The Assumption That’s Killing Us
There’s an accusation quietly circulating in Lutheran circles right now, and it usually sounds something like this:
“If your church is growing, you must be watering something down.”
It gets dressed up in more refined language with concerns about “faithful catechesis,” questions about “theological integrity,” whispers about whether a congregation is “truly confessional.” But strip it back and the argument is simply: growth is suspicious. Creativity is a red flag. If people are showing up, you probably compromised something to get them there.
I want to name that assumption clearly, because it has a corollary that nobody seems to want to say out loud.
If growth requires compromise, then faithful catechesis cannot grow a church. If people only come when you water it down, then the backside of that argument is that the Bible cannot attract people unto itself.
Read that again slowly.
Because that is the logical conclusion of the argument being made. Not by progressives (whatever that even means), not by the theologically lax, but by the most self-described confessionalists in our midst. They have, in their instinct to protect orthodoxy, accidentally confessed that they don’t actually believe the Word does what the Word says it does.
Isaiah said it returns not void. Scripture clearly says it’s living and active. Paul said it’s the power of God unto salvation. But apparently, if your congregation is growing, you’ve probably replaced it with something more palatable.
This is not a defense of theological liberalism. Watering-down-the-gospel is a real problem, and it deserves real critique. But conflating method with message and assuming that because someone doesn’t do it the way you do it they must be doing it wrong? That is not theological discernment. It’s intellectual laziness wearing a clerical collar.
I’ve been accused of doing something “creative” to reach people. You know what we’re actually doing? Teaching Jesus. Accurately. Relationally. In a way that treats people like they’re capable of handling the actual gospel instead of a domesticated version of it. Some people apparently find that threatening, which tells you more about them than it does about us.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: I’m fairly certain that Jesus himself would be a problem in our current environment.
He didn’t use the approved formats. He taught in fields, at dinner tables, on hillsides, in boats. He used farming metaphors and fishing language and stories about women losing coins. He picked twelve guys who would never have made it into our seminaries. He ate with the wrong people, healed on the wrong day, and said things that made the most confessional men of his era pick up rocks.
The Pharisees weren’t villains because they didn’t care about God. They were villains because they cared so much about protecting the right forms that they couldn’t recognize the right Person when he was standing in front of them.
I’m not comparing anyone to Pharisees. I’m saying the instinct is old, and it has always done the same damage. Protecting the container while missing the content, gatekeeping the method while losing the mission.
The question for our synod and whoever leads it after the votes are counted is not whether we are going to be confessional. Of course we are. The question is whether we actually believe what our confession says. Whether we trust that the Means of Grace are genuinely means. Whether the Word is actually powerful or just theoretically powerful.
Because if it is powerful, the it can reach people. It doesn’t need us to make it palatable, but it also doesn’t need us to make it inaccessible. It doesn’t need to be watered down, but it doesn’t need to be buried under a culture of suspicion toward anyone doing the work differently than we do.
The church’s problem has never been that too many congregations were teaching Jesus too clearly to too many people.
Act accordingly.