What Happened To Our Churches

What Happened To Our Churches

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18 Comments

The Lutheran Option to Live in Two Kingdoms

The Lutheran Option to Live in Two Kingdoms

The world of Lutheranism is very different from the world of Calvinists.   I realized this when preparing for the philosophy subject test of the Graduate Record Examination at the end of my senior year of college.  Ethics would be a component of this sub-test.  My philosophy professor realized that I had not had an ethics […]

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: church culture, christian, lutheran, Luecke, Christian life, calvinism, post-morden culture, conflict

4 Comments

The Neo-Calvinist Option to Reform Our Culture

The Neo-Calvinist Option to Reform Our Culture

Those who pursue the Benedict Option basically reject the post-modern culture of our times.  They would set up their own counterculture through communities that submit themselves to distinctive Christian practices, especially prayer. Neo-Calvinists would take the opposite approach of trying to reform the political process of a country to support religious institutions. The best representative […]

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: church culture, christian, lutheran, Luecke, neo-calvinism, neo-calvinist, calvinism, post-modern culture, luther, john calvin

16 Comments

church-reformation

Interpreting the Reformation 500 Years Later

We Lutherans make a big deal about the Reformation.  We celebrate it on October 31, the date in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.   These very scholarly statements challenged the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church at that time, which was the only institutional […]

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: church, reformation, church culture, american culture, post modern culture, reforming the church, reforming behavior

5 Comments

Gods-Presence-in-Church

God’s Empowering Presence in Traditional Churches

What will church cultures look like in America as it transitions into the post-Christian era?  Pivotal for my understanding of a fresh perspective on church life was the study of Gordon Fee’s 967-page book God’s Empowering Presence (1994)—his careful and thorough study of the 169 references to the Spirit in the Apostle Paul’s letters. He […]

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Holy Spirit, church culture, traditional church, christian, lutheran, presence of God, missionaries

9 Comments

church-cultures

Three American Cultures in One Lifetime

Most traditional mainline Christians are still in the Sacred-Canopy Culture that prevailed through previous American history. After World War II the Modern Scientific Culture challenged the traditional. Mainline ministers oriented themselves to addressing that new culture.  Traditional churches were on the defensive.  But in recent decades young adult Americans have moved on to the Post-Modern […]

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: sacred canopy, church culture, christian, american culture, modern culture, post modern culture, lutheran

5 Comments

Fine-Tune Your Congregation’s Church Culture

Congregations have a church culture. Each is unique in some way but shares much with other congregations in the same church body. One denomination’s general culture is different from that of another.

When traditionalists want to preserve their tradition, the necessary question is which tradition: the church culture of the 1970s, which is different from that of the 1930s, which is different from that of the 1880s, which is different from the church culture in the 18th century back in the homeland. Church cultures change over the generations in sensible ways. Leaders are continually fine-tuning what they do and how. Seldom does a congregation’s culture change abruptly and completely, however, that is the fear of many who resist.

What does change are the ways of communicating and organizing.

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Filed Under: Discipled by the Spirit Tagged With: church, church growth, church planting, church life, church culture

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