(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: A Signal from the Sixteenth Century

In 1530, while the outlaw Martin Luther was hiding from pope and emperor, Luther's learned and faithful colleague, Philip Melanchthon, presented the Augsburg Confession to church and world. That document, in which the Reformers clarified the issues between them and the Catholic Church and then proposed what they believed to be the essentials for a new agreement, quickly became the first of several reference points for Lutherans, a collection of documents called the Lutheran Confessions. In times of confusion over the centuries, people have turned to these documents for help in determining their Lutheran identities. The Lutheran Confessions, and the Scriptures to which they bore witness, have been the sources for self-definition.

In Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon offered the first Lutheran definition of the church. "The church is the assembly of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly" (BC 32.1). This lean definition also contains the Lutheran criterion: "For the true unity of the church it is enough to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments" (BC 32.2). Article VII identifies the essential sameness the Reformers were after, but it also makes room for considerable differences: "It is not necessary that human traditions or rites and ceremonies, instituted by men, should be alike everywhere" (BC 32.3).

In this article of the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon and Luther (by long distance) were not thinking primarily about individual congregations. Their emphasis was upon the "one holy church," of which congregations were small but essential parts. But for several reasons, this is a pivotal place for us to begin our search for identity. First, the article reminds us that Lutheranism began as a protest movement, and the reformers were concerned about the whole Christian church, not merely one ethnic group in it. Luther and Melanchthon did not feel called upon to invent something brand new. Instead, they wanted to call the whole church to return to its treasure, the gospel, and to make room for the breathtaking freedom that radiated from its core, the proclaimed Word about Jesus and the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist.

Luther's and Melanchthon's definition of the essential character of the church had enormous consequences. The history of Western Europe and the Americas are definitively shaped by the divisions of church and state that followed. The various Lutheran groups that migrated to the United States and the countless Lutheran congregations they formed are part of a tradition that grounds itself in Word and Sacrament. In the stories we tell now, this distinctive confessional stance is a benchmark. Each Lutheran congregation has behind it this confessional heritage, despite its ethnic, regional, socioeconomic, and denominational differences.