changed the face of North American Christianity.

We are all witnesses to, and in many instances participants in, a seismic shift in the patterns of church life.

Carey Nieuwhof in a recent post considered the disruptive church trends of 2016. I agree with many of the items on his list, and also think there are other shifts, less organizational, less practical, that are in fact more fundamental.

Almost everything on my list indicates this will be the year in which church leaders of all stripes will be called upon to self-differentiate, to learn to stand calm, and take initiative, even in the midst of the anxiety of systems, not to mention the fear of a whole nation.

"I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society—a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level, and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood church, synagogue, hospital, library, and school boards." (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman)

Consider this an ode to Carey's list. An expansion pack.

1. The church will align with the new civil rights movement. #blacklivesmatter

We are already witnessing this re-alignment across the religious spectrum. Even with the blatant racism of certain Christian communities, the continual subtle sabotage of white fragility, and the fierce animosity of so-called tolerant liberals, #blacklivesmatter has awakened the beast.

When an evangelical organization like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship AND a mainline Protestant denomination like Evangelical Lutheran Church in America AND advocacy organizations for LGBTQ equality all simultaneously pick up the #blacklivesmatters motto, and when clergy have feet on the ground at protests all across the country, and local congregations open up conversations about race and faith (if ever so halting and awkward), you know there is a new civil rights movement afoot, and it will not go away, and in the spirit of Scripture itself, which from Acts onwards has sought to address racial inequality (the dialogue about Gentiles and Jews), the church will not be behind but at the frontline of this conversation in 2016.

2. Church will be increasingly trans-mediated.

Nieuwohf says church online will be an advance, not just a replacement or supplement for church in person, and I couldn't agree more. Although he doesn't say it quite this way, the reason for this shift is an increasing recognition that we live in a trans-media era, so the life of faith, including participation in institutional forms of church, will be increasingly trans-media also.

We will continue to deepen the ambient intimacy of life together in social media, and Christian leaders will discover better and better ways to communicate and share faith in these contexts.

People will keep reading blogs (like this one, and Carey's), not simply as supplement to church, but AS their engagement with the mission of God.

And almost any Christian who lives their faith in social media will tell you church is mediated through them to a wide net of people who do not attend church, and they participate in the life of the church even if they don't attend through the mediation of Christians who use social media in such ways.

Churches, because of trans-media, will have more and more "friends" who may never become "members."

I happen to have written a book on this, which is very reasonably priced on Kindle these days.



3. Communities of faith will transcend bipartisan politics, and also entrench in them. Then they will remember Jesus.

Churches and Christians across the country have become frustrated with church as partisan politics, even if they increasingly believe faith has a political component.

Because increasing numbers of people are connecting their faith to their political and ethical engagement, more and more of us will find ourselves stuck parroting the propaganda of partisanship, but then turning again and again to resources that will help us transcend such propaganda.

Some of us are Christians and fully align with Bernie Sanders. Some of us are Christians and fully align with Ted Cruz.

But almost all of us think there is quite a bit more to Christianity than that. We will witness many churches hosting dialogues that study current events, faith and politics.

People want to build bridges, to get over divisions, and connect. Adam Hamilton of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City is leading the way on this with his series Facing Issues That Divide.

4. Real, deep creativity will emerge as an alternative to derivative mimicry.

Nobody is talking much about CCM anymore. Okay, Stryper may have come out with an album this year (which isn't half bad), so the kind of Christian music that imitated popular music is still around, but it is no longer the norm.

The norm instead might be Gungor, whose music pushes so many artistic and faith boundaries as to be almost unclassifiable.

We see ourselves returning to that which Christianity has for millennia been known for--generative rather than derivative art, creation that models the Creator.

We have heard the call to culture-making so clearly articulated by Andy Crouch and others, and it has taken us a while, but more and more faith communities are doing it.  They're making their own art, recording their own music, forming new organizations because the old ones no longer function.



