
The Spirit Calls, Gathers, Enlightens and Sanctifies God’s People
Calling to a Culture or to a Relationship With Christ?
Martin Luther divided the work of the Holy Spirit into the four functions of calling, gathering, enlightening and sanctifying followers of Christ. These next reflections address ministries of calling.
A calling to follow Christ seemed so simple at first. John the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the expected Lamb of God. Two of John’s disciples turned to Jesus, who asked what they wanted. To see where you are staying, they replied, curious about what differences he makes in life. Jesus challenged them to come and see. Andrew, Peter, then Phillip, and Nathanael responded. Thus began the momentum for calling others to follow Christ.
After Pentecost, the momentum of call and response brought moderate growth for the first three hundred years of the spread of Christianity. Then Emperor Constantine recognized Christianity as the preferred religion of the Roman Empire, and growth was explosive. Now there were social advantages to being a Christian. Calling became easier.
For most of Christian church history, there remained social advantages to being a follower of Christ. Such were the pressures in the Reformation churches. The ministry of calling stayed simple. Christianity was something you were born into. Almost all lived in villages and small towns, so there were social pressures to conform. Among Christian immigrants to America, the ministry of calling remained simplified. Previous immigrants met the new ones and gathered them into church communities that shared the same language. The social pressures to conform were strong.
Calling into a Culture
In my home neighborhood in Cleveland, the story is told of how in the 1880s the pastor from the new Immanuel Lutheran and the priest of the new St. Michael Catholic would join together and knock on doors along newly developed streets, one on each side. They asked whether each family was Lutheran or Catholic. At the end of the street, they swapped names. The challenge then was for each to gather those families into the appropriate flock. Calling ministries could not get much simpler.
What made the process so easy is that these mostly German immigrants self-identified with their home culture, which typically was either Catholic or Lutheran. The attraction was to rebuild the community they left behind. For many, central to that old community was the church. But the church they and their leaders had in mind was mostly the culture of values and behaviors they associated with the church. A culture is the set of beliefs, values, and behaviors a community passes on to a new generation. In traditional German church culture, the beliefs were left to the pastor to define and explain. Members were taught the Catechism, which mostly passes on head knowledge without much provision for heart conviction.
Called Into a Personal Relationship with Christ
Church bodies that had their roots in European cultures never had to develop strong ministries of calling others to follow Christ. We could rely on cultural pressures, which are now disappearing among young adults who are several generations removed from their grandparents’ immigrant roots. We traditional churches now face the more difficult task of calling people not into a church culture but into a personal relationship with Christ.
There are several problems with church lived out as a social culture. Basic is that this does not square well with the New Testament understanding of the church called together by the work of the Holy Spirit. The second, more practical difficulty is what happens when that culture does not transfer to succeeding generations. Then you are left with congregations of mostly older members that have diminished ability to attract and hold young families.
The issue is, which is more basic to being a Christ follower? Is it the distinct traditions of values and behaviors of a church culture? Or are the personal convictions of those called together to be a church more fundamental? Reaching out to those already in the tradition is easier. The job is much more demanding to call people into a relationship with Christ. That’s Holy Spirit work. Thus our human effort is done better when we recognize the Spirit’s ways and let his movement shape our ministries.
The Perils of Cultural Superiority
Lutheran church culture presents a special problem for ministering within the American culture. We come with an air of superiority. That’s a common trait among Germans. It shows itself in an unwillingness to learn from the ministries of other churches or in a smug tendency to run down any ministries that other churches are doing. We do so to our loss.
My consistent message over several decades is to visit churches that show evidence of effective ministry today. Check them out. See what you can learn. Some pastors have done so. Most have resisted. For them, if something does not carry the label Lutheran, it does not merit discussion.
Formative for me was the seven years I spent as vice president and faculty member at Fuller Seminary, often considered the flagship of Evangelical seminaries. I learned a lot and absorbed a taste for the pastoral ministry I had not had before. One learning is that conservative Evangelicals find it hard to work with conservative Lutherans, who in their Germanic way want to take over and control whatever the project is. During those years, mission-minded Lutherans expressed interest in what I was learning in that community, which I addressed in the book Evangelical Style and Lutheran Substance. But church officials marginalized what they regarded as insufficiently and indistinctively Lutheran.
Where is the Holy Spirit in Our Ministries of Calling?
Where was the Holy Spirit in these simplified calling ministries of Lutherans? We confess that he was somewhere and somehow in the background, but we had little need to pin down just where and how. Other branches of American Protestantism did develop maps. Revivalists featured human decision as the key component and expected the Spirit to move through the pressure of an altar call to bring the desired results. Pentecostals featured human emotions and relied on highly emotional experiences through which the Spirit was supposed to work. But neither approach does justice to the key Reformation emphasis on God’s grace rather than human effort as the basis for our relationship with God.
The Apostle Paul remains the key guide. As central as grace is to his theology, the Holy Spirit is even more central. At least by the numbers, he referred to the Spirit twice as often as he did to grace. For him, the Holy Spirit was basic to any ministry he was doing. This Spirit influences the human spirit and changes hearts. Look for him where motivations are changing.
Spirit-inspired church life is different from what happens in social organizations. For several decades after World War II the Red Cross and fraternal associations were taken as a model for many Protestant churches trying to improve their ministries. But the results were disappointing because those methods depend on just human energy. The challenge for mainline traditional congregations is to learn how to unleash Spirit energy.
Martin Luther was an avid disciple of Paul. We can rediscover Lutheran strengths by developing Pauline ministries that are both grace-focused and Spirit-shaped.
