(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: Key Questions

When we study our congregations, then, we need to ask how they have done with their treasure, the gospel and the sacraments. How have they built their lives, buildings, communities, and programs around these essential elements? How have they borne the gospel into the world? How has their understanding of the gospel changed over time? How has it stayed the same? How have the sacraments been administered, how have sacramental practices changed, and why? How has the Lutheran tradition's evangelical heart beat throughout the congregation's life? How have the people, washed with baptismal waters and fed with the body and blood of Christ, offered God's life to the world?

To answer these questions, we need to remind ourselves of Luther's fundamental distinction between law and gospel. From his own spiritual turmoil, Luther discovered that the most important thing people could learn was their enormous need for Christ. In opposition to centuries of Catholic teaching and popular religiosity that stressed the need for humans to earn God's favor, Luther found that human efforts to please God, even those of the spiritual virtuosos, are never good enough. God's law is the basic scriptural revealer of this truth. The law, whether expressed as one of the Ten Commandments or one of the biblical stories, makes it apparent that humans are sinners. No matter how strenuously we try to keep the commandments, we always find ourselves caught up in a relentless cycle of accusation, self-justification, fault-finding, denial, and despair.

For Luther, the law—whether it addresses Sabbath observance or orders political relations—always accuses. Instead of trying to find some way to beat the law at its own game, Luther sought some other source of salvation. He found his alternative in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, where another route to God's favor became available. The Reformation formula, "we are justified by grace through faith," points to this understanding of the gospel, God's other word, which declares sinners saints by virtue of God's surprising gifts of grace and faith.

In the not-quite-five centuries that have followed Luther's identification of the true treasure of the Christian church, Lutherans have argued, both among themselves and with other Christian communities, about the distinction between law and gospel. At their best, Lutherans have sought not to separate God's two words from each other but instead to be certain that each was playing its proper role—the one driving people to Christ, the other forgiving and reconciling them to God. That struggle to distinguish law from gospel, and in so doing to hang on to the church's indispensable evangelical treasure, is at the center of the Lutheran movement through history. When we come to writing the history of a Lutheran congregation, we must search for signals of that struggle in the local story.

There are several other distinctive Lutheran traits that flow from this central source. First, Lutherans are a people of the book. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures sit in a privileged position within our congregations because in them law and gospel are authoritatively proclaimed. Speaking, preaching, singing, confessing—all verbal acts—are primary in this tradition, because the gospel and our recognition of our great need for it comes to us through spoken and written words, through hearing the great story of God's gracious self-expression in our human flesh and blood.

Second, because Lutherans view the world and their lives through law and gospel lenses, they affirm some amazing paradoxes. For example, they believe that Christians are simul justus et peccator, simultaneously saints and sinners. The first word of God, the law, keeps exposing ongoing sin. The second word, the gospel, keeps remaking us into saints. At the personal level, this means that we Lutherans keep finding out contradictory things about ourselves. On the one hand, we keep unearthing evidence that we cannot keep the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me"; that our lives are malformed at the center. On the other, the recurring word of forgiveness rises again and again in our own lives.

At the congregational level, this means that our congregations will bear all the marks of fallenness and finitude that the law exposes. Far from expecting our churches to be perfect, we should not be surprised when we find them to be self-serving, idolatrous, immoral, or unloving. Yet, these congregations that can and do look all too human are also places where, with each proclamation of the gospel, life is, for a moment at least, reorganized around the forgiveness of sins, where the normal human processes of accusation, competition, and oppression are interrupted by Jesus' better way.