Welcome to another installment of the ‘Weekly Word, our effort to highlight Gospel centered preaching from Lutheran pulpits.

We missed last weeks’ audio, so we’re doubling up this week. All the audio features Pastor Kevin Kolander from First Lutheran Church in Lake Elsinore, California. Enjoy!

Another great video post by Faith Lutheran Church (FLC). This is a re-recording of one of the presentations Dr. Rosenbladt gave at the recent Mockingbird conference. This is another great ‘don’t miss’ recording by Dr. Rosenbladt.

As with all the new videos coming out of FLC, this is totally free.

This past weekend I had a chance to hear Dr. Rosenbladt give his lecture entitled The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church to a packed house. As Ted and I sat and watched the impact of Dr. R’s words on the audience, I knew it was past time to give it away for free. Both Rod and Ted agreed, and so did the good folks at South Orange County Outreach (SOCO), who funded and recorded the presentation. So we are giving it away.

Feel free to download, make copies and share with others, quote at length, link to, or print and it hand out. The MP3 and both PDF formats are available, and later this year we will be linking to a video version filmed in front of a live audience, including a question and answer session, which will be provided by Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach, California.

This lecture was one of the reasons we created New Reformation Press, and it has been influential in the lives and ministries of many people. It has given hope to literally hundreds of bruised reeds and smoldering wicks barely clinging to faith in churches that have lost their way and lost sight of Christ. Others abandoned church long ago and considered themselves failed Christians. This is another word for them, not of cursing but of blessing.

This lecture was one of the main reasons our friend the InternetMonk, the late Michael Spencer, wanted us to put our ad on his blog, and he recommended it to his readers a number of times. It speaks to many who find themselves in what Michael called the ‘Post Evangelical Wilderness.’

Below is an excerpt from the lecture in which Dr. Rosenbladt describes the entry into Heaven by those who appeared to be failures as a Christian in this life. This past weekend as he read these words with tears in his eyes, members of the audience openly wept.

You can see why we think this lecture is so important.

For a number of years we charged a small fee for the MP3 and the PDF in order to defray our costs and to give a small royalty to Dr. Rosenbladt for letting us put it on our site. After some discussion with him we decided that it was time to give it away to whomever wanted it.

If you have purchased the MP3 or PDF from us in the past, let us know if you decide to purchase something else from our site and we will give you a credit equal to the amount you spent on the The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church.

We know this presentation will be of immense help to many, and ask your help in getting it out to those who need to hear it.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today a friend forwarded me an article by Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today. Entitled ‘The End of Christianity as We Know it’, the article talks about the scientific finding that Psilocybin Mushrooms (known as ‘magic mushrooms’ or ‘shrooms’ on the street) can induce deeply religious and spiritual experiences.  He contrasts this with the modern church’s herculean efforts to create such spiritual experiences through worship services, and concludes,

“From the point of view of experience, it seems it’s impossible to tell the difference between drug-induced and “natural” mystical experiences. Both are powerful. Both enable people to enjoy a transcendent moment. Both seem capable of transforming people so that they feel a greater sense of empathy for and unity with other people—what most people would call love.”

“This sort of thing makes many a Christian nervous, and for good reason. We live in an age in which religious experience is the centerpiece of faith for many, many Christians. We disdain faith that is mere intellectual assent or empty formality. We want a faith that is authentic, that makes us feel something—in particular, one that enables us to experience God. When we describe the one time in the week when we put ourselves in the presence of God, we talk less and less about “worshipping God” and more about “the worship experience.”

“So, to hear that people can have even more powerful religious experiences without Christian faith gives us pause. It’s a lot of work to fast and pray and worship and deny oneself—and even then, experiencing God is a hit or miss proposition! What’s the fuss if we can pop a mushroom and have a nearly guaranteed religious experience?”

And finally,

“But the research suggests a number of consequences for the way we do Christianity in our day. If religious experience is something that a drug can induce even more easily than spiritual ritual and disciplines, it may be time, for example, to rethink what many churches are trying to do on Sunday morning: create a memorable “worship experience.”

