Deeper understandings Church of the future
How will it look? Certainly the next stage along the pilgrim way & seldom boring Editor’s note: This series is intended
to be a public conversation among teach- ing theologians of the ELCA on various themes of our faith and the challenging issues of our day. It invites readers to engage in dialogue by posting comments online at the end of each article at www.
thelutheran.org. The series is edited by Philip D.W.
Krey, president of the Lutheran Theologi- cal Seminary at Philadelphia, on behalf of the presidents of the eight ELCA seminaries.
By Nathan Frambach and Cheryl M. Peterson
A
fter many emails and posts and text messages, we decided that an old-fashioned face-to-face
meeting would be best to tackle this assignment. As we talked over coffee in Bexley, Ohio, we found ourselves intrigued by the question we were given. But instead of “Will the church have a future?” or “What is the future
of the church?” we zeroed in on “How the church of the future will look.” In other words, since the church will be, the more figural question is, “What will it look like? This question has been engaged
by the likes of theologian Douglas John Hall (Has the Church a Future? 2009) and one of our contempo- rary Lutheran sages, Timothy Lull (“The Church of the Future and the Prospects for Ecumenism,” Word & World, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 1998), in whose company we feel humbled to contribute our own thoughts. We begin with the obvious: inso-
far as both the church and the future belong to God, the church of the future will “look” like whatever God intends or desires it to. As disciples of Christ, we trust and
live and worship and serve and do our best to discern what “church” the world needs as the future unfolds— trusting the Spirit’s agency along with ours. And because we know that “the church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church,” the church is and always will be called to witness to and participate in God’s mission, all the while knowing that the “mission” as well as the “future” does not belong to the church, but to God. We are not seers, so what we offer
Author bios:
Peterson (left) is associate professor of systematic theology at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio, and Frambach is professor of pastoral theology at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.
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www.thelutheran.org
here is some imagination about what the church of the future will look like—at least in North America. To start with, we certainly believe
that God intends the church of the future to be more than a system of belief or a commodity that can be programmed, packaged, marketed and tweeted as the ever-elusive new and improved quick fix. Christian
beliefs and practices are intended to foster a way of life as disciples of Jesus Christ that in turn send us into God’s world to imitate the forgiveness, mercy and love of God. Claimed by God in baptism and drawn by the Spirit, we are invited to participate in the life and mission of Jesus Christ within community and in God’s world. This is a gift to which the Spirit calls people; it is not something we create or can force.
Ecumenical must So what might this look like? With Lull, we believe it needs to
be ecumenical, as the great question for Christians in the 21st century is likely to be what it means to be a Christian—rather than a Lutheran or a Presbyterian or an Episcopalian— in a world of many Christian groups, many religions, and widespread indifference to religious affiliation. For us this means bringing our dis- tinctive Lutheran voice while recog- nizing the gifts other denominations have to offer to the common mission we share as members of the one body. We believe it will be less about
being tied to a building and more about participating in a way of life, a life of discipleship. It will mean an understanding of church that is more nimble, more agile, perhaps more mobile, yet deeply rooted in God’s word of promise in Jesus Christ. If we are to be the gathered and
gathering community as the people of God, then we need to learn better how to go out the door. We need to learn how to be an authentic, wel- coming community in a place. Yet we will also need to leave our church
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