The Lutheran August 2020

N A TIO N A L M A G A ZIN E O F THE L U THE RA N C HU RC H O F A U STRA LIA

AUGUST 2020

d’s You are Go his temple and you.

Spirit lives in

VOL 54 N07

Print Post Approved PP100003514

H IA 1 C O R IN T

EV) N S 3 :1 6 (C

WHAT WE'RE

LEARNING

FROM COVID-19

LUTHERAN

CHURCH OF AUSTRALIA

You’ll never walk alone

EDITORIAL

Editor Lisa McIntosh

When the ALWS Walk My Way event scheduled for South Australia’s Barossa Valley in May was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kellie Leske, Ann Fitzgerald, Meagan Schwarz and Janet Haby decided to walk as individuals to raise funds to help refugee children in Africa to go to school. The four friends from St John’s Unley in suburban Adelaide observed social distancing while walking 29 kilometres from North Adelaide to Henley Beach and back and still had the energy to check out Meagan’s photo in the May edition of The Lutheran.

Lutheran. The photo was taken by Janet’s husband Richard.

p 08 8267 7300 m 0409 281 703 e lisa.mcintosh@lca.org.au Executive Editor Linda Macqueen p 08 8267 7300 e linda.macqueen@lca.org.au

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LUTHERAN

CHURCH OF AUSTRALIA The Lutheran informs the members of the LCA about the church’s teaching, life, mission and people, helping them to grow in faith and commitment to Jesus Christ.

The Lutheran also provides a forum for a range of opinions, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editor or the policies of the Lutheran Church of Australia.

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Culture centre groundsperson ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.’

Lucy Fielke St Michael’s Hahndorf SA Year 12 student Most treasured Bible text: Jeremiah 29:11 ‘“For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future”.’

Let the light of someone you know shine through their photo being featured in The Lutheran and LCA Facebook. With their permission, send us a good quality photo, their name and details (congregation, occupation, what they enjoy doing, most treasured text in these difficult times) and your contact details.

August Special features EDITOR'S

let ter

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When our LCA/NZ church buildings closed their doors to public worship in March, I didn’t imagine that some would still be closed in August. Or that increasing numbers of people around the world would still be sick and dying from this coronavirus. Or that suburbs, cities, states and countries would be returning to lockdowns, having failed to contain the spread of the virus, or having been hit by a second wave of infections.

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This is nowhere near over. Despite the money and mind power being thrown at developing a vaccine, we don’t know when one will be ready, if ever.

So, what are we learning from all of this? I think the first thing is to admit that this is way beyond us – we’re not in control.

What we can do is take our grief and fears to the Lord in prayer.

We can trust God’s promise that he is with us in our sorrows and uncertainties.

Paradoxically, with church buildings closed, it appears that in some congregations more people than ever have been engaging in worship – through online platforms. And not just active church members, but people who haven’t been inside a church for years, too, along with those who’ve never previously attended.

But our efforts at being the church to our communities will always fall short if we rely on our own strength – and on the way we’ve always done things in the past. What we’ve seen as the church has been forced to adapt, step out in faith and trust God’s Spirit for guidance is that people have responded.

Our contributors for this edition explore these and other lessons.

I pray that you’ll be at the same time comforted and challenged by their words.

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Online worship makes legitimate connections

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10 things I’ve learnt during COVID-19

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What I’ve learnt from home

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Church@Home

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Care and connection

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Regulars 4

Heartland

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So another critical lesson is that the church is not a building, or even an organisation. It’s not limited to Sunday worship, whether onsite or online. No, the church is all of us, the living, breathing body of Christ, every day and in every place.

We have been further reminded of this truth by pertinent memes on social media, such as: ‘We will never change the world by going to church. We will only change the world by being the church’.

A revolution! Learning to be church in a pandemic

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Dwelling in God’s word

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Going GREYT!

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The inside story

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Directory

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Your voice

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Sudoku

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Prayer calendar

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It’s become apparent amid the tragedy of COVID-19 that God has given us the opportunity to reflect, recharge and reset our course as church. With our eyes, ears and hearts open to what he wants to teach us, let’s not waste this opportunity.

Lisa PS – Thanks to all of you who have responded to the subscriber survey included with our July edition, as well as online. We hope to bring you the results in our next issue.

