Sending 1

To be Sent is to be in the world as it is and as it shall be.

Meal 1

To Eat together the body of Christ is to become what we are.

Thanksgiving 1

To give Thanks is to be aware of the source of all that is good.

Word 1

To engage with the Word is to make relative the world for its own sake.

Baptism 1

To remember our Baptism is to both forget and re-member our other callings.

Confess 1

To Confess and Forgive one another requires humility.

Gather 1

To Gather in community requires being self-outside-of-self.

Demographics 2

            There has also been a great demographic shift going on in America for a while. For example, in the 1950 census 87% of Americans claimed to be European, in 2010 64% made that same claim. As the same time, Asians went from 0.2% of the population to 5%, Latinos from 2% to 16%, and “multi-racial” wasn’t even a category but now is the identity claimed by 2% of our population. While these ethnic changes have taken place economic changes have occurred as well. There are now 10% fewer people in America considered middle class, and at the same time the cost of everything has risen dramatically, while incomes have not.

            Non-Europeans are the majority of new immigrant to this country, and Lutheranism has traditionally grown with new immigrants from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway… Well guess what, there are now more Lutherans in either Ethiopia or Tanzania than in Sweden, more Lutherans in Indonesia than Denmark, more Lutherans in India than Finland, Norway, or the USA, more Lutherans in Nigeria than the Netherlands. For that matter, the majority of Namibians are Lutheran. You get the picture, our country’s ethnic demographic changes should only scare us if we see Lutheranism as being about Lederhosen and Lefse instead of Grace and Word and Sacrament and Cross.

            As for the economics of it all, maybe this jolt to the middle class will help us hear those in poverty in a new way. Perhaps it can make us more thankful for those things we do have. Could we maybe become more creative in response to our limits? Even more generous? 

Decentralization 2

            The most quoted line of poet William Yeats comes from the beginning of his poem “The Second Coming” in which he writes:

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre

            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

            Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

            There is no center to things any more, everything has cracked open and separated out. At one time, everyone got their news from one straight laced news man, a single source, and that was the reality everyone bought into. At one time, you were likely to live next to a neighbor with a differing political opinion from yours and that was okay. At one time, people regularly bowled in leagues and regularly joined organizations of all sorts. Now, there are news channels that cater to any viewpoint, everything is looked at through a partisan lens and there are literally now “blue” and “red” neighborhoods—a great sorting based on ideology, the same number of people bowl as before, but alone because league attendance has plummeted, and any organization that takes serious commitment has taken a serious hit. In short, we’re feeling the effects of decentralization.

            There is a power to decentralization—a small group of people can do giant things. That should be good news to us, after all we are a small group of people tasked to do nothing short of be God’s hands in the world! 

Disestablishment 2

            The Church is (or in some regions of the country, is becoming) disestablished here in the USA—that is, we have a different voice in our country and in our culture than we once did. There was a time when our society saw the church as an integral part of the social fabric and treated us as such. For example, there were blue laws that kept businesses closed on Sunday so employment wasn’t a barrier to worship. These days most people don’t equate Good Christian with Good American, the distinction between those two things has grown and changed.

            Without the social pressures of being a good citizen and a good Christian, those of us still in the church are here because we really want to be here, not because there is social pressure to be here! 

Demographics 1

Demographics—America is changing both racially and economically

Decentralization 1

Decentralization—Small groups of people without anyone in charge can now influence the world

Disestablishment 1

Disestablishment of the Church—Being a good citizen in America doesn’t mean being a good Christian in the minds of most people

The Grid

	Disestablishment	Decentralization	Demographics
Gathering in Community	How do we gather without the explicit approval of our society?	What does gathering look like in a scattered world?	How do we gather in a racially ethnically and economically diverse world?
Confession and Forgiveness	How do we confess and forgive in a disestablishment world?	How do we confess and forgive in this decentralized world?	What especially needs to be confessed and forgiven in these new demographic realities?
Baptism	What parts of our baptismal identity shine through differently in a disestablished church?	How can we be centered in our Child of God-ness in a decentralized world?	As racial and economic identity shifts in our society how do we affirm our baptismal identity—in what ways does it shift or stay the same?
Word of God	What themes in scripture draw attention to themselves when read from outside the cultural mainstream?	How may the Word of God be preached and trusted in a decentralized world?	How do we hear and respond to the Word of God differently when we are ethnically and economically different than we were a generation ago?
Thanksgiving	For what aspects of disestablishment ought we give thanks?	What new ways can we give thanks when everything is decentered?	What methods of thanksgiving are found in non-Eurocentric cultures?
Meal	In what ways have we wed Holy Communion to the powers that be in our society?	Where do we have the holy meal in light of decentralization?	What aspects of Holy Communion can be expressed differently for a wider variety of cultural contexts?
Sending	Who have we neglected to go to in order to impress the powers that be?	Where and how are we sent when we’re already dispersed?	How are we sent differently to the new demographics in which we live?