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TechnoratiTraditional Lutheran congregations are looking a little different these days. With mainline churches either losing people in the pews or fearing such a loss, more have chosen to implement evangelical approaches to their less popular traditional ways.
At Zion Lutheran Church in California’s Silicon Valley, the congregation was installing their new associate pastor. A rock-n-roll band was set up on the front lawn of the church and clergy wearing brightly colored Hawaiian shirts sat down in front. After sermons were delivered and the service ended, the luau began.
The church was "not really Lutheran at all except that it took place on the front lawn of a Lutheran church," wrote Stephen Ellingson, author of The Megachurch and The Mainline.
Ellingson, assistant professor of sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., studied nine Lutheran congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area which has more residents who report having no religious affiliation and fewer Christians than the Orange County and Los Angeles Counties of Southern California. With Lutheranism looking relatively weak in terms of membership on the West Coast, the sociologist was charged with a grant to explain how and why some congregations were able to flourish amid a long-standing loss of membership in the state.
"I go to these churches and I go to worship services, and I start talking to clergy and insiders – people who've been around in the Bay Area – who knew the history of Lutheranism in California. And one of the things that hit me over the head from the very beginning was no one really cared about being Lutheran," Ellingson explained to The Christian Post. "No one seemed very knowledgeable about the tradition. No one seemed to care much about it."
While some churches were intentional about Lutheran tradition, by and large, it seemed like “who cares?” said Ellingson.
People are not committed to their denomination, the author observed after studying the nine Lutheran churches. Although some surveys have suggested that Lutherans do care about tradition, as Ellingson noted, a recent survey by LifeWay Research revealed lack of loyalty to a denomination. Among people who switched churches, 54 percent changed denominations when moving to a new church and 44 percent consider denomination as an important factor in selecting a church.
“Tradition, writ large, is dead. Being a uniquely, a particular type of Christian - a Lutheran Christian, a Presbyterian Christian, an Episcopalian Christian - doesn't matter anymore (people in their 20s, 30s and teens)," said Ellingson. "So people just want to be Christian."
Particularly in the West, congregations are less interested in following or reproducing doctrine, theology, and ethics emanating from denominational centers and more interested in creating church life to fit the local context, wrote Ellingson. He noted some historians argue that geographic distance from the national religious centers and pervasive individualism and pragmatism in the West have produced such congregations.
Retired clergy in the Bay Area have suggested to Ellingson that Lutheran congregations in California either hold on to the tradition so tightly that they become life-long Lutherans and irrelevant to everyone, or they adopt the traditions of other Christian groups and in the process lose the strongest parts of their Lutheran heritage. Continue »