5. Church will become refuge, and walk with refugees.

You can take this one to the bank. As much as there was xenophobic fear mongering about Syrian refugees coming to the United States in 2015, more Christians across the country heard the narrative of refugees, and thought two things, "They are us. And we have a call to love our neighbor, to both give refuge and join the refugees."

The most profound prophetic witness to this in 2015 was Larycia Hawkins. If you haven't read her statement at her recent press conference, you must. http://drlaryciahawkins.org/2016/01/06/statement-from-16-press-conference/.

In it, she writes, "Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed, are all my sisters and brothers."

For far too long culture Christianity has held sway in our churches, so church was a protective system to justify the self-satisfied smugness of our own comfort. 2016 will be the year we learn in new ways the discomfort of making room for the refugee, and opening our doors as the place that gives refuge. 

That is, we are learning that the church isn't ours, was never ours, because it is Christ's. The refugee. The refuge-giver.

Introducing Daniel Maurer

Dan the Story Man

An entry in the #LutheranCreatives series

Often Christians write books about God's grace in the midst of tragedy, with a heavy emphasis on the grace, and the narrative of tragedy serving simply as minor illustration. This approach works well for popular theology, because the focus clearly needs to be on the articulation of faith itself as it relates to the tragedies.

Daniel Maurer's creativity runs in another direction. Maurer tells the kinds of stories in which most of us would doubt the light of grace could shine at all, and then limns the entire story with the grandeur of God.

In his most recent book, Faraway, Maurer co-authors a suburban boy's story as a victim of sex trafficking. This is the story of K. Kline, who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, and spent the summer of 1974, his fourteenth year, as an underage prostitute. He is now an ELCA pastor in Hawaii.



The majority of the book is the story of one summer in Kevin's life. He tells an excruciating tale of adult male violence. He is coaxed into the prostitution, tricked and manipulated by an older man, a sexual predator, who then pimps him to suburban homes where he turns tricks, often with married men with families, lawyers and police officers, who then in certain instances rape or abuse him.

If the stories of police brutality in this book are at all typical, we learn first-hand why Ferguson has had so many recent struggles.

His summer ends with a brutal gang rape by peers who leave him beaten and unconscious. His parents never learn of his suffering, because he always disguised his time away as sleepovers, time hanging out with friends.

In the course of the story, we meet two young men, Stevie and Squirrel, also prostitutes, who become Kevin's emotional family. They are the first gay males Kevin meets who he can be open with, share emotionally with. Squirrel is, for Kevin, a Holy Martyr, saintly in his open heart and love for all people. Stevie is a Holy Saint, willing to stand up and suffer to protect those he loves. Kevin believes telling their story, telling his story, is the only way to healing and wholeness.

Here's why telling this story matters. Kevin reminds us that "everyone who was gay lived with the constant threat of violence or rejection." Gay men from a very early age are taught to believe that their lives don't matter, that they are not loved, cannot be loved, lack value. And if you have no value, it is a small leap indeed to allowing people to treat you horribly, or even putting yourself in a position to be treated horribly.

Why does such a story matter for heterosexual cis readers who have never experienced what Kevin went through? Well, his soul-searching and therapy for PTSD leads him to realize, first of all, that talking, telling the story, can be therapeutic. Even more important, however, what young men like Kevin went through is caused not by them, but by us. Although Kevin has asked himself the question over and over, "How could you?" of himself, he is reminded, in his wisdom, that he was just a kid.

So the real answer he says, is this:

"It was you. You, my city. You, my schools. Yes, you, my church. And yes, even you, my friends. And though you never dreamed of hurting me--you, my family. You made it clear to each and every single one of us in no uncertain terms what we were worth. God forgive us, we believed you. When every message you get from your society, school, church, and even family and friends on the subject of homosexuality is one of utter damnation and complete worthlessness, it becomes surprisingly easy to sell yourself. Because you see, at least then you're worth something to somebody. When you are told you are worthy of nothing but hell, you begin to not care about whether or not what you are doing is against the law, or whether it conforms to what society thinks is proper. All you care about is finding someone who accepts you just as you are" (135).

