For many years of my childhood I served as an acolyte. The musty sacristy out the side-door of the chancel, positioned a few stairs down and full of albs and gowns and candles, was the destination to which I hurried after we parked early for Sunday service.
Acolytes always served in pairs. We’d hang out, put on our robes, wait for the pastor to pray with us, then split up, one to each side door of the chancel (there were two) and then wait for the opening hymn.
Generations of acolytes had clearly gotten bored and caved to temptation at this point, because both doors had dozens of burn marks on them, presumably made when the lit candlelighter “accidentally” got too close to the varnish of the door.
During service, acolytes received a blessed respite from the gaze of the congregation because we sat sideways and behind the lectern and pulpit. We could hunker down in plain view. But sometimes I’d acolyte the same Sunday our choir sang, in which case I’d descend back down the stairs to the basement, under the sanctuary to the rear stairs, then ascend to the choir loft, ready to sing, only to then repeat the procedure at the end of service.
Over the years I picked up other church culture practices. I helped count money, learned to fold the bulletin and turn it into a fan (churches in that era did not have A/C). I helped serve donuts at the coffee hour, was a likely youth group member to make phone calls inviting other youth to come back to church again for Sunday evening. I went to church camp.
Church was a second home.
And over that period of time, I gathered from the community a sense of what counted as aspects of what we’d sometimes jokingly label Lutheran culture. The examples are myriad: sitting in the back of the church and leaving the front pews empty; sharing the peace in a perfunctory handshake; potlucks, so many potlucks; church with an organ and choirs; clerical collars and albs and stoles; a liturgical musical idiom steeped in the 1970s and the ecumenical liturgical renewal movement.
Some of the cultural stuff was also regional or ethnic, things like casserole, jello, worship stoicism (the pastor told a joke so good it was all the congregation could do NOT to laugh). On the ethnic side, there were the churches that hosted lefse bakes and lutefisk dinners or Swedish smorgasbord. It was all German or Scandinavian, I didn’t discover until adulthood that Lutherans also made injera (pictured) and curry.
When I think back on this Lutheran cultural heritage, I do enjoy that I was raised in a “culture.” Admittedly, this is not as robust a cultural heritage as some others, but it was mine, and it felt nice (and remains grounding) to know that’s “where I came from.”
I describe this culture not to a) assert that this is actually THE Lutheran culture or b) argue that it should hold together as a continuing culture. When I reflect on it, it seems tied to a specific time and place. Perhaps some places still steward it (I’m looking at you, Minnesota). Certainly many still yearn for it. But for myself, I have long since lived in a geographical location where the maintenance of a robust “Lutheran Culture” is improbable, and have gathered a community of people in a church with the name “Lutheran” for whom “Lutheran Culture” is strange and distant.
Our church, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, still has the word Lutheran in the name, and is served by a pastor of the Lutheran persuasion. However, the congregation is made up of people from widely varied backgrounds: Church of Christ, evangelical, Southern Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness, mainline Protestant, agnostic, atheist, Wiccan, Roman Catholic. My rough estimate is that less than 10% of the congregation was raised in a Lutheran community, and even many of those were LCMS rather than ELCA (the conservative branch of Lutheran rather than the liberal).
We call ourselves now “a progressive church in the South” in order to broadly and overtly signal who we are and who we are not. And I like this. But it does leave me wondering sometimes about the church culture of it all. Like, is there a “progressive church” culture?
When I used to live in the Midwest, it wasn’t uncommon for various small towns to emphasize their ethnic heritage. You might drive into a town in Wisconsin where the McDonalds sign said “Vilkommen.” Then drive 15 miles down the road and the next town’s sign would say “welcome” in an entirely different language, like “Wilkommen.”
Okay, that was a little bit of a joke, but it’s true, in the Midwest towns are Norwegian or German or Danish or Dutch. And this is because Midwest itself is not a culture.
Nobody ever anywhere opened a restaurant with the sub-title “good old-fashioned Northern cooking.”
