The Day I Got Punched when I Dared to Be Lutheran

By Rev. Paul T. McCain

I got punched the day I first dared to be Lutheran. I grew up in the deep South and the public high schools in my home town were really bad. The year I was in the eighth grade at my Lutheran grade school, there was a big race riot on the campus of Escambia County High School, the very school I was supposed to go to in a few months! My parents thought that sending me to a place where rioting was a team sport wasn’t such a good idea. So they sent me to Pensacola Catholic High School instead.

I was really upset by how cloudy and murky the Gospel was in Roman Catholicism. It made me dig deeply into what I had been taught as a Lutheran. I had to go to Mass at least once a month for four years. I sat respectfully, not participating, but I was listening intently. They sounded and looked a lot like Lutherans, but the preaching was just terrible. They never talked about Jesus and the forgiveness of sins. I admired and liked some things about Roman Catholicism, but then, smack! They got it all wrong. They didn’t talk much about Christ and the forgiveness of sins. In other words, the Gospel was just not there clearly and consistently.

After I graduated from Roman Catholic high school I didn’t want to have anything to do with anything that even looked “Roman Catholic.” If it looked or sounded to my eyes and ears even remotely Roman Catholic, I was angry! I hated it. I thought that if I could get as far away from Romanism as possible in outward things, I would not have to worry about falling into the errors of Rome in doctrine.

I was wrong. I learned more about the Lutheran church and its history. I remember reading for the first time in the Augsburg Confession, our most important Lutheran confession, how our fathers in the faith said that they never intended to do anything contrary to the truly “catholic” or “universal” church but to correct errors. It dawned on me that what is truly “catholic” is not necessarily “Roman” and what is wrong about Roman doctrine is actually deeply anti-Christian and, therefore, not “catholic” at all! It’s not what is believed on the basis of the Bible, by all people, everywhere, at all times.That was quite a revelation to me. And so now I rejoice in the good customs and traditions of the historic Lutheran Church. Being Lutheran is great. Dare to be Lutheran? You bet.

And you want to hear something I’ve not told many people? God has a great sense of humor, I’m convinced. One big reason I’m a Lutheran pastor today is because so many of the priests and nuns and monks at my Roman Catholic high school, each, in their own kind way, quietly urged me to be a Lutheran pastor. In both my junior and senior year in high school they awarded me religion student of the year. I worked really hard to explain and understand carefully what they believed as Roman Catholics and to understand what I believed as a Lutheran. Wrong as they were in many of their important beliefs, God used my Roman Catholic teachers to set me on a path that has led me to where I am today. Let’s do what we can to understand Roman Catholics and witness to them and speak about what we have in common and gently lead them to put Christ at the center and trust entirely in Him.

Maybe you’ll get smacked around a bit when you dare to be Lutheran. Jesus went through worse than that for you and He’ll see you through whatever might happen when you dare to be faithful to Him. So, dare to be Lutheran!

Rev. Paul McCain is Interim President and CEO as well as Executive Director of Editorial at Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis, Missouri. His email address is boc1580@aol.com.