Religiously Significant Experiences?
This article: “What Triggers Religiously Significant Experiences?” by LCMS church growth guru the Rev. Dr. David S. Luecke is a tremendously helpful resource into the mindset of those who would disagree with with Gottesdienst in matters of liturgy and worship.
The last paragraph is really his message:
What is the future for formal traditional worship? Not good. Face it. That old culture is dying. A few young adults are attracted on rebound from their experiences in Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Some of those are in traditional seminaries, resisting any change to what they have learned to value. What is the future for those seminaries? Not good.
Dr. Luecke has been beating this drum for a while now, being the author of Evangelical Style and Lutheran Substance back in 1988.
Liturgy is bad. Rock and roll and dancing girls - or whatever other kinds of entertainment-based worship emerges from non-sacramental secularized Christianity - is good. He has been predicting the death of liturgical worship for decades, even as today’s Evangelicals are taking a hard look in the mirror and wondering if the shallowness and vacuity of their ever-innovative entertainment “worship experiences” is something to be reconsidered. For just one example, see here.
Just by way of anecdotal experience, I grew up in a non-liturgical but traditional Baptist church. We were still using the KJV and had an organ without a drum kit. We sang traditional hymns, and nobody waved their arms around. Of course, Baptist worship today is quite different. But I do get visitors from Baptist and non-denominational churches - including some from our local seminary - and they will admit in moments of candor that the entertainment-based “worship experiences” just leave them flat. They long for a deeper connection to the church, to the apostles and the apostolic fathers, to the reformers, and even to their own grandparents - and a little less connection to the secular world, to Lennon and McCartney and Amy Grant. And indeed, there are Neo-Evangelical Christians who have re-instituted liturgical practices in their congregations.
The problem with the church today is that it has been decimated by the secular culture. We are rich and decadent and awash in a 24/7 unbroken stream of Big Entertainment. We are biblically and culturally illiterate, and we favor a Moral Therapeutic Deism that tells us we are good, nothing is wrong, and the only sin is bigotry (which Christians are guilty of, by definition). We are long past any debate over homosexuality and we have moved on to a “conversation” about how polyamory, drag queen story time, and a lowered age of consent are representative of the new sexual ethic - and bigots and traditionalists had better get out of the way.
Hollywood movies and TV shows are intentional in their pushing of a secular and contra-Christian worldview. And, again, anecdotally, a walk around the neighborhood to the “little libraries” reveals the kind of “literature” people consume: lurid and graphic crime porn, fiction that demonizes Christians and lauds the occult, deviant sexuality (of course), and entire series of books that wallow in death.
This is the world of secular, post-Christian western culture. No-one is unaffected by it. We re all desensitized to its insidious assault on what we believe, teach, and confess. Pope John Paul II coined the term “the culture of death.”
More and more Christian young people - even those in the LCMS - support non-biological and non-monogamous “marriage".” An alarming number support abortion “rights.” In our culture, sports takes precedence over the faith.
And Dr. Luecke’s “solution” to the secularization of the church is… more secularization.
His article could have been written by an unbeliever - or at very least, by a non-Christian. In his analysis of how people come to faith, he never mentions Jesus. He never mentions the Holy Spirit. He never mentions the Word and its efficaciousness. He never identifies the problem of sin or the solution of redemption in the cross. This article could really be about selling widgets or marketing soft drinks. He never once mentions anything supernatural, as though the only thing that exists is the material world. There is no call to faithfulness. The Lueckean program is to treat the congregation like a firm, and find out how to attract customers.
The masters of this kind of analysis is Hooters. If you want to attract a demographic, find out what attracts them - and give it to them. As it turns out, a lot of contemporary worship isn’t that far off from Hooters, although I would hope that church growth experts would counsel against putting the LWML gals in orange shorts. But then again, it’s hard to argue against it if it “works.”
Dr. Luecke is very good at tearing apart that which is organic and complementary. For example, his premise that we can sever style (“Evangelical”) from substance (“Lutheran”) ignores centuries of wisdom of the holistic relationship between style and substance summed up in the ancient dictum: “Lex orandi, lex credendi.” He also shreds the both/and distinction of Transcendence and Immanence into an either/or. He says, essentially, transcendent: bad, imminent: good. And in doing so, He makes a muddle of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is both transcendent in His divinity, and imminent in His humanity. He is God, and yet He comes to us in space and time - in His Word and Sacraments. Jesus comes to us in the intimacy that younger people crave in the miracle of the Mass - the reality that the transcendent God breaks through space-time and bridges the gap between the righteous and the sinful, between the eternal and the temporal. In the Divine Service, our Blessed Lord delivers His love and forgiveness and grace to us where we are. I find it telling that many advocates and practitioners of “contemporary worship” downplay Holy Communion, practicing it infrequently, as if it were an imposition upon the show. This is in contravention to our confessional subscription in which we vow our devotion to the practice of every Sunday communion.
