15
« on: February 24, 2021, 04:36:19 PM »
I am going to attempt a very difficult “dance step” here, and being the sinner I tend towards…OK, I am….I usually mess this stuff up big time (Maybe there is a thread in that too?)
When I get the most disquieted about the LCMS, I recognize that it is not about the Holy Spirit at all….
We don’t show much “enthusiasm” (see, overused Luther quote about swallowing the bird) as we are a liturgical church. Either you are blessed by the necessary formality of a liturgy, or you are not. We too often criticize because we just don’t like the style.
Working with the down and out: I have a different spin on this than most because I began my adult life dealing with drunk, high, or hungover or withdrawing from addicted substances as a Paramedic in a medium size city near the Mexican Border, Tucson, AZ. I have heard every line, every con, every “conversion”….you name it. SO, I get involved in this Lutheran church and start trying to figure out what it is all about, comparing it to the only other church I know, the Roman Catholic. I learn about “Social Ministry” during the LCUSA era, and how we need to serve the poor and dispossessed and sick and addicted, etc. I bought into it pretty well, as I grew up on a regular diet of the Maryknoll Medical Mission movies I saw every Friday in the mid to late 1950’s and early 60’s. I credit those movies for my dual calling to the pastoral ministry and to medicine, but I digress……
Flash ahead a few years and I am serving on staff part-time at my LCMS congregation as a Deacon (read: cheap Associate Pastor, as I replaced the recently Called away Associate Pastor and did all of the work he did including preaching, presiding, weddings, funerals, etc) and I start getting people coming through the door “on their way to Texas when they need gas money” folks (we were too near Interstate 10). I was never instructed in their ways, and the secretary pushed them all to me, sometimes literally, to get them out of her office, and I would talk to them. I often fell for their stories of hard luck and gave them money. We all know where this is going.
So, I have now been conned by the best of them, and combined with Paramedic days and parish days, and tell you nothing new when I say that most of the people who come to us are neither wanting to change nor willing to give anything up to repent, reform, or renew…..they operate from one con to the next. So, I am more realistic about this.
Bottom line: When people write letters like Mr Whomever (I am too lazy to navigate back to the original post to get his name) I say “See ya, bye”. They are already decided that their church is spiritually dead or some such nonsense and they are going to try to put as much on that parish as they can to talk themselves out of coming back because the new place is just as bad.
Life is hard, ministry is harder…..