It's important to realize that it wasn't these three young teenagers who were hurting people. It was adulterous pedophiles. We have a culture that still wants to blame young gay men and women for the manipulative sins of others. Stevie was likely kicked out of his own home for being gay, and had to make it on his own. The level of ostracization and scapegoating is immense.

Here's what I have learned from stories like Kevin's. We need to distinguish harmful and manipulative forms of sexuality from loving and supportive kinds of sexuality. If Kevin had had an opportunity to live out his same-sex attraction in healthy ways early in life, it is very unlikely he would have suffered the abuse he did.

If families all across our country knew how to embrace their children with same-sex attractions, there would not be the need for a homeless shelter for LGBTQ teens like the one at Trinity Lutheran in Manhattan.

And if more of us could meet the Jesus that Kevin knows, we would be transformed. "The idea of a God who would give it all up to be one of us, and then give the finger to the rich and powerful while hanging out with thieves, beggars--and prostitutes--seemed to make a lot of sense to me. I'm not in anyone's face with my faith. I want only to be there for others, to care, and to make a difference in the world."

Telling his story is destroying the grip of shame. So many Christians still want to shame members of the LGBTQ community, while stating that they will accept or tolerate them. Stories like Kevin's help us remember that we can and should do better. We should join Jesus in his work of sacrificial, scandalous love.

Thank you, Dan, for your work in bringing us Kevin's story.

On Religious Liberty

This is a draft of a text I'm working on articulating a specifically Lutheran approach to religious liberty. I welcome comments and questions to refine and improve the essay.

--

On Religious Liberty

When developing a vocabulary of culture and society, difficulties arise. It is the words themselves that often present particular trouble. Conceptual words, what Raymond Williams calls keywords in his book of the same name, are notoriously elusive.  They have specialized meanings in particular areas of study. Their usage is variable in general discussions.

Williams wrote an entire book on keywords because he found that with such words the problems of the meaning of the words are "inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss" (Introduction). In other words, the words themselves are elements of the problem we are seeking to solve when we discuss that which the words are intended to signify.

I have been given the task of writing an essay on the understanding of religious liberty from a Lutheran perspective. With "religious liberty," our troubles are twofold, for we have two words tethered, both of them endlessly complicated. One of them made it (sort of) into William's keyword lexicon, elucidated in neighboring entries on liberal and liberation in his lexicon.

If we take Williams as at least somewhat authoritative, we learn that although liberty in general means freedom, the more specific use of the term historically has been that of formal permission or privilege. We "take" liberties. Other than this sense, liberty also has the sense of rights granted under the auspices of some sovereign. Our liberties are protected.

Williams offers another entry on liberation, and notes that although historically liberation was understood as emancipation, being set free from bondage, the more contemporary sense of liberation includes a more active sense of winning self-determination. Our religious liberties are ours; we own our own freedom.

I will circle back around to this term, liberty, in a bit, offering a comparison to the word more appropriate to Christian and Lutheran theology, that of freedom. But for a moment, lets continue with the other keyword. Williams offers no concise definition of religion, so we are left to our own devices. And we all know that the word "religion" is one of the most hotly contested words on the planet. Not only is there a global contest as to what counts as the "right" religion, but religious studies as a discipline is almost humorously incapable of defining the very term they study. I say almost because the academic guild, having the task of defining religion in a "sortal" way to cover a set of activities, way-of-being-in-the-world, tests the range of definitions and finds them lacking, but then continuing the quest. The scholars quest for a definition of religion aspires to objectivity and neutrality, which is a wholly different approach than the confessional one.

