Pastor’s Corner

 

First Lutheran’s roots include the Augustana Synod of Swedish immigrants.  One of the old Augustana Synod’s brightest thinkers was Sidney Ahlstrom (1919-1984) who taught American Church history at Yale Divinity School.  His words in 1960 are timely even today.

In the case of the Swedish Lutherans who founded Augustana a hundred years ago, it must be said that their response was quite unequivocal.  The resurgence of Pietism in Sweden had certainly made them insistent upon “experiential religion”–the life in Christ, they knew, was not a dead and formal thing.  Yet they did not make experience the Alpha and the Omega of the Christian life.  The very name they chose for their synod indicates another concern.  The liturgy they adopted, the principles of church order they formulated, the government they established: all these attest to a single-minded determination to create a church that would withstand the seductions of culture and popular religious pressures.

At mid-century–and as Augustana completes its first century (1960)–the threat to the church in America is not less than it has ever been.  The church continues to face all the temptations to accommodation that it has faced in the past.  The threat of a Christianity that will be simply cultural and not prophetic is forbidding.  The major social trends of our time suggest that the temptations will become even more alluring, the total situation more acute.  A return to religion is not necessarily a revival of the Christian faith.  The church and membership in it becomes simply useful.  The real proclamation is smothered by overmuch kindness.

What Augustana (or any other body into which it may be transmuted) will need most is the strength to resist new religious seductions in whatever form they come.  We must strive with constant diligence and concern lest ours become a mere “culture Christianity,” so adapted and conformed to the world that it has nothing to say or do but provide tea parties for young adults, recreational facilities for their children, and old peoples’ homes for their parents.  I believe we have resources which may, with God’s help, prevent that circumstance from coming to pass.  The American situation not only dramatizes the need for our concern, but provides circumstances favorable to the necessary reforms.  Freedom, voluntary churchmanship, and a lively sense of leadership, co-operation, and stewardship in the laity–all of these factors open the way to experimentation and fresh discovery.  But we must claim and use the resources which are ours if the Lutheran Church is to be a “countervailing force.”

Just about every sentence of his essay would be a good discussion starter.  I read him to say that the Lutheran form of Christianity lives continually in the tension between church and culture.  In this tension, we find ourselves favoring the “prophetic” words of Bible and tradition over the “simply cultural” words of our day.  This is no small task, but I find the words “freedom, voluntary churchmanship, and a lively sense of leadership, co-operation and stewardship in laity” to be crucial as we live in this tension between church and culture.  I believe First Lutheran has the kind of qualities I have quoted in the previous sentence.  These qualities will continue to serve us well as we move into the future God has for us as this portion of the whole Body of Christ.

Grace and Peace,

Philip M. Nesvig, pastor