O is for Obsolete

In 1987, before the advent of the ELCA, when I was elected president of Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, I wrote to our 6,000 graduates around the nation and in 38 countries of the world. You know the genre of such letters, fully genuine, yet predictable. "Hello! I'm the new president!" In the middle of the second paragraph, I said something like, "We are beginning a curriculum reform. Let me know if you have counsel." We received 550 letters, some of them 3-4 pages long, single-spaced. It took me three months to read and answer all of them. They thought I really wanted to hear! Or at least, they believed we truly needed to hear!

In fact, this was a message from the church. One third of the pastors of the ELCA are graduates of Luther Seminary or the schools merged into it. Their counsel was a treasure trove. First they voiced an almost unanimous chorus of gratitude for teachers. The elders who graduated in the 30's and 40's waxed the most eloquent. If their professors ever wondered whether their work mattered, I hope they read over my shoulder from heaven. That refrain continued through the predecessor seminaries: Augsburg, Luther and Northwestern. A few worried about faithfulness or Biblical authority, but very few. "Keep teaching the scriptures. Hold fast to the faith. Make sure the students get a solid grounding for their ministries of word and sacrament."

That was message #1: gratitude for what has been and encouragement. Message #2 was more complex. Sometimes it came in lament. "Pastors are not respected as they once were." Sometimes the words were discouraged or angry. "Do you have any idea how hard the work is?" Others attested that they had found it exciting to re-equip themselves thoroughly in the midst of pervasive changes. One pastor drove the message directly: "Quit preparing your graduates for a church that no longer exists."

This was a message we could not ignore. We had to discover what it meant. How should we conduct ourselves as seminary? All of our graduates are preparing to lead in a church that is still ahead. How can we do right by them and the Christian communities that will call them to lead? In the turmoil of the early years of the ELCA, we plunged into a listening process. At about that same moment, 1991 to be exact, an Episcopal priest named Loren Mead published his Alban Institute study of The Once and Future Church, subtitled, "Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier." Our faculty and board read it together for a session when we were receiving some of the first results of our listening process around the church. The simple thesis of the book was that before Constantine the mission of the church lay at the front door of the worshiping community. Then as Christianity became the religion of the state and the populace was officially Christian, mission became an effort of the bureaucracies or orders, sending apostolic representatives to far off frontiers, pagan places like Germany, and England, and eventually North America, and Asia and Africa.

Without legal establishment, the main-line churches of North America enjoyed a cultural establishment, a privileged, public status in education, politics, and human services. But then something changed, after the second war, in the rise of the great economies and pluralistic cultures of the west, the establishment of Christendom had ended, locally and globally. The mission frontier was again at the front door of the worshiping community. One of our faculty gave a fine review of Mead's book. "Way too simple!" he declared. "Church history is much more complicated than this!" Everybody nodded. Then one pastor said, "OK, but what Mead said is true! And if he is even close to right, we better do seminary differently!" Another observed, "A seminary is the only thing harder to move than a cemetery!"

The laughter in the room was more than a little anxious. We had just received word of another cut in our funding, due to declining benevolence support in the church. I had endured my first year as president with a deficit. I thought to myself, "Isn't this great? The ELCA merger is now complete, and we have become a mainline church just in time for it to be over!"

Dr. David Tiede (with Dr. Robert Wright as fellow guest speaker) in St. Louis addressing Lutheran School of Theology's workshop "Sharing Our Gifts for Common Mission: Lutherans and Episcopalians," November 3, 2000

Something we loved and counted on was dying, but that was not all that was happening. We had begun to sense that God is in the changes. Change brings both threats and opportunities. In the early 90's, AAL's Church Membership Initiative study demonstrated that where lay and pastoral leaders were trying to hang on against the future, congregations were in decline or dying. On the other hand, where the local pastoral and lay leadership sensed God's call beyond taking care of themselves, the signs of life and even growth were regularly present. In 1994, Mead published his study on Transforming Congregations for the Future, along with the sobering statistics about the mainline churches. In particular, the ECUSA declined in membership by 800,000 between 1970 and 1990 and the ELCA declined by 300,000. Both of our percentages of the US population showed even sharper decline and our median age rose at an alarming rate.

The decline of mainline churches of Christendom was indisputable, or at least of the Protestant establishment in North America. The European churches that gave birth to us are even less healthy, at least if measured by their worshiping communities. The ecclesiastical diplomacy or conciliar ecumenism of these churches has not caused renewal. As Finke and Stark pointed out in their study of The Churching of America 1776-1990, the number of people who worship and identify themselves as Christian has risen, but these are primarily among Roman Catholics and Evangelicals.

Those of you who read Douglas John Hall or Stanley Hauerwas are well acquainted with this analysis from their quite different cultural and theological perspectives. Two excellent Lutheran interpreters of this moment are Patrick Keifert and Gary Simpson. They learned about public confession from Robert Bertram as some of us learned it from Kent Knutson. Without belaboring the point further, when we say, "A time of crisis has come for Christendom," we are not hysterical. We understand we are "Called to Common Mission." We know business as usual won't cut it!