This past Sunday our Council met and continued to develop our vision for the coming years. That vision is, “By the time that 2030 arrives, the people of University Lutheran will have established trusted avenues taken by members to invest in the lives of students living in the housing marketed to the three campuses of Tallahassee. The investment of the members into the lives of these students will form them into spiritually robust Christians leaders who can do great things for the Kingdom of God.”

One of the things we’ve talked about is what challenges get in the way of this mission. As it turns out, the things Council came up with are a pretty good summation of what oftentimes gets in the way of almost any mission. For the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a look at those things that can get in the way of our mission, and maybe how we can think about those things in a more Jesus-centered way.

The first thing that Council recognized was a complacency about Christianity. Sure, there’s a few people out there who really hate Christians, but the largest growing segment of those outside the Church are those who simply don’t feel the Church has anything to really offer. For a long time, churches were propped up by things like community belonging. I remember a friend of mine who moved to Iowa who was told what church to go to so that he could make the right business contacts. There’s less of that today. Similarly, years ago if someone didn’t go to church, their neighbors may have thought they were morally inferior. There’s almost no sense of that anymore. But those things weren’t really things native to the church anyway, they were crutches that held the church up.

People are also complacent about things like worship and preaching and maybe Christian morality in general. These things ARE native to the church, but they are not things that people immediately assume are good for them. There are plenty of substitutes for these in our culture – TikTok creators preach pretty effectively, we worship at things like concerts and football games, and there is a morality in our culture, even if it doesn’t draw its lines in the same places that Christianity does. But there is GOOD NEWS is that. The core things of the Church are things that people still need, it is just that churches (in general) are not offering those things in a compelling way.

So what do we do? I think we focus on what those core things are. What is core to the Christian church? If we stripped away the varnish and looked at the bare core of the Church, what would we find? And once we find those things, how could we offer them to the people around us? We should be pretty good at this as Lutherans. Our Reformation theology is one that seeks to strip away the dross and go back to the core goods of Scripture, of Faith, and of Grace. Let’s get back to the core good of Jesus. And we will know when we do, because we will find people can’t be complacent about those things – they are needs built into us by God.