They Need Not Go Away

Recapturing Lutheran Spirituality

Timothy A. Rippstein

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725260009
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Have you ever wondered how the Lord sustained Martin Luther through one of the most personally and spiritually intense times in the history of Christendom? And does God still do this today? The answer is yes! They Need Not Go Away is a practical book identifying and teaching modern-day Millennials and Gen Zers about Lutheran spirituality. It offers prayer practices designed and applied by Martin Luther, the Reformer, for modern families, individuals, adults, and teenagers. These spiritual practices are also applied to the modern Christian. To support these practices and the Lutheran contribution to Christian spirituality, this volume traces the influences of Martin Luther's piety from pre-Reformation influencers to Dr. Luther as he navigated the tremendous social, cultural, and ecclesiastical pressures of his time. His spirituality is then traced through the next generations of Orthodoxy and Pietism identifying the shifts away from the affective aspects of Lutheran spirituality and elevation of the academic and more cognitive characteristics received in the twentieth century. The goal is to recapture the wholistic spirituality including the cognitive, affective, and experiential features. These are still useful in the hands of the Lord for today's believers.

Unit 3

Chapter 6

Opportunity Knocking

“They need not go away.” Rather than effectively sending these souls away from our congregations and believing communities, “You give them something to eat.” The work of God’s people is to hear the cry for spiritual food, understand the increasingly postmodern culture, and respond with the gifts Christ has given to us. This is being who we are, the “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). The progression in the act of feeding the 5,000 is instructive for us, “Then he [Jesus] broke the loaves . . . gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied” (Matthew 14:19—20). The Lord offers life-giving nourishment to His own disciples; they in turn share what they have received to those who are hungry around them. They can only give that which has been received. The great news for the postmodern hunger is that we have received wholesome food to share with a spiritually hungry generation.

One blessing to the church today is the discipline of sociology. Many reliable sociologists are observing shifting cultural values. We appreciate the work of such groups as Barna, Pew Research, Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), American Religion Identification Survey (ARIS), and Spirituality in Higher Education. Through their research and gifted Christian thinkers such as Donald Carson, Christian Smith, and Sandra Schneiders, we have identified the nature of this hungry and thirsty generation. But how can we respond? How can we take what we have received from the Lord to feed a new generation the nutritious, spiritual food who has come down from heaven?

Such books by D.A. Carson as The Gagging of God, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, Christian Smith’s Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, and Sandra Schneiders’ articles; “Approach to the Study of Christian Spirituality,” “Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum, and Spirituality in the Academy.”

With the aid of such diverse Christian writers as D.A. Carson, Brian McLaren, Steve Chalke, Sally Morgenthaler, Dan Kimball, and Alan Mann, as well as the many unnamed Millennials living a postmodern worldview, we can observe nine values held by most of people who are leaving the mainline churches:

1. Authenticity
   Authenticity is highly regarded by a generation which has been poked, prodded, studied, and surveyed more than any previous generation. Just imagine when Generation Z (those following the Millennials and born since 1995) gets a little older! Along with all this studying is the market research designed to identify where and how Millennials are spending their time and money. The Christian marketplace has not missed out on the business and marketing opportunities for attracting, entertaining, and acquiring the following and finances of this generation which possesses tremendous resources. In response, we have a generation of suspicious young people who are tired of hidden agendas and are now seeking authenticity.
2. Community and Relationships
   From TV shows such as Cheers, “Where everybody knows your name” to Friends and The Big Bang Theory, where no one directly related enters into and shares one another’s lives intimately, to the plethora of “reality” shows where we watch communities randomly brought together, Millennials seek community. This generation produced such electronic communities as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. As a respected cultural observer and interpreter of postmodern culture, Sally Morgenthaler has proclaimed, “The postmodern, post—Christian world is relational to the core. It is much more interested in matters of being than simply knowing.”
3. Spirituality
   Much has already been written above on this value. It was Judy Rogers, a researcher with the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, who identified spirituality as a congruency between one’s inner self and outer self, or words and actions.27
   Many of us attempt to define this ‘spirituality’ with great frustration. The need for a strong, concise and precise definition is a desire and value of a modern generation, not necessarily so for postmoderns. This spirituality is more subjective, affective, individualistic, and relational and therefore defies a clearly and rationally defined spirituality.
4. Experience
   The Millennial generation focuses upon collecting experiences rather than simply reading about them. No other era of young people has engaged in short-term mission trips, servant excursions, and international travel like this one; they have the resources to engage in a more experiential existence. This experiential theme also carries over into the spiritual life. Two examples will suffice here: Dan Kimball, a pastor in Santa Cruz, CA writes, “Their desire is to experience God and not just be told about him or told about the things he doesn’t like, which also happen to be the things they want to do.”28 Harvard Divinity School professor, Harvey Cox, has been working on a project called “Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.” He states, “They [those who claim SBNR] want a more direct experience of God and Spirit. And I don’t think it’s really going to go away.”29 Millennials place a high value on the experiential.
5. Exposure of Modern Weaknesses
   In addition to these four values; authenticity, relationships and community, spirituality, and experience, we can add five more with the insights of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School New Testament professor Donald Carson. Millennials challenge the established structures and therefore offer a service. Our fifth value in this list of nine is that postmoderns expose modernity’s weaknesses and pretensions. The scientific thinking of The Enlightenment has, at times, given over to “unfettered arrogance.” Carson has written a well-thought-out book titled Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, which helps us to better understand and appreciate some of the characteristics of this postmodern world view. Through this feature, he has exposed modernity’s tendency toward overstating the roles of human reason and our methodical attempts to control human understanding. Reason, which had replaced faith in previous centuries, is being challenged by this new worldview, which desires a larger canvas upon which to paint meaning, existence, and identity.
6. Nonlinear and Unrigorous Method...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Unit I
• Unit 2
• Unit 3
• LCMS Spirituality in the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries
• Glossary
• Bibliography