Tag Archives: Church

Bishop and Christian*, February 2015

The Church of Jesus Christ is never a static, unmoving entity. Even as she lives in the present, she is tied to the past as she waits in hope for what the future will bring. Often, conversations about the Church—what she is, what she should do, how she should look—revolve around various points of time: this is what my congregation used to look like; or, these are the problems here and now; or, this is how she should be in the future. Because the Church is an historical entity, those aspects are all worthy of consideration. But we can never privilege one point of time over another. The Church was not better or purer the closer it was to Jesus and the Apostles; the Church is not smarter or more significant because we’ve had two thousand years to get it right; the Church is not heading toward a utopian future in this creation.

Behind all of the disputes and controversies that have disturbed the Church internally is a failure to hold close to the second phrase of the Third Article of the Creed: “I believe…in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Just as we cannot look around at the world, or into the circumstances of our own lives, in order to discover what God is doing, neither can we look at what we can see of the Church in order to discover her source, sustenance, or goal. As with Christian faith generally, the only One in whom we can know for certain what God is doing is His Son, Jesus. Just as Jesus’ death and resurrection tell us what the outcome of this world will be for His saints, so they also tell us the truth about the Church’s existence in this world. Jesus is the source and beginning of the Church’s life in the water and blood of His pierced side, He is the ongoing food and drink to sustain the Church’s life in the midst of this world, and He is the goal to which the Church is headed, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesisans 4:13).

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Bishop and Christian*, October 2014

How are your feelings related to your worship? That is a question that is behind many of the arguments in the church related to worship. Talk to enough people from various congregations and it will not be long before you come up against a division between those who, on the one hand, know that they have been to church if they feel good, or different, or forgiven and, on the other hand, those who do not seem to care whether they feel anything at all. The division can be seen most clearly when someone leaves a particular (“stale,” “dead,” “boring”) congregation for another (“refreshing,” “alive,” “exciting”) one in which the Spirit seems to be moving more noticeably. What is striking about those conversations is that the descriptive words are completely tied to individual perception: that is, for worship to be good, everything depends on the feelings of the individual who is participating in the worship experience. If someone does not feel (there’s that word again) that he or she “got anything” from the service, and if this experience goes on long enough, such a person may be inclined to seek out a church where something (the “something” is rather ambiguous) is “gotten.” You may recognize a friend or a family member—or yourself—in that description.

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Bishop and Christian*, August 2014

August often seems to be a time when things are about to happen: children are about to go back to school, vacations are about to be over, activities are about to start up again, fall harvest is about to begin. Nothing wrong with having a cycle to the year. We all associate particular times in the year with particular things.

But one thing the Church year teaches us is to associate times in the year with the life of Christ. Even in this hot, dry time of the year, the color on the altar and on the pastor is green. The life of Christ that flows to us in Word and Supper never dries up, never gets low, never needs to be restricted. Often, we unintentionally associate the summer time with vacation from every routine, including the Lord’s Day-to-Lord’s Day routine that the Resurrection of Jesus and the Church year instill in us. An unintentional fruit of that unintentional association is that regularly hearing and receiving the Lord’s gifts (whether here at Faith or together with another faithful congregation) can become a casualty of the summer’s irregular routine. It is exactly the routine of Sunday to Sunday that should remain intact no matter what. If we or our children learn to associate going to church with going to school, they will also (perhaps subconsciously) expect to outgrow church like they will outgrow formal schooling. Is this why confirmation instruction is associated, despite our best efforts, with graduation?

If your children are still young, this is encouragement to continue providing for your children’s spiritual formation even during the summer. If your children are grown, you cannot redo things either way. But whether your children are young or have children of their own, the point of these words is this: Christ remains who He is the whole year round. The green of the paraments and vestments and the promises we hear each week are your oasis in the desert of this world: in the dry heat of summer and in the dead cold of winter; in the growth of spring and in the abundance of autumn. He never leaves us or forsakes us, and His promises remain what they are, until things are no longer about to happen, but are all fulfilled. That’s the refreshment that Christ gives, even better than a cold drink of water on a 100-degree day!

Pr. Winterstein

*St. Augustine (354-430 AD), Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, said, “For you I am a bishop [overseer]; with you I am a Christian.”