If you are a Lutheran, lay or clergy, I urge you to read Be at Leisure: A Lutheran Approach to Outreach by the Rev. Andrew Richard. It is a mere 43 pages, but is pure gold. You can download it free here, or purchase a paperback here (cost: $3.10).

This book is the stake in the heart of the Church Growth Movement vampire. It replaces the hustle-bustle busyness, the bureaucracy, the grift of expensive classes and seminars and best practices conferences and leadership institutes and running around hither and yon in exhausting programs with a simple framework for how to approach outreach in an authentic way.

First of all, regarding Pastor Richard, I don’t know him personally. I met him and shook his hand and thanked him for his outstanding presentation on poetry at the latest CCLE conference. I heard him preach. He is very smart, an advocate of classical education, seems to be gifted musically, a great communicator, and seems to have a rapport with young people. He carries himself with humility and pastoral bearing. Maybe some day I can grow up and be like Pastor Richard. Probably not ;-). In spite of his calm demeanor, he is willing to say the hard things, to confess unpopular truths. And again, this book is barely an eighth of an inch thick, so he doesn’t waste a lot of time in getting the message across. That said, it is still a delight to read.

Rather than outline and review the book, I will tell you why I think it is valuable.

1) This book is concise. As I’ve pointed out already, you can read it in a single sitting. That gives it an accessibility to everyone. Pastor Richard did not feel constrained to present a lot of filler in order to sell product.

2) This book is not a program, but a framework for thinking about outreach. What a specific pastor or congregation might focus on may well look different than others - but this book - in contrast to the grifty Church Growth Industrial Complex, doesn’t offer glib “solutions” replete with faddish buzzwords and bamboozlements borrowed from Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and West Point. There is no sense of “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with you-know-what.” Pastor Richard doesn’t offer any courses, classes, podcasts, or a book series (and this one is available in print for the mere cost of the printing itself).

3) This book is not theoretical, but borne out by actual experience. Unlike many of our Church Growth gurus - who have left the parish in order to teach us in the parish how to be in the parish, Pastor Richard is, and remains, a parish pastor. He recounts how he tried the standard Church Growth and “missional” techniques, and how they simply don’t deliver what they promise. They do nothing but create busywork and exhaustion, if not a sense of failure and injury to one’s faith. By contrast, his approach is that the Word of God actually works, the Holy Spirit is in charge, and what we confess in the Book of Concord is really true. It is a call to faithfulness rather than to pragmatism based on faulty anthropological (concerning human action) and pneumatological (concerning the actions of the Holy Spirit) assumptions. It is a countercultural call to a calm faith and, yes, a leisurely approach to outreach.

4) While not a worldly, pragmatic approach, this book is practical insofar as it comports with reality, with how we are wired, and how God actually works in our midst. The book begins with the assumptions that we Lutherans bring to the table concerning Word and Sacrament, concerning ecclesiology, and concerning worship and the office of the holy ministry. This is in contrast to the Church Growth culture, even among its advocates who call themselves Lutherans, who advocate for worship practices based on neo-Evangelicalism (that denies the Real Presence) or even in neo-Montanism (Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement, Enthusiasm). This book does not cave in to Arminianism (“decision theology”) that sees outreach as a kind of sales job, using emotional manipulation to “close the deal” (which was, in fact, the “New Measures” approach to evangelism advocated by Charles Finney that was explicitly condemned by the first constitution of the LCMS).

While not dwelling on it, this book is like boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes pointing out the nakedness of the standard Church Growth methodologies being tried and refried, regifted and regrifted, by Lutheran churches. It dovetails nicely with Dr. Eckardt’s recent critique of the past few decades’ worth of synodical outreach programs. It also provides an alternative to the idea that pastoral care, preaching, and celebrating the Divine Service are duties that impose themselves on us at the expense of the more important work of “strategic planning.”

I think we need to say the quiet part out loud: most Church Growth methodologies are a grift. They are useless at best, and dangerous at worst. They are our own version of Johann Tetzel selling and scamming a religious product to desperate people by means of marketing instead of just simply preaching the Gospel in faith.

The Lutheran Church Growth Movement has its pioneers and celebrities.

The Rev. Dr. Kent Hunter sold himself as “the church doctor” who would come in and consult with you about how to make your church “healthy” (for a consulting fee, of course). And it doesn’t matter what denomination or confession you are. You can be a female “pastor” of a church that denies the Real Presence or believes in direct revelation. No worries! The doctor is in! He left the parish himself to do this, and apparently, his own methodologies didn’t deliver as promised in his own congregation.

The Rev. Dr. Waldo Werning wrote Twelve Pillars of a Healthy Church. Of course, if it were true, the book would still be out there being read as a classic treatment that works. But it isn’t. It’s about as relevant today as the remains of the Pharaoh’s statue in the poem “Ozymandias.”

