Living Theology
in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church
In America
Vol. 7 No. 1
Summer 2002
Craig A. Satterlee with Trish Madden
Let’s hear it for the social
ministry committee! You know, those
dedicated folk in every congregation who make it their business to minister to
homebound members, to raise awareness of, as well as funds and volunteers for,
benevolent causes, and to strengthen the connection between the congregation
and the social ministry of the church.
In many places, their efforts are largely apolitical. Viewed from our current perspective of
social ministry as “justice-making,”1 their efforts may even seem
tame. Of course, many in our pews
wonder when the church got into the business of “justice-making.” When the ELCA released its social statement
on capital punishment2, parishioners repeatedly asked me when the
church had given up on the Gospel and gone into politics. While this reaction may shock us today,
reviewing the history of Lutheran social ministry reveals that there has been a
shift in emphasis. Our focus has, in fact,
changed. Still, while the church and
its leaders may have moved to a new emphasis of social ministry, many in our
pews, unaware of any change, continue to hold former understandings. Recognizing that meeting people where they
are is an essential part of preaching, we devote the first portion of this
essay to sketching the historical landscape of this shift in emphasis. We then turn to practical suggestions for
preaching on issues of justice.
In the twentieth century, a
change occurred in the Lutheran approach to social ministry. In the nineteenth century, Lutheran social ministry
was aimed at maintaining the moral life and caring for those who fell through
the cracks of society. Lutheran leaders
were concerned with religious indifference and family hardship, not socialism.3
For example, the General Synod,
which comprised three-fifths of American Lutheranism, focused its social
ministry on temperance and “inner missions.”
As the twentieth century began, Lutherans wonderfully supported
orphanages, hospitals, immigrant missions, and deaconess homes.4
“Nevertheless, with few exceptions Lutherans set themselves apart from the
Social Gospel, which aimed at reforming social structures and not just binding
victims’ wounds.” 5 Deeply suspicious of the optimistic theology of
the Social Gospel, which depended on a corporate interpretation of sin and the
possibility of eradication through collective social reform, Lutherans were
also uncomfortable with the requirement that church bodies participate directly
in social reform.6 Thus, in
1917, the newly formed United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA) created a
standing committee on temperance and social service.7 After the passage of the 18th amendment, the
church altered this focus and created a Committee on Moral and Social Welfare.8
By
the 1930's, though Lutherans continued to understand social ministry as the
activity of citizens inspired by the Gospel, the church was confronted by
members’ growing desire for help in addressing social questions raised by the
continuing economic crisis of depression and international instability.9 “Economic depression...revealed major
weaknesses in the institutions of private industry and government. As Lutherans
moved outside their ethnic and religious circles, they began to view
citizenship as a more demanding matter and to expect greater help from their
church in sorting out issues and in responding in light of faith.”10
In response, Lutheran church bodies created boards to investigate these
issues. For example, in 1933, the
National Lutheran Council, comprised of the ULCA and Augustana Synod, created a
Committee on Social Trends. The
American Lutheran Synod established the Commission on Social Relations in 1934.11
“Although Lutherans were expressing a churchwide sense of responsibility for
American life, they were hesitant about the implications of their tradition for
ethical judgments about the social order.”12
As the twentieth century
progressed, both Augustana and Union Seminaries served as vehicles for moving
American Lutheranism’s understanding of social ministry from “inner missions”
to “justice making.” Alvin Daniel
Mattson, who studied at Yale where he became acquainted with Social Gospel
advocates, aligned himself with the leftist thought within liberal
Protestantism during his tenure at Augustana Seminary and as chair of the
Augustana Synod’s 1936 Commission on Morals and Social Problems. Mattson’s “legacy to the more than one
thousand students who passed through his classroom heightened their sensitivity
to issues of social injustice while also leaving them with the riddle of
determining what constitutes God's will or manifests the kingdom in the
struggle for justice.”13 Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, who
offered voices of dissent within Protestant Liberalism, made Union Seminary “a
catalyst for future leaders in social ministry in both the ULCA and LCA.”14 During the late 1940's through the 1950's,
Niebuhr's influence moved beyond the seminary through the eighty columns he
wrote for The Lutheran. By this time, “Lutheran self‑consciousness
over the German church's acquiescence to Hitler and the new threat posed by
atomic weaponry had increased the stakes for a Lutheran social ethic.”15
With
the formation of the LCA in 1963, the predecessor bodies (ULCA and the