When Dr. Luecke speaks of immanence, he means pedestrian and secular. He means that we can’t be bothered to be inconvenienced because, why should we? It’s all about the sizzle, not the steak. And that is not merely Evangelical style, that is the substance of those confessions that deny the Real Presence in their “worship experiences,” replacing the body and blood of Christ with the emotion of the customer.
And while Satan mocks us from the sidelines on account of our diminishing numbers, even our Lord lost many followers by insisting that we eat His flesh and drink His blood. The secular culture of Rome was not necessarily eager to come to Christian worship services. In fact, they were more eager to come to the sports arena and watch them get eaten by animals. It is absolutely true that we appear to be facing a tsunami of unbelief overtaking our congregations. But rather than change to adapt to the secular world, what if we are called to be like Noah, whose little church dwindled to eight people including himself? Noah was called to be faithful to the Word. He was not called to compromise with the world for the sake of numbers and “butts in the ark.”
I find the Parable of the Sower to be the best text on church growth. And in the eyes of the world, the sower is a fool, throwing seeds around without a central plan, without a vision or mission statement, without using science and psychology to make his planting more efficient. The modern church growth version of the parable would have the sower taking soil samples and sending them out for analysis, installing sophisticated irrigation and fertilizing systems, and hiring a consultant to genetically modify the seeds for maximum yield. There is a sense that we know more than Jesus, because, well, its the twenty first century, and because “science.” It reminds me of a lady who explained how the individual communion glass was an improvement upon Jesus and his common cup because “He didn’t know about germs like we do today.”
Maybe Jesus knows more about germs and church growth than we like to think that He does.
Dr. Luecke’s analysis makes sense only if one is an unbeliever, if there is no God, no supernatural, and the Bible is just a work of fiction. Then I would wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Luecke that growing the church is much like growing a McDonald’s franchise. Moreover, not only does his article ignore what Scripture says, he makes no mention of our Lutheran confessions - even though he is an LCMS pastor who spoke sacred vows that our Book of Concord would norm his preaching and teaching.
As much as Article 24 is a stumbling-block to the Church Growth Movement and to Entertainment-Based Worship, and given the excuses that I have heard over the years, from “It’s descriptive not prescriptive” (to which I add a hearty Amen!), to “it’s no longer binding” - yet there it stands. And there is the wisdom of relying upon the Lord to work through Word and Sacrament :
In our churches Mass is celebrated every Sunday and on other festivals when the sacrament is offered to those who wish for it after they have been examined and absolved. We keep traditional liturgical forms, such as the order of the lessons, prayers, vestments, etc. ~ Apology 24:1
I appreciate Dr. Luecke’s candor. At least he isn’t trying to hide what he believes and trying to wheel it in like a Trojan Horse. It’s there are all to see. But there is a whiff of bait-and-switch in much of this church growth methodology - we’ll bait them with rock music and dancing girls, and then at some point, swap out the entertainment for Jesus. I find that kind of manipulation to be not only immoral, but also inimical to the Gospel. And does the “switch” part of the equation ever really happen? As I recall, the “bait and switch” tactic did not bode well for the now defunct Circuit City stores.
Let us be undeterred by such calls for revolution, for casting away of our pearls in exchange for the trinkets of the secular world. Let us continue to confess the Word and remain faithful to the Lord’s calling. Let us resist the sin of hubris, of believing that the “success” or “failure” of the church is based on our machinations, our programs, and clever methodologies of our own origin. Let us steer clear of the temptation to make use of emotional or psychological manipulation. Let us dare to confess, as Luther did, that the Word actually works,
“I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf… the Word did everything.”
What Luther understood and what the church growth experts forget is that God chooses to work in counter-cultural ways: not in the bombast of the world’s insatiable desire for the adrenaline rush, but rather as He demonstrated to Elijah: in the Word - even the sound of a “low whisper.” And even when Elijah was tempted to be discouraged, when his eyes, the devil, the world, and perhaps some of his own people’s “worship experts” mocked that the faith was dwindling, that the future was “not good,” that Elijah should “face it. That old culture is dying,” the Lord assured Elijah that there was indeed a remnant to serve of those who “have not bowed to Baal” (1 Kings 19:9-18).
We are not called to be providers of “religiously significant experiences,” we are called preachers of Jesus Christ, ambassadors of the cross, and proclaimers of the Gospel. We do not sell widgets, rather, we raise the dead.