(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Defining a Lutheran Congregation." Be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Your Congregation's Inner Life .")

Defining a Lutheran Congregation: Cultural Factors

As you look for this distinctive Lutheran presence, you need to be prepared for other realities you will encounter. Lutheran congregations in America do look strikingly similar to many other kinds of American congregations. They share similar features like worship services, parking lots, lay/clergy struggles, limited resources, and human fearfulness. Many observers have commented that Americans seem to like compartmentalizing religion in congregational packages, because that keeps religion from intruding into important public, economic, and social arenas.

Some of these observers are critics who see congregations as life-style enclaves that foster patterns of exclusiveness and privilege. Others warn against the individualism that is so ingrained in the American character and express concern that this American malady infects much of our congregational life as well. To be sure, the congregations of the ELCA are not culture-free zones. On the contrary, they are culture-laden places that bear all the strengths and weaknesses of the many cultures that come together in their lives.

You, the congregational historian, therefore, must come to your task with heightened cultural sensitivity. The congregations of the ELCA exist in a context of great religious and cultural competition. People church-shop in ways quite similar to the way they buy groceries or purchase a car. Ours is the age of the religious entrepreneur who beams blessings at us on the television or invites us to sample the new improved product at the church down the street. You should expect your own congregation to reflect this entrepreneurial character by supporting a variety of new programs and missions. At the same time, you should expect it to be in tension with the consumer culture that fuels the competitive spirit.

More than one religious way of life will permeate any congregation's life, since our nation is manifestly pluralistic. Worshippers bring with them into the pews dashes of Zen, traces of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, large portions of fundamentalism and pentecostalism, and whiffs of New Age religion. The vague American religiosity that some call civil religion also manifests itself in arguments about patriotism, morality, and citizenship. And ethnicity, the skeleton of American religion, will be an important part of every congregation's history—whether the congregation is a group of long-assimilated Germans, second-generation Hispanics, or African Americans new to the community.

These cultural factors interact with the Lutheran heritage carried in your congregation to shape a distinctive local answer to the question, "What does it mean to be Lutheran?" Rather than assume that every congregation should be a carbon copy of every other one or that each is a unique entity, you want to learn how your congregation puts itself together, how it takes all these threads and weaves a fabric out of them. As congregational historians sort through all the evidence gathered, you have the opportunity to help your congregation ponder a question as old as the Christian church itself: the relation of Christ and culture in history.

As H. Richard Niebuhr demonstrated in his book Christ and Culture, at various times Christians have answered that question in different ways. At some times, Christians have taken strong stances against the world, forming themselves into alternative communities at some distance from the surrounding culture. At other times, Christians have so thoroughly accommodated themselves to a culture that they seemed almost totally of it. At other times, they have seemed to float above the culture, almost in a world of their own. Many times they have sought to transform the culture by changing it from within. Occasionally, Christians have adopted paradoxical postures, employing more than one of these stances at the same time.

As you begin to delve deeply into your congregation's past, this question will come increasingly to the fore. Our congregations sit on the front line between the sacred and the secular, the private life of home and personal belief and the public life of action and moral discourse. They mediate between many cultures, classes, traditions, and experiences. By asking, "How does this happen here?" you will help your congregation begin to discover who it has been and who it is now. Discoveries about those questions also can help your congregation decide who it should be in the future.