Augustana Synod) needed to determine how to incorporate their previous social
statements. The election of John Kennedy as President ushered in a “resurgence
of political liberalism.”16
The church could not ignore the energy around the civil rights
movement. Between 1963‑1967,
William Lazareth and Joseph Sittler, both members of the LCA's Board of Social
Ministry, articulated opposing views of whether the LCA should take a directive
role in the church's response to social issues. Sittler, who was concerned for
the integrity and therefore the responsiveness of Christian faith, spoke
against guidelines, which could hamper the inventiveness of Christian love in
particular circumstances.17
Lazareth was concerned with how such ethical wisdom emerges. For Lazareth
the framework of Christian ethics does not lie within the individual response
to God's action through faith, but rather in the way God structures human
community.18 Lazareth
therefore worked to lessen the divide between the sacred and secular realms,
arguing that, particularly in a pluralistic society, the church's social
ministry will often take the form of working together for human justice under
the law with other civic-minded groups, both voluntary and governmental.19
This view counters an American Protestant ethic common even among Lutherans,
which required a Christianizing of the social order before social problems
could be solved.20
Lazareth's stance became operative and the LCA began making statements
on race relations, poverty, capital punishment, and Vietnam. Thus, by the 1960's, justice language was
incorporated into the social statements of our predecessor church bodies. This is certainly clear in the ALC's
statement on the relationship of church and state.21 An examination of our church’s social
statements reveals that this emphasis has continued in the ELCA.
The shift in the church’s
understanding of social ministry reflects a change in the relationship of faith
and culture, or at least a shift in our understanding of that relationship. In the twenty-first century, the Christian
direction of culture is highly ambiguous at best.22 The church no longer stands securely at the
center of society. Rather than being a
Christian society, contemporary culture is characterized by a variety of
moralities that include historic religions, new forms of religious life, and
secular alternatives to religion.23 For many today, Christianity
implies a nominal life that is above all else personal and private. In his much-publicized book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and
Democracy in America, Richard John Neuhaus argues that we are facing a
crisis in our society because faith has become so privatized that religious
discourse has been increasingly excluded from our public life.24 Faith has become so personalized,
individualized, and de-materialized that society’s need for public discipline,
once met by religion, is now provided by the values of advanced global
capitalization.25 Contentment and gratitude are replaced by desire and want. Faithfulness is measured by success. Character is reduced to image. As Christian and cultural values diverge,
the church’s social ministry moves from caring for those who have fallen
through the cracks of a “Christian society” to working to make society more just.
Despite
the church’s best efforts at providing leadership, resources and strategies for
discussing social ministry and helping congregations to understand this shift,
thereby empowering them to become communities of justice, the challenge is
great. Church social statements are not
something that pastors can easily rally their congregation’s interest
around—unless, of course, people read something shocking about a statement in
the newspaper. Furthermore, many in our
congregations continue to regard American society as a “Christian nation” and
hold tightly to a doctrine of the separation of church and state that
understands public policy as an inappropriate topic for preaching. Preachers must therefore carefully consider
how they will lead their congregations to embrace their calling to be
communities of justice. Effective
preachers of social justice remind us of six realities:
First, as preachers lead
their faith communities to take a more active role in justice making, we must
be mindful that much of their resistance to justice making comes from the
church itself. As our previous
discussion has shown, our parishioners’ notions that public policy has no place
in the pulpit and that social ministry means caring for those who fall through
the cracks are things that their church taught them. This historical perspective may make preachers more patient and
understanding with their people.
Second,
before an effective preacher attempts to be a prophet among God’s people, she
first shows herself to also be their pastor.
Effective preachers understand people before criticizing them, love
people even as they are challenging and correcting them. Effective preachers are also careful not to
compartmentalize their ministry, reserving their pastoral selves for one-to-one
encounters while hauling hell fire and brimstone into the pulpit and the
committee meeting.
Third, effective preachers
are clear about the purpose of preaching.
From a Lutheran perspective, the purpose of all preaching is to proclaim
Jesus Christ and not a public policy agenda.
The essential good news is that, in Jesus Christ, our loving God joins
us in our suffering and brings us to new life.