Our cover: iStock.com The Lutheran AU G U S T 2 0 2 0

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JES U S I S G OD'S LOVE. HE G IVES U S NE W HE ARTS TO L AY AS IDE O UR OL D WAYS, TO B EL IE VE AND FOL LOW HIM, TO L IVE WI T H HIM E VERY DAY.

heartland

RE V JOHN HENDERSON

Bishop Lutheran Church of Australia

FORG IVEN AND RE ADY TO BE A BLES SING ‘Now, mortal man, tell the Israelites that when someone good sins, the good he has done will not save him’ (Ezekiel 33:12 GNB).

‘My help will come from the Lord, who made heaven and earth’ (Psalm 121:2 GNB).

Do you ever lie awake at night ruminating over an incident in your life, or something wrong you once did? Even if it was years ago, does the memory still make you feel embarrassed, ashamed, or guilty?

Just one tiny sliver of evil is enough to knock our life off course. It all started with an infraction we might think was relatively minor. ‘Did God really tell you not to eat fruit from any tree in the garden?’ (Genesis 3:1). Through this temptation, the serpent succeeded in shattering the bond of love and trust between humankind and God. Every

SI N IS N OT J UST A FEW ACCI DENTS OR M ISTAKES ; IT IS TH E TOTAL CORRU PTION OF OU R BEI NG . FAITH SET US FREE TO CO N FESS SUCH SI N , CERTAI N OF GOD’S G RACIOUS PARDO N .

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day we experience the results of that lost relationship all around us and within us.

That God didn’t bring everything to an end right there and then was an act of grace. In love he sent his Son as the new Adam, to voluntarily take our place. Jesus bore our guilt and shame.

When he died and rose, he took them and their punishment away. Now they can only harm us when we choose to step outside the new loving, trusting relationship we have with God through him. The judgement over sin is gone, but original sin lingers, tempting us not to trust God, not to trust Jesus for our salvation and not to love others as we ourselves are loved.

This is a time of overlapping realities.

Right and wrong, good and evil, righteousness and sin are sometimes simple choices. More often, however, within a situation, they can be stubborn, complex dilemmas. They are made harder because the sin that clings to us most is our self-regard and, with it, our sense of self-righteousness.

We fool ourselves if we try to caricature such moral complexity as black and white, ‘goodies and baddies’, usually with the result that we blame someone or something else. For instance, ‘Black Lives Matter’ promotes an obvious truth that we can yet be blind to. Racism is sin and too often it’s built into the system in ways that we

don’t even see. But replacing one prejudice with another will not solve the problem. We will only get better when we take responsibility and learn from our mistakes and those of earlier generations. Otherwise, whatever noble intentions we may have, we won’t be able to touch the real problem, the one inside ourselves.

In this complex time of difficult moral choices, we pray: ‘Almighty God, our maker and redeemer, we confess to you that by nature we are sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against you by thought, word, and deed.’ We need not fear praying this radical prayer, which comes from the LCA Service of the Word. Sin is not just a few accidents or mistakes; it is the total corruption of our being. Faith sets us free to confess such sin, certain of God’s gracious pardon. God still loves us and welcomes us. In baptism, he has washed away our sin and raised us to new life. Each day we live once more in that baptismal grace.

So, if you do lie awake at night ruminating, remember that your God is there with you, just as he always has been. You can fall asleep peacefully in the knowledge that you are a forgiven sinner. And when the morning comes you can rise, assured by your baptism, armed with God’s promise and ready to be a blessing to all those God sends your way that day.

A revolution!

L E A R N I N G TO B E C H U R C H I N A PA N D E M I C

BY LISA MCINTOSH

The coronavirus pandemic has been a terrible global tragedy in the true sense of the word, with a huge death toll. It has also swallowed up jobs and businesses and sent economic shockwaves around the world.

And there are other less-seen costs, too, resulting from the isolation that lockdowns or restrictions have caused, in the areas of mental health, domestic and family violence, addictions and relationship stress.

Even for people not personally affected by the loss of loved ones, health or livelihood, the virus has taken away things many of us have taken for granted in our comfortable lifestyles in Australia and New Zealand.

Work, school, family, social activities and even church life have been affected. No restaurants, no sport, no pubs or clubs, and no church on Sunday – at least, not the type of church we were used to.