You can chase the word religion down a lot of paths. Some claim it has to do with organized forms of worship. Some argue it is about a shared sense of meaning. Others about a higher power. Others a set of beliefs. The problem with almost every definition offered for "religion" is the reality that some religion of a specific group or individual conflicts with the definition. Some religions don't organize for worship. Other religions deny that a search for meaning is integral to their faith. Many religions do not posit a higher power, or may be actively anti-creedal, rejecting a body of beliefs as definitive of their religion.

This being the case, we may need to offer a more tautological definition of religion: a religion is what is claimed as a religion. If it's your religion, that's a religion. I offer this definition, recognizing that this hands the definition of religion over to the participant, whereas there are some legitimate arguments to be made for the definition of religion remaining in the hands also of analysts of religion, even if their definitions always fall short of completely articulating the phenomenon of religion as we experience it.

So we can offer a somewhat concise definition of religious liberty: Religious liberty is the hard-won freedom and privilege to practice religion as we understand it, or as the religious analysts observe and continually articulate it.

Of course, this itself is hotly contested. Not all advocates for religious freedom successfully extend privileges to all religions, and oftentimes the claims of one religion in its liberty stands in incommensurable conflict to the religious claims of others. These are the sites in our culture of particular heat and pain.  By and large, though, I would argue that a Lutheran understanding of religious liberty would, in its vocation to live with and through this world, share much in common with secular or standard understandings of the two terms, especially in our shared responsibility to protect religious liberty in as capacious a sense as possible. Which is to say, a working Lutheran definition of religious liberty would be to practice our faith in such a way that the religious liberties of others are safeguarded and even advanced as much as possible.

This brings us to the specifically Lutheran approach to the topic. Lutherans carry with them a rather famous essay of Martin Luther, "On Christian Liberty." In this essay, Martin Luther offered a famous paradox:

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.”

This paradox benefits from a bit of unpacking. First of all, Luther is working in categories of freedom related to the things above as much as he is working in categories related to things from below. That is, towards God, because of the justification of the ungodly in Christ, Christians are completely free, no longer bound by their concern for salvation, and so subject to no one as regards their standing before God. If there is one mark of what it means to be Lutheran, it is likely this--we have been set free from having to earn, purchase, justify, or establish in any sense our standing before God. Christ has set us free from this. That is a form of religious liberty. This is the freedom Luther discovered reading Paul, Galatians and Romans in particular.

So we are freed from justifying ourselves with God. We are realigned, new margins set, working our way down the page not free from any margins, but free for specific margins. We are justified for the neighbor, set at liberty, subjected to the neighbor and their need. The new direction of concern for the Christian set free from the law is the neighbor in love.

This bears repeating. We are set free, liberated, for our neighbor. In this sense, Christian liberty is not license, the liberty to do anything, but liberation, solidarity with the neighbor so free and deep as to completely pour the self out in neighbor love. This is why the greatest commandment, though a law, is itself a paradoxical law, because it looses by binding.

This is where the paradox lies, because you can't have the one without the other, even if they appear at first blush paradoxically incompatible. Freedom can't be true freedom without love. Love can't be love unless it is free.

As a result, I think we can offer two robust theses regarding a specifically Lutheran understanding of religious liberty.

First, religious liberty in the Lutheran sense will agree with the Vatican Council in Dignitatis humanae, that "a human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all [human beings] are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to [their] own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits." So Lutherans, as ecumenically oriented Christians open to and encouraging of shared commitments concerning religious liberty, agree with the Roman Catholic communion that part of the recognition of human dignity includes protection from religious coercion.

Lutherans would take this commitment one step further. It is a step that is implied in much of Dignitatis humanae, if not expressly conveyed. Lutherans have a habit, grounded in their Small Catechism, of articulating an interpretation of God's commandments not simply in the negative, but also in the affirmative. For example, Luther's explanation of the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," reads--We should fear and love God that we may not hurt nor harm our neighbor in their body, but help and befriend them in every bodily need.