The Rev. Dr. David Luecke wrote Evangelical Style, Lutheran Substance in an open attempt to do “bait and switch” evangelism, severing the orandi (worship) from the credendi (doctrine) - as if driving a wedge between what one says and how one practices (or as our confessions put it, “doctrine and ceremonies”) isn’t obvious inauthenticity and the very definition of hypocrisy.

The Rev. Dr. Walter Kallestad was a Lutheran Church Growth “expert” who also put it in crass terms in his book called Entertainment Evangelism. His book is filled with hype and numbers and boasts about worldly success (the goal of the normie Church Growth Movement). Of course, he also pledged unswerving fealty to Lutheran doctrine, and swore up and down that abolishing the liturgy and adopting Pentecostal practices (not unlike Luecke’s approach to severing style and substance) wouldn’t change the doctrine - right up until he and his bazillion-member Terachurch became members of the tongues-speaking Assemblies of God. It’s a tragedy and a cautionary tale.

The silver bullet in the modern Church Growth Grift is always getting rid of the liturgy. It’s hard to read Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and not see the Church Growth Movement as the work of a middle-management devil in the bureaucracy of hell desperately trying to destroy something used by God to keep people in the faith. The liturgy is always the target of these people in their quest for worldly respectability based on the lust for numbers and the theology of glory.

I was recently listening to a podcast: an interview with a modern younger Church Growther (who likewise fled the front lines of the parish to take up a nine-to-five as a consultant telling us how to do parish ministry). Before even listening, I made a mental note to pay attention to what minute in the podcast the “ditch the liturgy” argument would make its grand appearance. I was not disappointed, and I didn’t have to wait very long: 3:53. That’s minute three, not hour three. That is where the words “the liturgy” were said by the host as a thing to be discarded, ironically claiming to play “devil’s advocate.” And this was following an illustration by the guest that began at 1:34 (again, it didn’t take long for the silver bullet to make its appearance) in which he recounted his quitting the parish to move and take his new job. The rental truck was full, and so some things had to be left behind. They had sentimental value, but ultimately, they were just no-value-added junk that they simply needed to throw away: old grills, high school trophies, etc. He said this caused him to mourn a little, because this stuff was emotionally meaningful, but ultimately, it just had to be left behind.

Yes. The liturgy. He compared it to sentimental junk that ultimately needed to go in the trash.

I think it’s fair to say that the Church Growth Movement confesses an altered Augsburg Confession: not the one with Melanchthon’s variata, but one in which the Confession goes directly from Article 23 to Article 25 (and makes the same leap as well as in the Apology). For indeed, they have abolished the Mass.

By contrast, Pastor Richard believes the liturgy (including our magnificent traditional hymnody and focus on excellence in preaching) is a component (not an opponent) of outreach, and urges us to treat it with reverence, emphasize its beauty, and to focus on it as a treasure rather than trash. At one point, he uses the word “heirloom.” Pastor Richard takes a radical departure from the Lutheran Church Growth culture by not abolishing the Mass, by positing that we should “religiously maintain and defend it.” It’s as if Pastor Richard actually believes something this radical: “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."

The Old School Church Growthers were hostile to the liturgy, to hymns, to vestments, to traditional church architecture, and to the frequent and reverent celebration of the Holy Supper, as they saw these as impediments to their outreach goals. Some of the old-timers who are still in the game are still pushing this narrative - in spite of the fact that the culture is no longer defined by the 1960s or the 1980s. Young people are actually being drawn to the liturgy. Much of what is called “contemporary worship” is, to put it colloquially, “boomer cringe.” Modern Church Growthers will sometimes moderate the silver bullet and pay lip service to the liturgy, but only under the banner of “contextualization” and only reluctantly as a nod to pragmatism. And often what Church Growthers call “traditional worship” is anything but.

Pastor Richard cuts through all of this noise. His advice is practical without being pragmatic, pedantic, or programmatic.

The idea is that we need to relax and see outreach not as busywork that we do, but rather as evangelical work that God does. And so our task is to get out of the way, focus on what is truly important, and practice what, and how, we confess. This is a refreshing antidote to the exhausting Church Growth busyness, stress, boxes to check, expenses to incur, and at the additional cost of detachment from the means of grace. Our focus must be on Christ, and him crucified. This is the theology of the cross over and against the theology of glory. And Be at Leisure is grounded firmly on the cross, and the Good News that flows from it.

And to this day, Pastor Richard is Pastor Richard. It’s not just a title. It is what he does. He is not a consultant. He is not an “expert from afar.” He isn’t running a grift. He isn’t even making money on this book. He is a faithful missionary and pastor who planted a church, and who continues to tend it by means of the Word of God. So take a deep breath, relax, get this book, and be at leisure!

As a bonus postscript, here is a video of Pastor Richard speaking on this topic five years ago: