Relief
I was reading David Zahl’s latest, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, and along the way, I started thinking about what the relief he describes would look like in a local congregation. I resonated with the idea that “The church has been the place I go when there’s no place left to go” for relief (Introduction, p. 5). But I also found myself resonating with the experiences of those who find church to be a burden and not a refuge. Much of what informs my oscillating pattern between finding church to be a burden and refuge is that I am a professional church worker. Depending on the day, or the liturgical season, arriving on Sunday morning can feel like the world is either on my shoulders or I do not have a care in the world. This is probably how many folks feel about their own professional lives—but since the church is the place where my personal and professional life come together, it’s the perspective from which I write. What does relief look like in the local church? Is relief even possible?
As a pastor of a small church that averages thirty people on a Sunday (and has a membership of fifty), there is a temptation to look at the work as only burdensome. The reason for that is that our congregations are full of proud people who remember what things used to be like. Our congregation of fifty has seating for one hundred and fifty—never in their wildest imaginations did they see the church shrinking to this size. They also never imagined that they would exist without a parochial school, which closed ten years ago and still haunts their memories. When I interviewed for the call committee, they asked me what I would be able to do to bring young people back to church. Instead of answering their question, I asked them why that was important to them. Twenty minutes later, someone finally answered, “Because if we don’t get young people, we will die!”
“Death is lurking around the corner of every call committee interview, of every church council meeting, and of every voters’ assembly. ”
Death is lurking around the corner of every call committee interview, of every church council meeting, and of every voters' assembly. Depending on your congregation’s age or size, the urgency will vary, but our congregations are not just assemblies of voters and people but also of assets and properties, and those assets and properties drive our survival anxieties. In our heydays, we built magnificent buildings not only to communicate something about God’s own majesty, but because we imagined our trajectories as always pointing up. It would not have occurred to our forebears to plan for decline. And why would it? To plan for something other than perpetual growth is to admit defeat and plan for death. There isn’t room in the American mind for such depressing thoughts.
Andrew Root of Luther Seminary has written extensively on the topic of congregational decline. One of the themes Root engages with is that congregations are always grasping for relevance via programs and resources. The reason it simply would not have occurred to members of my congregation, or any congregation, to plan for decline is because they offered programs—and good ones at that. They had day schools and Sunday schools, they had adult groups and youth groups, they had spiritual gift inventories and discipleship initiatives, they had relevance and they had it in spades. Decline wasn’t considered because the activity was busy and the resources were flowing.
“Relief in a local church looks like a community of people who have stopped swimming against the current, stopped kicking against the goad, and stopped fighting like hell because there is no more hell to fight. ”
For many of us, those resourceful rivers have dried up, and we are left wondering what happened. What’s worse is when we could most use the cool refreshment of a riverbed, we are left without. Relief? Facing a dried-up river in the heat of exhaustion, relief would be death at this point. But that realization gets us to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? Death is relief. As Christians, we are death and resurrection people (Romans 6), and it’s the people who have been buried and raised with Jesus that make up the local church—however many or few there may be. Relief is embracing baptismal identity that each day is the day to die and rise in Jesus. In the Small Catechism, Luther shares that we may begin and end each day with the sign of the cross to remind us of our daily death and resurrection in baptism. The riverbed once more is the place of refreshment.
But the baptismal life is lived in the sphere of this world, where the crisis of decline also greets us at the start and end of each day. It’s hard to face the crisis in faith because, as far as I can tell, our churches are full of folks who carry around enormous amounts of guilt. The folks who are left in our declining churches not only carry the burdens of to-do lists but also of guilt. “How did this happen to this church?” “We used to have hundreds of people worshiping here on the weekends and hundreds more on the membership rolls.” Beneath the “why” questions is where the guilt resides. “Did we do something wrong? Did I do something wrong?” And the other way people deal with guilt is denial. Kick against the goad, swim against the current, fight like hell in the face of death. Do anything but admit reality.
Despair and denial are two common ways to deal with guilt but thankfully, there is at least a third way—the way Zahl describes in The Big Relief as “atonement.” Without delving into the depths of everyone’s favorite atonement theories, we do well to follow Zahl’s lead in focusing on the vicariousness of Jesus’s atonement (chapter 5, 87). That is, Jesus takes your place. Although protestants focus on punishment when it comes to the idea of “vicarious atonement,” it is more than that. Jesus is not merely taking your punishment when vicariously atoning for you—he is taking your death. And if Jesus is taking your death, then he is taking your guilt. The once dried-up riverbed is again the place of refreshment.
I learned to swim in the ocean, and one of the first lessons of the ocean is that you do not fight against the current. If you fight against the current, you will tire out, and when you tire out, you risk drowning. Going with the current is safer because at some point you will be spit out by the ocean—even if quite a ways down shore. The relief I felt the first time I went with the current sticks with me to this day. Suddenly, there I was on dry land, no longer thrashing about in the waves. I was able to catch my breath and let out a laugh. I felt the relief in my body.
What does relief look—or feel like—in a local congregation? It looks like being spat out on the shore when moments earlier you thought you might drown. Relief in a local church looks like a community of people who have stopped swimming against the current, stopped kicking against the goad, and stopped fighting like hell because there is no more hell to fight. Jesus has taken your guilt, your death, and your place. Your place is now his place—even places we may have trouble recognizing.
When you embrace that you’re not going to return to “the good old days,” you make space for the current time to be someone else’s good old days. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God who raised Israel from Egypt, and he will raise us—he will give us relief. God will relieve us in the new heavens and new earth, but he has also promised to relieve us now. Every day, he will raise us up and grant us relief. This is why relief is possible in the local congregation. Relief in the local church looks like the recognition that everything is up to Jesus and none of it is up to us. All we do is trust. And in that trust, we can catch our breath and let out a laugh because we finally see that the big relief, all along, was Jesus. He takes the shame of our guilt and makes us blameless, he makes life to lurk around every corner. The riverbed once more is the place of refreshment.