This year, 2023, marks my twentieth year back in the Lutheran church after twenty-five years away from it, mostly in Pentecostal churches. I’m glad to say I’m still very happy I’m a Lutheran. By contrast, I was beginning to have significant doubts about being a Pentecostal after only five or six years in the Pentecostal church, and that was even before the church of which I was a member fell into a dreadful scandal that split the church several years later. But now as a Lutheran, my confidence in the teaching and worship of the Lutheran church* continues to grow steadily.
So, in a modest celebration of twenty years as a Lutheran, I’d like to briefly list some reasons for my happiness with life as a Lutheran:
1) It’s a way of life that gives first place to faith, not to emotions and experience. Emotions and experience aren’t necessarily bad, but they don’t belong in the driver’s seat. Faith in Jesus and in his Word belongs there, and that’s where the Lutheran church keeps it, firmly holding off all other contenders for the position. Another way of putting this is to say that the reason the Father sends us the Holy Spirit and his gifts is to create and maintain faith in Christ, not to give us exciting spiritual experiences.
2) There is a proper emphasis on good works in Lutheran teaching, as flowing out of gratitude to God for Christ’s work for us. Contrary to the attacks of opponents, Lutheran teaching doesn’t say good works are unnecessary. What it says is that good works are unnecessary for salvation and that good works have no place at all in any discussion of what justifies us before God.
3) The grace of God is properly taught as what alone, through faith in Christ, makes us righteous and justifies us; and that grace means specifically his gift to us of the forgiveness of all our sins for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t mean a quality we are endowed with by God that enables us to keep his law perfectly or earn his approval by our own efforts or obedience.
4) Further, Lutheran teaching preserves the Scriptural revelation that grace is given by the Holy Spirit through external means: the Word of God itself (preached or written), baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Because the Lutheran church teaches this correctly, the Scriptural rites of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were restored to me after I had suffered under the neglect of their true worth in Pentecostal churches.
5) There’s an awareness in the Lutheran church of the importance of good doctrine and of the dangers of false doctrine that was missing in Pentecostal churches. Christian doctrine and theology are simply the careful, ordered accounting of everything Scripture teaches. Lutheran teachers know neglecting that study comes at a cost—a weakness of knowledge that can lead Christians out of true faith and into confusion and instability.
6) I’ve learned that peace and stability aren’t bad things if you have them because your faith is in God and His Word; if that’s the case, it’s expected that you should have them. The Bible says lots of good things about them, but Pentecostal churches teach, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that peace and stability are signs of spiritual stagnation or dead faith. Because of that, many Christians are led into thinking faith is something that must be challenged or proved by always moving into new spiritual experiences said to be “moves of God.” When I was a Pentecostal, I saw the resulting spiritual instability and anxiety corrupt quite a few individuals and churches. It’s good to be free of that now.
7) I get so much more out of the historic liturgy and hymns of the church than out of contemporary styles of worship, which now seem emotionally manipulative and spiritually shallow to me. Also, I’ve realized that the Scriptures do not really endorse spontaneity and informality, but rather commend order and structure in worship. And I’ve found that, in the long haul, liturgical worship wears much better—there’s so much more enduring spiritual substance there.
*The “Lutheran church,” means to me the set of Lutheran churches that has kept to the Lutheran Confessions and the historic liturgy. Sadly, that’s not the majority of them.