All of a sudden, congregations were forced into the digital online world, streaming, meeting, or sharing worship via various internet platforms, emailing sermons and other faith-life resources to some parishioners and physically delivering them to others.

Amid all the suffering from COVID-19 though, God has given us some precious and, in the context of the 21st century, rare gifts. He has given us the gift of more time, less busyness and distraction, and the chance to rest in him and reflect on what it really means to be the body of Christ, his church in the world. In doing so, he has challenged us to look outside ourselves and what we have been used to.

Some of the LCA/NZ’s leaders in local mission believe these gifts present an opportunity too good to miss in fulfilling the Great Commission, and that many of us are looking for something other than a return to ‘normal’.

The South Australia – Northern Territory District’s Assistant Bishop for Mission, Pastor Stephen Schultz, says that, pre-COVID, many of us saw worship on Sunday as the be-all and end-all, and that we would offer worship only on our terms and expect community members to simply come to us and fit in with us. He says this model is flawed.

‘Basically, you’d rock up to church and tick a box to say, “Yep, I’ve done that, I’m a good little Christian”, The Lutheran AU G U S T 2 0 2 0

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and away you’d go’, he says. ‘And we’ve been thinking that model of church needed to break down. But that was going to require a culture change, and a culture change takes years, maybe generations.

‘And then “bang”, along comes COVID and what normally would take years, we’ve been able to achieve in months. So from my perspective, we don’t really want to miss this opportunity and the rhetoric we’re hearing from people is that we don’t want to go back to the way things were.

‘Of course, some people have seen this as a momentary disruption. But this is not a disruption, this is a revolution. This is an opportunity for us to rethink “church”.’

Pastor Stephen says he had heard the story of a congregation which, like many, had been declining in numbers. While previously there had been between 50 and 70 people attending worship with the congregation each Sunday, since going online with worship it has made approximately 100 new non-church contacts.

Pre-COVID, the congregation’s Messy Church program had been reaching a few non-member families, whereas it is now in touch with around 20.

‘It’s almost like church had been happening behind closed doors’, Pastor Stephen says. ‘It’s as though it’s been a private thing, it was for the religious people.

And the attitude has been, “How do we get people

into our territory, onto our turf?” And so we’ll put on amazing programs, but it’s all been on our terms still, it’s all operating mission from a position of strength.

‘Well, it’s as though God has said to us, “I’m shutting your doors, you can’t go on site, so what does it mean for you to be the church offsite? Forget your programs.

Get out there. And what am I giving you to take with you? I’m giving you the good news”.

‘Well, hallelujah, praise the Lord, that’s all we need!’

Pastor David Schmidt, Queensland’s ministry and mission director, says that, after speaking with and listening to many people from across the church, there is a view that many of us have ‘developed a very narrow understanding of what word and sacrament are about’.

‘My interpretation of what I’ve been hearing is that we’ve thought it’s simply about what happens in the sermon on Sunday morning and getting holy communion’, he says. ‘But what was reinforced from a conversation I had this morning with a bunch of pastors was that the word is actually incarnational. It’s got to be out there and transforming lives.

‘One pastor said that he’s been challenged through what has happened to realise that he hasn’t done discipleship well, that discipleship is about walking alongside people.

‘And he said the other part of it is sacramental. He said the sacramental aspect of God coming to us is

‘ B UT TH IS IS N OT A D IS R U PTI O N , TH IS IS A revolution. TH IS IS A N O PPO RTU N IT Y F O R US TO rethink “CH U RCH ”.’

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‘ IT ’S I M PO RTANT TO R ECOG N IS E TH AT W E A R E sacramental W H EN W E A R E EN GAG ED I N TH E WO R LD ARO U N D US .’

absolutely true and that’s what people are yearning for and missing.

‘Some people have been wanting to go back to church for no other reason than to have holy communion. But it’s important to recognise that we are sacramental when we are engaged in the world around us and to start understanding that word and sacrament is not a narrow perspective in our Lutheran world. It’s actually a broad perspective.’

Dr Tania Nelson, the LCA’s executive officer for local mission, says the restrictions and isolation of the pandemic have by necessity changed some of the ways we engage in discipleship. And, she says, recognising people’s limitations and responsibilities in the way we serve them is also important, as was reinforced by a recent conversation with an LCA/NZ church planter.

