Challenges for Confessional Lutheranism

Christianity today is faced with many challenges, the greatest of which is the changing culture. Yesterday I was at the monthly Pastor's Conference and we heard a presentation by Dr. John Johnson, President of Concordia University, Chicago. Johnson's presentation centered on the question of being confessional Lutherans amidst these changes of epic proportion-- What should theological formation look like in our current post-modern context? There was one statement that he made that almost made me stand up and cheer (and I'm paraphrasing):

Theological formation and inquiry should connect with a person's existential needs.

Dr. Johnson said very eloquently something that I've been trying to say in my own clumsy fashion for quite some time now. It's time for the church to start addressing the ominous existential emptiness that many experience today. It will no longer do to use the Lutheran Confessions as, in the words of the late David Treumper, an electric fence to zap the masses or as a fundamentalistic litmus test of confessional integrity. It used to work back in the day when being Lutheran actually meant something to most Lutherans. Today we are reaping the results of such continued use-- the LCMS continues to decline in membership. We no longer capture the hearts of people. Our theological formation and practice doesn't connect with the existential needs of people.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, people by in large have lost their hearts. I believe this to be the greatest existential malady of our day. Not only are people disconnected from the church, they are disconnected from themselves. The church is not capturing hearts because it doesn't know how. And it will never know how as long as it continues to serve as a bridge to the 16th century. In the meantime, people will continue to flounder while scraping the bottom of dry-rotted barrels trying to find a morsel of significance or a drop of meaning. Let's not give them one more barrel to scrape.