Does the distinction between calling to a culture or to a relationship make sense to you? What happens when a church culture starts to fade away? Do you feel some church cultures have a superiority complex?
Great! Simple and easy to understand.
God is everywhere. In church, out of church, and the holy Spirit works where there is love being shared. I’m no expert on history, can’t always quote the scripture I’m trying to relay to someone–and yet God uses me, an ordinary Lay Person and staff of the Unite Methodist Church. Around the world we are partnering with cultures to save, help, and rescue those in need…and in doing so the love of Christ and His calling shines brightly to those in darkness. Our calling can no longer be contained to the “church” because we as the body of Christ in this chaotic world must take our calling to be the hands an feet of Jesus into the world. Waiting and advertising for people to come to church is futile–so me must mix Christ’s calling with the cultural callings that are being like Mother Teresa and serving anyone and everyone who is in need. we must be a part of all cultures, accept all people, and be God’s light to all. May God bless you for your wonderful teachings that comfort and promote thought and wonder beyond our comfortable scope of serving.
Good afternoon, David. Those are great questions to wrestle with. I like the idea of learning from others the nuts and bolts of how they do ministry. I recognize whether Lutheran liturgical or non-denominational worship, these are delivery systems to make the disciples we are intending to make according to our understanding of what a disciple is. The churches that are growing seem to have an intentional discipleship track laid out that receives people where they are in the faith and seeks to bring them along. Often, in our Lutheran churches, many of our people were taught in a manner that affects how they receive or do not receive newer folks of a different Christian background. And moving a church to go beyond certain membership sizes does take prayer, the Word and time for adaptive change to take place. I will trust the Spirit’s work in the Word to do what is needed for sin not to be a barrier is a disciples’ growth! Blessings!
The distinction totally makes sense to me. Cultures evolve over time, but God’s will for us never changes. The Bible reminds us not to follow the patterns of this world but to follow Him. He is our constant.
However, I don’t think the church can survive without culture and not all culture is bad. Hopefully, the church can embrace the culture WITHOUT embracing its idols.
As Christians, we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20). We represent another world, while we live in the midst of this one.
And if church cultures fade, we should still be grounded in our faith and relationship with Christ.
Regarding a superiority complex….absolutely! It’s unfortunate but it happens. Churches need to be grounded in the Word. Nothing else really matters. Jesus always needs to be the focus.
I’ve been reading the Confessions of our church contained in the Book of Concord.It is very clear that there is no hint of a Call to a culture.We have been called to have a living
relationship with our Lord Jesus.Over and over again the message is very clear,The Holy Spirit has called us to such a relationship.The Confessions remind us that nothing can
happen in our personal and church life apart from the Holy Spirit.We are to be attentive to the “urgings of the Spirit” (Formula of Concord SD Article XI) The Holy Spirit creates
“new activities and emotions in the intellect’ (Formula,Article II) He works a vital faith
enabling the believer to have a joy and willingness to love and serve others.(SD Article IV)
All of the above and so much more apply to any culture
The Lord blessed me with a ministry mostly spent building His Church among Southern Baptists (Southeastern and Florida-Georgia Districts. Your book was spot on for me as I began a new ministry in a Baptist culture in 1989. I already had the ideas, but that book really sharpened them.
Christian cultures are always a mix of Christ and the world. The Holy Spirit is busy working call the lost from darkness into the light of Christ. So often the light of the Church is a dimmed culture-corrupted light. That often makes ‘faith’ an add-on to ‘normal’ life, with conversion or confirmation being a modification of worldly values (as in ‘Christian Nationalism’ – a serious oxymoron today).
So very much we need the Holy Spirit conforming our personal, and then our church culture to Christ even as He uses us to call others out of the deadly culture with no light within.
The question of calling to a culture or a relationship seems to be a both/and question rather than either/or. Challenges arise when the two get out of balance.
During the period in which the biblical texts were written, faith was understood as a relationship of trust in God based on God taking the initiative to reveal himself to someone in his or her life. Faith is a gift from God, given at a time and situation of God’s choosing. This is in contrast to someone taking the initiative to recite doctrine to become a “believer,” a word with which I am not entirely comfortable.
As people to whom God reveals himself come together in churches, each church will develop its own rituals, traditions, and values. Different such cultures will be attractive to different people which likely is one reason why there are any number of denominations.
Church cultures fading away seems to have a couple related causes. Churches, over time and through changing leadership, can lose sight of God’s call to them and what drove them to come together in the first place. Perhaps this is what the author of Revelation referred to when speaking of churches losing their lampstands. Perhaps this creates an imbalance of culture over relationship to God in ways not entirely positive.
This may be reflected in how some churches and denominations respond to the current secular assault on churches and the devaluing of faith in God. Some churches have responded by aligning with various secular fads. Their message seems to be, “we check all the right boxes, and, at minimum, we’re not a threat to what passes for current secular ‘wisdom.'” I have seen situations where alignment with secular masters equates to a sense of “superiority.”
The question for churches is how do they maintain their cultures based on God’s revelation to people in their lives? How do churches do what is right instead of what is easy? The difference isn’t always clear.
How do churches listen and act on God’s call to them? How are they called to engage the communities and world around them?
Hi John,
You’re framing the issue well and asking the right questions. Interesting observation that those churches that align with secular interpretations often convey a sense of superiority, usually over against traditional churches. Many traditional churches do take the easy way and just repeat traditions. But is that the right way to spread the Gospel? We live in challenging times.
Blessings,
Dave