If we take this same interpretive stance as regards religious liberty, Lutherans might say, a human person should be not simply immune from coercion, but also encouraged and supported in their religious practice. Not only are we committed to protecting the free exercise of religion, we are also committed as Lutherans to ensuring that all humans can practice their religion in as lively and life-giving a manner as possible. This might take many forms in many places, but at the very least, beyond ensuring that Muslims can build mosques and nobody at the university has to pray to a God they don't believe in, so too Lutherans are committed to providing the resources and space, the conversation and neighborliness, that can make the religious liberty of their neighbor, of any kind, as vitalized as possible.

Second, and somewhat like the first, the Lutheran will practice their own religious liberty in solidarity with the neighbor in their religious liberty. Lutherans have this tradition of interpretation sometimes called the bound conscience, which emphasizes our responsibility to recognize when the neighbor, the other, has to stand in a place where they can "do no other," as Luther apocryphally stated. This is to say, sometimes we discover a moment, a place, where our neighbor's faith is particularly imperiled. I am mindful, for example, of the recent tensions between Larycia Hawkins and Wheaton College. Here, in this moment, a Lutheran who wishes to protect religious freedom, will strive to understand and support the religious practices of these neighbors in faith.

In this particular example, Lutherans might say, "Well, Larycia Hawkins is practicing her faith, which includes her Advent discipline of embodied spirituality, the wearing of the hijab, and Wheaton College is practicing its religious freedom, the freedom to operate a Christian college with a specific statement of belief expected of all faculty." Lutherans would likely also recognize, and be particularly sympathetic to, Professor Hawkin's Advent discipline, because it illustrates the kind of life-giving solidarity our peculiar understanding of religious freedom entails.

Where things would get complicated would be in the adjudication of the contesting claims for religious freedom between the college and Professor Hawkins. It would appear that one way or the other, somebody's religious freedom is going to be curtailed. This is probably why Dignitatis humanae includes that little final phrase in the quote above, "Within due limits." There are due limits, in this life anyway, to the completely liberated practice of anyone's or any group's religion.

This is, specifically, the problematizing of the possible positivism I am working against by way of an articulation of the Lutheran paradox of Christian freedom. Personally, I do stand with and support Professor Hawkins and believe Wheaton College is constricting her religious liberty precisely because it has the white privilege and power to do so. The fact that she is a black woman speaking out for solidarity with Muslims puts her in the position in need of protection. Yet this needs to be problematized inasmuch as it is not always clear who gets to decide who is marginalized in a given situation. That being said, problematizing such positivism likely always carrying with it the inherent risk of benefitting whoever happens to hold the position of power, and thus indirectly curtailing rather than protecting religious liberty.

Take time, if you would, to read Professor Hawkins' own case for herself over against Wheaton College. http://drlaryciahawkins.org/2016/01/06/statement-from-16-press-conference/

In the case of such contested claims, a Lutheran understanding of religious liberty will err on the side of the liberty most in need of protecting. That is, solidarity will be with the marginalized, the vulnerable, the one most at risk in the structures of power that are at play. This is implicit in the paradox itself, the emphasis on taking the form of the servant for the neighbor in need. Lutherans seeking religious freedom for the neighbor will not join the group enforcing systems that obstruct religious liberty, even if those groups perceive their enforcement as itself an act of religious liberty. Lutherans will stand in solidarity with the weakest and most vulnerable. They will be servants with the servants, slaves with the slaves. Returning to Williams and his definition of liberty, it is much more than simple emancipation--it is winning self-determination.

The peculiar form of Lutheran religious liberty is a sense that no self-determination need be won on the God side of the equation, so, having already had the self-determination won for us through the suffering love of Christ, the Lutheran (and all Christians who share this perspective) our now free to join the fight for self-determination for those most in need of it. This is precisely what love looks like, in community, as it pertains to religious freedom.

The Reverend Doctor Clint Schnekloth

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Fayetteville, Arkansas