Too Many Referees and Not Enough Players

I spend less time than I used to in Lutheran Facebook groups. Not because I stopped caring what we believe. I care more than ever. I stepped back because I kept closing the app with the same question: how does this honor the grace I’ve received?

Usually it didn’t. Usually what I’d just read was two baptized, forgiven people treating each other like enemy combatants over something Jesus never said a single word about.

I don’t think that’s a me problem or a Lutheran problem, specifically. I think it’s a church problem, broadly, right now. And the way I see it: the church has too many referees and not enough players.

We’ve gotten very good at one thing

We have become experts at identifying what’s wrong with everyone else’s ministry while neglecting the mission God actually gave us.

Watch a convention floor debate, an online theology group, a comment section under a synod announcement. The skill on display is real. People can spot a doctrinal drift, a liturgical shortcut, a worship style they find suspect, from three tweets away. That’s not nothing. Discernment matters. But discernment aimed exclusively outward, never inward, and never toward action, isn’t discernment anymore. It’s just officiating a game you’re not playing in.

A referee’s whole job is to watch other people move the ball and blow the whistle when they don’t like how it’s done. A referee has never once scored. That’s not a criticism of referees either. The game needs them, even though I find myself being a far better referee on College Football Saturdays. It’s a problem when an entire stadium fills up with people who only want to hold the whistle, and the field goes empty.

Four places I keep watching this happen

Online Lutheran debates. Confessional precision is worth defending. But there’s a difference between contending for the faith and performing contempt for an audience. You can tell the difference by asking who the post is actually for. Is it trying to persuade a brother, or humiliate one in front of a crowd?

Convention politics. I’ve written before about what it costs to keep calling people family instead of opponents on a convention floor. The referee instinct shows up here as certainty that everyone who voted differently did so from bad faith rather than a different conviction, held in good conscience, by someone who also bled for this church.

Worship preference arguments. Notice the word doing the work in that sentence: preference. Not doctrine. Not the Gospel purely taught. Preference. A hymn style, an instrumentation choice, a bulletin format. We will spend more words defending our preferences than the average congregation spends discipling its confirmands, and somehow convince ourselves it was a hill worth the casualties.

People who leave over minor disagreements but never serve anywhere. This might be the saddest one. Not the person who leaves after wrestling honestly with a real theological conviction. That’s a different category, and it deserves respect. I mean the person whose relationship to the church is entirely critical: never on a serving team, never in a small group, never behind the scenes on a Tuesday, but always ready with an opinion about how Sunday should have gone. You cannot referee a game you’ve never once suited up for and expect anyone to trust your calls.

The commandment we keep skipping

In our own catechism, the Eighth Commandment doesn’t just forbid lying about our neighbor. It calls us to defend our neighbor, speak well of them, and explain everything in the kindest way. Best construction. Not neutral construction. Not “I’ll withhold judgment until I have all the facts.” Kindest.

I don’t know how to reconcile that command with how we actually talk to and about each other. It often feels like we’ve inverted it entirely assume the worst, reach for the most insidious motive available, and call it discernment because we found a Bible verse to stand behind while we do it. That’s not contending for the truth. That’s just sin wearing a doctrinal costume.

The kingdom of God does not advance because someone won a Facebook argument. It advances because someone showed up, served, forgave, and kept showing up the next week too.

What being a player actually costs

Want to know why I think refereeing is so popular? It’s cheap. It costs you an opinion and twenty seconds of typing. Playing costs something else entirely. It costs you a Tuesday night, a hard conversation with a real person instead of a screen name, the risk of being wrong in public instead of just being right in the comments.

It also costs you the ability to stay comfortably above the mess. The moment you actually serve somewhere what you teach a class, lead a small group, sit with someone in crisis, or countless other areas of serving – when you serve you stop being able to critique ministry from a distance, because you’re now close enough to see how hard it actually is. That proximity changes people. It’s a lot easier to demand perfect execution from a Bible study leader when you’ve never once tried to hold twelve people’s attention on a Wednesday night while someone’s toddler screams in the next room. And there’s also a need to highlight context a little as well. Just because you have served “somewhere” doesn’t mean you’ve served everywhere. We can’t judge what someone else should do until we’ve been in their exact shoes.

What I actually want, including from myself

I’m not asking anyone to stop caring about doctrine, or to pretend worship style is theologically weightless, or to sit quietly through actual false teaching in the name of niceness. Some things are worth the fight, and I’ll keep fighting them.

But I want us, me included, to ask a harder question before we hit publish. Is this critique in service of the mission, or is it a substitute for it? Have I served anywhere this month, or have I only had opinions about the people who did? Would the person I’m about to correct feel loved by how I said it, or just beaten?

We are not known, right now, by the crowds we’re reaching or the neighbors we’re loving as much as we’re known by what we’re against. That should trouble us more than I fear it does. The world isn’t watching to see who wins the Facebook argument. It’s watching to see if we actually love each other, and honestly, most days, I understand why they’d be skeptical.

There’s a better way. It looks like fewer referees and more players. It looks like best construction instead of worst assumption. It looks like putting down the whistle long enough to get back on the field.