Always Reforming

Today was Reformation Sunday at church -- the great annual Lutheran tribal gathering. The church was bedecked in red; the pews were packed; the air was redolent with aromas of various caloric potluck dishes warming up in the kitchen; we sang "A Mighty Fortress" and "The Church's One Foundation"; the tradition lives on for another year.

But more importantly for our congregation, this Sunday was Confirmation Sunday. This is a new thing for us, and perhaps for readers as well; at least when I was a kid, confirmations happened around the Easter season. But we have found that, at our church, we can get junior-high and high school kids involved in religious education if we put them through what amounts to a two-week theological bootcamp and a week of church camp in the summertime...this after easing them through the door with an afterschool program where kids hang out afternoon a week with the pastor, engage in Godtalk, play music, and on occasion go on pastoral-care rounds and help out with various churchly tasks.

This morning eight nervous white-robed confirmands sat in the front row. One of them had been so desperate to attend confirmation class that he intially fibbed about his age so he could get in. (We would have let him in anyway, but it's a great story.) Another, a girl with minimal evident adult support for her faith journey, who got involved with our church through her friends, was recently baptized, and when she was her adolescent peers from confirmation class stood up for her as sponsors. (Which I suspect is probably against "the rules," or falling under the dreaded category of "But we've never done it that way before." But our response as a congregation was happy wonderment -- imagine a bunch of teenagers, unprodded by adult authority figures, being the Church for their friend.)

We followed the liturgy for the Affirmation of Baptism. Each kid was asked the traditional question: "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises?" A series of quiet responses: "I do." "Do you believe in God the Father?" The entire congregation then joined in, response after response, to affirm the articles of the Creed.

Finally it was time for each kid to be confirmed. As he or she knelt at the altar, our pastor invited parents and godparents to join him in the laying on of hands. And when it came time for our newly baptized, sans-adults teenager to be confirmed, all the rest of her class, her friends/peers/sponsors, stood up in unison, returned to the altar and laid their hands on her.

What should the Church look like? I think at its best it looks a lot like this.

Lutherans like to describe ourselves as catholic, evangelical and reforming. We're catholic because we affirm the witness of the Apostles, the formative theologians and the ecumenical councils of the early Church, and the praxis of worship as has been handed down to us from those times. We are evangelical because our primary goal in being the Church is to proclaim the very good news of God's unconditional, no-strings-attached Yes! to a loving relationship with humankind, personified by Jesus Christ, God With Us. And we are reforming because, whenever some aspect of our life together impedes that message of God's love and grace, we believe that it's our job to make a change. That's the ideal. That's what we strive for.

I am happy and blessed to be a part of a faith community that takes this always- reforming ethos seriously; that tries its darnedest to erase the lines, whatever they may be, that work to keep people outside our church family.

After the service, I was talking with our pastor -- we were both grinning from ear to ear -- about what a great congregation we have, and he said, "I go to these pastoral conferences where other pastors talk about the problems they have keeping their congregations going, and when they ask me why ours is always bucking the trend, I tell them it's because we've made the decision to stop fighting about stuff; about who's 'in' and who's 'out.'"

When the Son sets us free, we are free indeed. Thanks be to God!

Luther Rose, stained glass David Hetland