Are We Still A Free Church?
It seems a truism to say that our Lutheran churches in the United States and in Canada are not state churches. They enjoy some tax benefits but are not tax-supported. Our ministers are not government officials. We slot nowhere into our nations’ federal bureaucracies, and it is probably easier to lose one's call in our churches than for a mid-level bureaucrat in the US Department of Health and Human Services to be fired.
When our fathers identified the distinction between a free church and a state church, however, they did not confine themselves to these financial or organizational differences. There was also a freedom that a free church possessed that was not available to the state church - an openness of doctrine and life that a state church, invested in upholding various political statuses quo, did not have. The state church would be inevitably subjugated to the purposes of the state, and something unholy would be born from this union of church and state. Friedrich Wyneken said in his “The Rights, Privileges, and Duties of the Free Church” that "If both are combined, the result is a bastard. The Church becomes the handmaid of the state and must, for instance, accept teachers sent by the state that they would otherwise under no circumstances accept."
But are we a state church if we are not tax-supported? Yes, we are. Our subjugation need not be organizationally established. If our churches or schools rely on government money, of course we are subject. If our sense of what can be taught or done in the church is controlled by government diktat or political correctness, of course we are. If the media is the main spiritual food and spiritual drink of people and of pastors, crowding out the Bible in their spiritual diet, then we will be subjugated in our opinions to what the media propagates. If our spirits are subject already to the media, then our actions will likewise conform to that spiritual subjection.
Our being state churches is a better theory for many actions over the past two years than the idea that we are still free churches, establishing doctrine and practice on the basis of the Word of God, the freedom we have historically enjoyed in the United States and in Canada. Now we will alter all our worship practices, including how we receive or do not receive the Body and Blood of Christ, on the basis of the latest advice we have received from our media sources, from government "guidelines" that we take as gospel truth however many times they change, from legislators speaking from behind podiums who do not wear masks when they're together but who require children to wear masks in schools indefinitely. Life has changed for us because our hearts are attached to the state's changeable priorities.
The state church cannot know the peace that Christ intends for His people because its priorities are not the Bible's. It must waver with the winds of teaching the state and its media apparatus put forth. So if we now agree that our churches are open, then we cannot agree to disagree about the efficacy of masks and vaccines. If we live in Canada, we must face the issues about vaccination and worship I raised in December, though these things are less serious threats to the peace of the church in the United States (for now). Endless turmoil is caused by attachment to the state and its priorities, even over matters where it has no divine jurisdiction such as divine worship or the education of our children. There is no peace in a state church - only what is outward, false, and forced, a conformity that knows no peace, only sheer compliance.
We will find peace in being free churches, whether we continue to enjoy tax exemptions or not, because a free church such as Christ Himself founded is free to be governed only by God, not by the traditions of men. A free church is free to have people wearing or not wearing masks, being vaccinated or unvaccinated, because it knows the freedom Christ gives in His divinely ordained means of grace, including His blessed Cup that has no poison in it. "Freedom" is not some self-indulgent enjoyment of things that hurt other people as it has been recently mocked. Freedom is the inheritance of God's children, who have been set free by the Son, by His truth, and so we are free indeed. Let our churches in North America be and remain free churches, without state interference in our pocketbooks or in our hearts, free to worship God without fear all the days of our lives.