Dare To Be Lutheran: A Relevant Font

By Aaron D.Wolf

“Your font just isn’t relevant.” When Professor Worldly Wisdom told me that, I’m pretty sure I felt a tiny, hot vein pulse on my forehead. How can a font be not relevant?

I wore many hats at our small evangelical church, or what I like to call the Willow Creek Mini-Me Clone Church: worship leader, elder, and bulletin maker. We couldn’t afford an expensive video projector for our song lyrics, so worshippers had to rely on our little bulletins, printed on a folded 8-1/2 x 11-inch piece of warm, friendly canary-colored paper from Kinkos. But I had committed a mortal sin according to the Canon Law of Cool Churches. I’d used an unfriendly Gothic font.

Dr. Wisdom, a professor at Fancy Pants Evangelical Seminary (names have been changed to protect the guilty), was our consultant, a guru who was explaining why our church wasn’t growing.

He started out, “I’m an unchurched guy who’s been invited by one of your people. I come in here and sit down and open up this bulletin and BAM! You hit me with this churchy font. And I’m already uncomfortable.”

His point was that everything counts when you’re programming a service “because lost people matter to God. Are you willing to risk one soul coming to Christ because you like German fonts?”

Many moons have passed since that frustrating day. Today the Way of Willow (the philosophy of the gigantic Willow Creek Community Church of Barrington, Illinois) has infected formerly traditional churches of every stripe. Now, many churches—even Lutheran ones that for centuries had traditional worship and a common liturgy with only minor changes over the years—feel compelled to follow the thought process outlined by Professor Worldly Wisdom. Perhaps you’ve seen this, and if it was at a small church compared to Willow Creek (twenty-four thousand people attend on weekends), the experience might not have been pretty. It’s one thing when the praise band is made up of a host of trained, skilled musicians. But when Pastor Lutefisk and four other middle-aged men and women and their guitars and Clavinovas struggle through such contemporary classics as “You Are My All in All,” a song that is almost fifteen years old, you might find yourself asking why you bothered to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.

Still, Professor Wisdom’s question is left hanging in the air. “Are you willing to risk one soul coming to Christ because of your liturgy?” Many of us who love to sing the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Sanctus every Sunday don’t have a good answer to that question. We get caught up in debates over drums and small groups and even fonts but miss the big picture. In the Way of Willow, the burden is on you to save souls.

That burden was lifted from me when I stumbled upon the Lutheran Confessions, the collection of biblical doctrines to which we who dare to be Lutheran hold.

There I learned that Professor Worldly Wisdom’s question was the wrong question. Instead, we must ask, “What separates a sinner from God?” And the answer to that is not “our style,” but the fact that they are dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1), unable to respond even to the slickest of programming. Next comes, “What can save sinners and make them alive again?” And the answer is that they need to hear God’s Law, His judgment on their sinful condition, just like a vampire needs a stake through the heart to convince him that he’s dead. They need to hear God’s Word of forgiveness, the Gospel, that Christ has freely given them through His bitter suffering, death,and resurrection.These are the things that God delivers through our old-fashioned Lutheran liturgy, hymns, and preaching,along with those things that are rarely seen in the Cool Churches: the altar, where we receive forgiveness through Christ’s body and blood, and the font, where God washes away sins and makes dead men live.These things aren’t very flashy, but God has used them for two thousand years and through countless generations, while the world has changed and one fickle trend has yielded to the next.

Following the Way of Willow is confusing because it teaches us that we’re not so bad af ter all. It says all we need is a little more convincing, a little more tweaking. It also breeds arrogance in our hearts, because we assume that our use of relevant fonts has bridged the gap between heaven and hell that only a crucified Redeemer could bridge. Since sinners matter to God, so much so that He paid for their sins on a bloody cross, what could be more effective than a straightforward liturgy and hymns that tell them the Good News? Of the Lord’s Supper, St. Ambrose said, “Because I am sick, I am bound to take the medicine.” What does a man sick with sin need more than the medicine of forgiveness? And St. Paul tells us “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27 NKJV). Now there’s a relevant font!

Aaron D. Wolf (awolf@rockfordinstitute.org) is the associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published in Rockford, Illinois. He is a member of Reformation Evangelical Lutheran Church (LCMS) and the father of four children.