So where is the church left when deeply religious experiences that change people’s hearts can be induced chemically? What is the purpose of ‘church’ and of the Christian faith itself? What does the Church offer that we cannot get anywhere else?

Good morality and philosophy can be found in any number of religions.  Christianity has no corner on the market there.

Counseling and Psychotherapy are usually much superior to what can be found in the way of ‘help’ in the average congregation.  AA has a remarkable track record in rescuing those thought to be beyond hope.

You don’t need a church to make friends, find a mate, or fill your social calendar.

Modern self help gurus can help you improve everything from your physical fitness, and your manners, to your career and your desirability to the opposite sex.

Many religions claim to improve the lives of their adherents. They can ‘cure all your ills, and pay all your bills.’

And now, apparently, you don’t need to fast, pray, and worship to induce an encounter with the transcendent and produce deep and lasting ‘spiritual’ change.

The one thing that the Church has that can be found nowhere else is Christ and the forgiveness of our sins.

That’s what the church has to offer a dying world. It can be found nowhere else. God reconciling the world to Himself through a dead and risen Jesus.

Many of us in the Reformation traditions have been banging this drum for a long time. Whether it has been Eugene Peterson, mocking the search for ‘relevance’ and comparing much of contemporary worship (even in liturgical churches) to Baal worship in the Old Testament, or the guys on the White Horse Inn radio program, faithfully placarding Christ in His saving work for us, week after week, or faithful pastors who don’t shrink back from preaching the Gospel to a room full of Christians, the message of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus still goes out.

Any other message can be found somewhere else and usually done better than the church can do it.  If this is the case, why even compete?  Why not concentrate on the one message we have that no one else can lay claim to?

Hear me when I say that I am not discouraging spiritual experiences, worship, prayer and the like.  These things will be natural outgrowths of pursuing Christ and His finished work on the cross for us, but to start with ‘worship experiences’  to build our churches and draw a crowd is to put the ‘cart before the horse’, so to speak, and will lead us down the path to spiritual ruin.

To start with anything except Christ and Him crucified is to build our foundation upon the sand. (Matt 7:24-27) We sell people on some concept or benefit they will receive by being a Christian, and then they find out the church can’t deliver it, or they can find a better version of the same thing outside the church, and they become disillusioned and often bitter.

Brethren, these thing ought not be.  There is a better way, and that is to embrace the one needful thing, Christ and His work on our behalf, and to preach and teach this with an unquenchable fervor and an iron-like determination.

I would like to make a few of my own comments about the video which Pat posted recently, “Sunday’s Coming” Movie Trailer from North Point Media.

I’ve been seeing some comments in entries on other blogs regarding this video, and I find them rather telling.

…how sad. Packaged and served just like fast food. That’s what religion is today. And that’s how people like it.

Really? We do? People prefer feel-good-isms and content-less entertainment thinly veiled behind the disguise of church? In our sinful states, yes, we do.

As fallen people, we always desire the new shiny bobble. A part of us never outgrows that infantile desire to grab at the shiny new thing we’ve never seen before, drop the boring old one we’ve been playing with up until now, and put the brand new one in our mouths and ogle its wonderful glitzy qualities. This will never change this side of heaven.

I can say for certain that right now, through technological advances, we are now able to produce shininess that has never been seen by former generations. I mean, put on the sunglasses, spread on your SPF 1000 sunblock and hold on to your seats levels of shininess. And still we get bored. Why? Because that it is an idol that does not save.

Yet unfortunately, too often this is how we view the choices:

would i want to go to a church like that?
no.

But if the only other option was my grandma’s church…well…

and I remember that the model in the video was born out of a time when that was the case.

Let me digress for a moment. I had written something completely different for this entry, but after last Sunday I have decided to mostly start over.

I visited Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach, California last Sunday and was reminded of the changes they’ve been going through. (Please bear with them, the website is currently going through a complete overhaul.) Faith is a church which has both a traditional liturgical service as well as a hybrid service which is a blend of a contemporary worship sound and feel, but which retains the text of the traditional liturgy and the same Law/Gospel sermon which is preached in the traditional service.