At the same time, preachers must be clear that Christ’s life and love
are meant for all people, indeed for the whole world, and not just for
individuals privately. Lutheran
theology also reminds us that, before we call people to respond, we boldly
proclaim the good news that in Christ God is gracious and reconciling. This good news frees us from thinking that
we can and must persuade God to work for our good or that we must build the
realm of God by our energy and will.
Rather than something we must do to demonstrate our faithfulness,
justice making is an essential part of our faithful response to the
Gospel.
Fourth, effective preachers generally name issues of public
policy as they arise naturally from the scriptures read and heard in
worship. Congregations are often more
receptive to issues of public ministry when they grow out of the scripture read
in worship than they are when scripture is imposed on a public policy issue in
order to justify its proclamation.
While the realities of our world may necessitate preaching on a specific
situation or issue, effective preachers make clear that social ministry is our
biblically based response to the Gospel and not the preacher’s personal agenda.
Fifth, effective preachers
exercise extreme care when they name any single public policy as
Christian. Lutheran social ethics does
not lead in a specific ideological direction, if that is taken to mean a fairly
detailed blueprint for public policy.26 A Lutheran understanding of God’s will and our response is never
that simple. More challenging is the
call to discover and discern both God’s will and our response within the
Christian community. Rather than using
the pulpit to persuade parishioners to buy into a prepackaged public policy
agenda, effective preachers lift up the realm of God breaking into our lives
and our world in the person of Jesus Christ.
In response to this good news, effective preachers lead their
communities of faith to consider, corporately as well as individually, how they
will in thanks and praise respond to this good news at all levels of our common
life.
Sixth, when preaching on
issues of public policy, our hearers embrace images and stories more readily
than concepts or statistics. Images
have the power to effect deep changes in people. Walter Brueggemann reminds us of the power of images to move us
outward by embodying an alternative vision of reality and giving us another
world to enter.27 The more we turn to the picture language of
the poet and the storyteller, the more
we will be able to preach in a way that invites people to respond from
their heart as well as from their head.
That Christian preachers are called to proclaim God’s
justice and mercy is undeniable. The
question we are called to consider is how we will preach justice as our
response to God’s grace.
The
Rev. Craig A. Satterlee
Carlson Assistant Professor of Homiletics
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
Trish
Madden
Second year Master of Divinity student at LSTC
1 See, for example. the ELCA social teaching
statement, “The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective,” adopted at the
second biennial Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America, August 28-September 4, 1991.
2 “A Social Statement on the Death Penalty,” a
social practice statement adopted by the second biennial Churchwide Assembly of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, August 28-September 4, 1991.
3 Christa R. Klein and Christian D. von Dehsen, Politics and Policy: The Genesis and
Theology of Social Statements in the Lutheran Church in America
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989),
p. 9.
4 Ibid., p. 10.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 11.
7 Ibid., p. 16.
8 Ibid., p. 21.
9 Ibid., p. 26.
10 Ibid., p. 27.
11 Ibid., p. 26.
12 Ibid., pp. 27-28.
13 bid., p. 30.
14 Ibid., p. 32.
15 Ibid., p. 33.
16 Ibid., p. 43.
17 Ibid., p. 49.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 65.
20 Ibid.
21 “Church-State Relations in the USA: A Statement of The American Lutheran
Church,” adopted October 21, 1978 by the Ninth General Convention of the
American Lutheran Church. See
especially D.4.
22 In the
following discussion, I am indebted to my previous work published in Craig A.
Satterlee, Ambrose of Milan’s Method of
Mystagogical Preaching (Collegeville:
The Liturgical Press, 2000), pp. 312-317.
23 James F. Gustafson, “The Sectarian Temptation:
Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University,” CTSA Proceedings 40 (1985): 83.
24 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984).
25 Roger Clapp, “At the Intersection of Eucharist
and Capital: On the Future of Liturgical Worship,” 2000 Annual Meeting of the
North American Academy of Liturgy, January 4, 2000, Tampa, Florida.
26 Robert Benne, “Lutheran Ethics: Perennial Themes
and Contemporary Challenges,” in The
Promise of Lutheran Ethics, eds. Karen L. Bloomquist and John R. Stumme
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), p. 18.
27 Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), esp. pp. 79-110.