When we moved to the South, we moved to a region of the U.S. that stewards it’s own culture. There actually is Southern cuisine. When you survey Americans on their ethnic heritage, Midwesterners will still point to their immigration story, identifying themselves as German or Finnish or… In the South, a sizeable percentage identify as… Southern.
This makes a reflection on “Lutheran Culture” by a Lutheran pastor in the South even more complicated.
In order to “have” a culture as a church one option would be to maintain, in distinction to Southern culture, midwestern cultural morays of the Lutherans. We could be known as the church that teaches you how to make lefse.
But why would we do that? And displaced as Lutherans are if they are in the South (at least in most places… there are admittedly a few locations where Lutheran is “native” to the South), such secondary migration may steward the culture for the period of time while the migration is happening, but eventually something like indigenization will need to take place (if I can borrow that word from missions theology).
So what does it means to make progressive church “indigenous”? Or another way of asking this would be to ask, “Does progressive church have a culture? Can progressive church in the South have a culture?”
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When I reflect on our practice of being church as a progressive church in the South, this final question becomes tremendously interesting. The nice thing about “having” and maintaining a culture is that it gives you a set of guardrails. It tells you what is and isn’t your culture.
When considering a new idea, you can ask yourself, “Is that Lutheran?”
Having such a culture also gives those coming new into it a sense of what they are in for…
When I was growing up, I think most people around me knew what they meant when they asked themselves or others that question (even if asking that question really should have been more specific, like… is that Midwestern 1980s predominately Anglo Lutheran?).
I think progressive church culture finds itself in a precariously (and wondrously) different position of not-knowing. We don’t know what progressive church culture is.
Many of us know what we don’t want church to be—bigoted and Christian nationalist—which is why we left other spaces. Religious trauma, and a desire to move toward spaces of inclusion, are big drivers in connecting people to progressive church. But we do not have models (either regionally or nationally) to really emulate. What we’re doing is new enough and unique enough that we’re in the position of creating a new culture more than we are attempting to steward an existing one.
There’s a certain sense of loss in not being able to enjoy the culture you knew. There’s a certain amount of confusion trying to practice a culture when you don’t entirely know what it is yet. There’s a lot of freedom and joy in not being constrained. It’s all of that together.
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Perhaps the most confusing aspect of being “progressive church in the South” is the public nature of the enterprise. Although the church I grew up in in Iowa was big, it wasn’t super public. It maintained an internal culture that only periodically made forays into public church.
Today, in my own church, it’s almost flipped around. We’re so public, so known by our neighbors and communities around us for a commitment to progressive Christian values and advocacy. But those who know us don’t necessarily show up Sunday morning or participate in helping us maintain a kind of internal culture. Nor even do we ourselves.
I’ve come to realize, having traveled this long road toward significantly more progressive and public church, that perhaps there is some kind of balance necessary to also identify more clearly our culture, not for the sake of insularity but instead for the maintenance of a church-self that can be robustly helpful in place, in the public.
We are indeed this-and-not-that, prioritizing some things more than others. We have a style. We have our quirks. Insight into this makes me want to sit for a while and ask many people, “So, what is progressive church culture?” And since we still have Lutheran in our name, a subsidiary question, “Are we? Lutheran, that is? And if so how?”
So what is progressive church culture to you?
I am a recovering Catholic having attended a Lutheran-Lite (ELCA) church in SE Michigan for the past 7+ years. The experience has been extraordinary because of progressive tendencies fueled by beer and critical thinking about Scripture with a dollop of humor ( I interpret these three ingredients as decidedly Lutheran) Today we continued our weekly Bible study proctored by an avowed atheist who loves Jesus. Our study of John provided me a necessary antidote to an overdose of national news. On the way out I stepped in the church office to share my gratitude for our community -- believers here not afraid to express frustration during these days when Christian nationalism has been normalized. Where else in churchville could I exclaim out loud: "Well, God wins in the end, so STFU!" and not be considered a condemned reprobate. "Put that sign out front," someone said.
Openness. There are no guardrails limiting inquiry/discussion. At the same time we’ll be free to say “no” or “not yet” or “beats me.”or, “we need to talk/wrestle with that.”
And, let’s try making lefsa😊!