‘He said that he had been meaning to work more with his members on discipleship but because many are young families with young children and are very busy, he has felt a certain amount of guilt about asking them to be involved’, she says. ‘Generally, we might bring people together for a pastor’s study group one evening a week, but how can young families do that? They possibly can’t – let alone single-parent families.

‘So this pastor started up a Bible study group online in the midst of COVID, and he’s reflecting that the group members probably won’t ever meet face-to-face because the online meetings have been so successful.

That way you can put your children to bed and then meet, and husband and wife can take part. No-one really wants to return to a face-to-face group because this is more accessible for people. For busy people with commitments, it’s the perfect way to be discipled.’

Pastor Brett Kennett, who serves as the Victoria and Tasmania District’s pastor for congregational support, says there is a will among the pastors and leaders he supports to ‘change and adapt’ with what is happening in the world, making use of technology to enable us to reach more people, rather than to “snap back” into how things were done pre-COVID. ‘While I think we’re still in that space where some people will be wanting to snap back, I think the

majority are wanting to lean into this and lean out and forward’, he says. ‘One of the regional pastors, even while being able to have a small live Bible study group, has put a big flat screen monitor at the end of the table and has combined that with Zoom so that his wife, with a little one at home, (and others) can join in the study. I asked him whether he saw this as a paradigm shift and he said, “No, but I see it as a major augmentation”.’

Pastor David says the enforced slowdown for many people has meant the chance to reflect on what is truly important in terms of home, work and church life.

‘Congregations are saying that they don’t want to be as busy as they have been, so to move to a new way of being church we need to answer the question, “How do we actually be church without having to put this massive service together every week, when we’re just running out of energy trying to do that”’, he says.

‘People who want to go to church while they’re still at home provide our congregations with opportunities.

But how do we engage with those people in meaningful ways, so that we don’t just teach them to be really clever Christians, but rather to engage with their next-door neighbours over the fence? I think that’s the key area that we need to work on.’

It seems that if the pandemic has proven anything, it is that God’s light and love can shine into even the darkest, most desperate situations and bring the hope of new life – and that he never rests from building and shaping his church on earth. We just have to be open to him working in us and through us.

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O N LI N E WO RSH I P M AKES

legitimate connections

BY TIM STRINGER

In June 2017, I began my first round of intensive classes in St Paul, Minnesota, as part of the Doctor of Ministry degree in Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary there.

It was a daunting prospect to travel to the other side of the world to undertake post-graduate study, yet I was excited to stretch myself in a field of ministry dear to my heart.

I was interested to discover where people were accessing the streams from, and whether there was a sense of community and connection with the congregations and pastors providing the streamed worship. My thesis title became, ‘Reaching the Diaspora: Streamed Worship in the Lutheran Church of Australia, Cultivating Koinonia and Ecclesia’.

One aspect of the study was to write a thesis and I had begun to home in on an area of research. For many years I had been watching online preaching to learn the craft. On the way to St Paul, I travelled to Nashville and met with the production manager of a church whose streamed sermons I had been watching for several years. I wanted to know the motivation behind streaming sermons to multiple campuses and to discover what their joys and disappointments were.

One key finding of my research was that while people highly appreciate being able to access Australian Lutheran worship online, they desire to worship in person. We are a sacramental church and this is an aspect of worship missing online. At the time of my research, it was difficult to find doctrinal statements that addressed the challenges of receiving holy communion in the virtual realm. But soon every denomination needed to have a document stating their position.

As the thesis research project would need to be contextual, I shifted my focus to the streaming of worship, which has been happening in the Lutheran Church of Australia for many years. I met with Pastor Richard Fox of Lutheran Media and asked whether I could conduct an exploratory case study into the experiences of users of worship streams from St Michael’s Hahndorf, in South Australia, and Good Shepherd Toowoomba, in Queensland.

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As I read and talked with people in preparation for thesis writing, I discovered that most people considered that building community and connections in the online space was difficult and not ideal. Many also considered that gathering virtually was not true gathering.

I submitted my thesis draft in the week of 30 March 2020 – coincidentally when most churches around the world were forced to close due to the global pandemic.

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