Last Sunday, during Bible study, someone asked me if I was going to share with the congregation what I was going to be talking about at the last Pastor’s Conference this past week. It’s sort of too much for a newsletter article, but I feel that it is important that you all get brought into what I’m doing when I’m away at things like this. In short, this pastor’s conference was an exploration of the philosophical idea of “secularization” – and how we continue to proclaim the Gospel in a world that is increasingly seeing this sort of secularization as the norm. 
Secularization is still a tension for us, at least those of us in the Church. It is the tension between the fact that my hotel did not have a 13th floor this week, and that I regularly have lunch at a place with the address “666 Tennessee St”. It is the tension that gets strained when we talked about creation vs. evolution in Bible study the other day. It is a tension that enables scores of FSU students to “self-identify” as Lutheran while never making plans to attend a Sunday service during the four years of their undergraduate experience. It is a taking of the temperature of the “social imaginary” (how we collectively imagine the world to be) and seeing if that has any room for the notion of a God who loves, cares for, and is involved in the everyday life of a human.
Secularization is a shift for Lutherans. Lutheran theology came out of a time that was essentially the beginning of a path of embracing the secular notions of things. For Luther, the notion that there could be a God whose judgement and justification of life was of supreme importance was not questioned. For us, the reverse is true – to believe in such an “important God” is counter-cultural not to mention counter-intuitive. The assumptions of our confessions of faith, such as the Book of Concord, require a critical interpretation if not an outright translation into the lengua franca of the day. Theology used to be the mother/queen of the sciences, but now the roles have reversed in the minds of most people as theology is at least princess if not serf or perhaps exiled from the land all together.
This may sound negative, and if you believe that the only way that Christianity can survive and thrive is by being propped up by the state and the culture, then it probably is negative. If you somehow have the expectation that without the government’s approval, or culture’s approval, or science’s approval, that the Church will die – this is news of the Church checking herself in for hospice care. But my reading of history doesn’t require government or culture or science for the Church’s thriving. In fact, if anything, it is perhaps because of mistaken alliances with those things that we have gotten confused about what the Church is. I believe in a Jesus who is both supreme monarch of the world, and simultaneously is subversive revolutionary working against the fascist regime of sin, death, and the Devil.
As our culture, our government, our sciences, our social imaginary, get more and more secular, I think we see more and more ways to operate in new ways as the Church – not necessarily against culture or government or science, but in conversation with those things – bringing to light a God who has long been forgotten due to our triumphalistic approach to His Kingdom. Things are just getting more fun. Opportunities are endless. We are being commissioned by Christ again, “Go and make disciples, Baptizing and teaching them all I have commanded you….”