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LCMS Convention
The LCMS Convention is well underway (I’m behind the game on this). Already our byzantine church polity has been replaced with a less byzantine church polity, and more is underway. After all these re-structuring changes are complete, the normal order of business will be followed, i.e., electing the President and other resolutions.
I cannot get excited or bothered by much of this. Re-structuring is probably necessary; our constitution is an unwieldy amalgamation of rules and conflicts. But restructuring will not change the Synod that much. Likewise the question of who is president. A more liberal president will ignore the conservatives, and a conservative president will ignore the liberals. It’s all politics, after all, and no one wants to preside over the real change that must happen in our synod.
What’s that, you ask? We are at least three different denominations living under the same roof. We have liberal protestants, evangelical conservatives, and Confessional Lutherans. To further complicate matters, each group has mixed in with them low, high, and no church worship theologies.
This is the problem in the LCMS: you never know what you’re going to get from any pastor or congregation, and all are insistent that they are the “real Lutherans.”
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Filed under: Theology · Tags: controversy, ecclesiology, LCMS, liturgy, Lutheranism, Theology
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The LCMS is like a box of chocolates. . .
I’m good – but you other guys are nuts or squishy. =o)
The Orthodox Church in America just made public a draft Strategic Plan, which called to mind this serendipitous section from a book I am reading that may also be at least somewhat pertinent to the LCMS:
“…bearing to mind the problems with which our Church is confronted in its entirety and especially the local Church which I am called to shepherd. How [shall we solve this?] In the name of Christ. With Christ as the model. Imitating Christ.”
Bishop Meletios [of Nikopolis and Preveza, Greece (under the Ecumenical Patriarchate)] conveyed his most deep-seated principle: health and salvation will come only through individual devotion to and imitation of Christ himself. He would offer no strategic plan or clever campaign, only Christ and the pledge to follow him personally.
…[Restoration] would not be achieved by [Bishop Meletios] alone but only through collective struggle. He described this struggle in stark military terms… By using war imagery, Bishop Meletios transmitted in clear terms the urgency with which he perceived the situation. He called for… a collective spiritual war waged upon each person’s own internal battlefields so as to transform the character of the Church by all, for all. By each person urgently transforming him- or herself based on the model of Christ, the collective body of Christ – the Church – would be transformed….
Bishop Meletios outlined no new programs; rather, he reiterated the basic Christian life. He offered no grandiose promises; rather, he promised future struggles and persecution….
Bishop Meletios disappointed all those who wanted a strategic plan laid out in his first years. In fact, he has deliberately avoided applying any boilerplate solutions, saying that he tries to carry out his mission “peacefully, without calculation, without plans, without programs.” For Meletios, strategic plans are human-derived attempts to solve problems. But “the Church is not of man. The Church is of God. And whenever God is present, the human element ought to be extinguished. When it is not only not destroyed but also validated, the Church does not go well. Anthropocentrism kills the Church and its life.”
Not surprisingly, then, Bishop Meletios promises that he never had a “program” for Preveza. Nevertheless, with hindsight, we can deconstruct how Preveza was transformed; we can identify goals toward which Meletios steered the institution of the Church; we can identify concrete actions that were taken; at times, we can even note which activities seem to have the most impact. However, in doing so, we are artificially reverse engineering a “program” that never existed in the first place.
While some actions of the bishop undoubtedly worked toward multiple ends, his actions can be grouped into five goals:
1. Restore the spiritual integrity and authority of the clergy;
2. Restore the Church experience to its spiritual, traditional, and aesthetic glory;
3. Construct forums for the Church to interact with the people;
4. (Re)educate the people;
5. Develop monasticism in the region.
- In Beauty for Ashes: The Spiritual Transformation of a Modern Greek Community (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2009) by Stephen R. Lloyd-Moffett, pp. 66-7, 68-9, 70, 75
The Ochlophobist has a few choice words for the OCA’s Strategic Plan, as well. There are various chestnuts in there for anyone, regardless of denomination or religious affiliation (setting aside those parts specifically Orthodox), allergic to the reigning spiritual ethos (and its administrative shadow):
http://ochlophobist.blogspot.com/2010/07/thank-oca-for-crock-of-swot.html
Christopher–I actually saw this the other day and cringed, but thanks for the link. It goes to show you how infectious this disease truly is and how easily we forget that one thing is needful.
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