(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

Depending on whom you ask, the answer to this question, "What's Lutheran about this congregation—and what's not?" could be "everything" or "nothing."

Some will point to the Northern European names on membership rosters, the Norwegian piety, or the German insistence on sound doctrine and suggest that everything about their congregation is Lutheran. Others will concentrate on congregations that are a mixture of heritages and cultures and suggest that there is little difference between St. Paul's Lutheran Church and Grace Episcopal or Westminster Presbyterian down the street. They will suggest that the congregation is primarily a reflection of its community and that whatever is Lutheran is actually window dressing on an American socioeconomic community.

Your history of your congregation will take you into a consideration of this question. As you review the sermons preached and confront the references to Martin Luther and the Reformation, as you ponder the hymns chosen and not chosen for regular worship, and as you dust off the catechetical materials used to introduce new generations to the Christian faith, you will inevitably face questions about your congregation's distinctiveness.

When you consider your congregation's response to racial changes in its neighborhood, to changing sexual mores, or to divisive social issues such as the Vietnam War of the 60s or the abortion controversy of the 90s, you will want to ask: "How is this congregation the same as any other American congregation, and how is it different?"

When it opens food pantries, pours money into an alternative school system, collaborates in the building of an orphanage or hospital, or moves to the suburbs, who really are the people making those momentous decisions? How is this congregation just like every other Lutheran congregation in the United States—or the world? How is it different, if not unique?

Shishmaref Lutheran Church, Seward Peninsula, Alaska (c. 1970)