(Go here to listen to the sermon I heard while I was there on May 16.)
(You can find the text here for the hymn which Pastor Hodel mentions in his sermon.)

Faith has been growing by leaps and bounds. That traditional service is packed out. I mean, it’s standing room only every single week, even after a recent refurbishment and expansion of the sanctuary. But why?

The reason they’re so packed is that Faith is being inundated with ex-evangelicals, ex-contemporary worship service goers and others who are looking for a worship service with substance. When talking to these people, I’ve learned that it isn’t a decision they’ve made lightly. They are extremely passionate about what they’ve done. They uniformly feel like they’ve been rescued from some kind of hopeless nightmare. I won’t recount the details of the stories I’m hearing, but trust me when I say some are pretty dark.

And that’s what Christ-less and Gospel-less teaching will do to you!

Something else that I find very interesting is that these folks who are leaving their contemporary worship service-based churches to arrive at the traditional liturgy at Faith did not first attend the hybrid service which Faith offers. They’re coming directly from one to the other without the layover. And they’re loving it! They’re so passionate about the traditional liturgy, in fact, that if any ‘contemporary-sounding’ elements accidentally slip in there, as can happen sometimes, they’re very upset. I heard words spoken almost at a yell about some contemporary-sounding elements accidentally making it into one of the traditional services I attended there months ago.

Talk about refreshing! And these people are no dummies. They are quickly getting up to speed theologically, or are already knowledgeable about Scripture, but finally getting solid Christ-centered teaching. They can recount many details of the kinds of Christless teaching they’ve been receiving at their former church and what effect it has had on them, often with tears in their eyes. They feel like they’ve been delivered. The sermons and the teaching are big parts of the reason why, but clearly they also love the traditional liturgy. They love the confession and absolution at the beginning. They love the chanted Psalms. They love the hymns. They love the Lord’s Prayer and the creeds spoken amongst one another. They love the communion, eating the body and drinking the blood of our Lord Christ while hearing that these elements are given for their sins. They’ve come from the ‘new’ to deeply appreciate something which is hundreds of years old.

We at NRP are trying to tie in with Faith more and more as they work like crazy to get the unadulterated message of Christ’s death and resurrection for the sins of the world out to the masses. (In our catalog you will see more and more recordings produced by South Orange County Outreach, or SOCO, affiliated with Faith Lutheran Church.) People are starving for it. I know this to be true because they’re telling me face to face how they have been quietly and privately languishing in their current contemporary church, not knowing (because they’re not hearing) the message of the Gospel. A very common phrase on the lips of these newcomers when they arrive is something resembling, “What is this strange new teaching?”

I wanted to tell this story because, clearly, not all want a contemporary service. Some are beginning to reject it. They no longer want something subjective and based on their feelings. They want something objective which comes from outside of them. They want to hear about Jesus Christ, the God-man, coming down from heaven to rescue them from eternal damnation. This is serious stuff, and these converts mean business.

Let me wrap this up with a little bit of a response I recently wrote to a commenter on the recent post in which we shared the video. He mentioned that we should have more respect for what he considers a “modern liturgy”, referring to the contemporary worship service, and signed off with this line – “What we really need to do in the body of Christ is recognise, appreciate and celebrate diversity, not mock it.”

We all need to be where these ex-evangelicals have come to. That is, they’ve been languishing and they know what matters: Christ crucified and resurrected. That is all that matters. If the preachers and teachers out there, of any denomination in any church, are not preaching and teaching Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins week in and week out, not only is it useless crap, but it is false teaching and dangerous. What value is this to anyone? Removing Christ from the preaching and teaching in the church is not ‘diverse’, it’s just us once again offering false gods in replacement.

To the churches which have a contemporary worship service and do preach every week the true depth of our sin and the sacrifice Christ made in His death and resurrection in order to rescue us, I say, “Good on you!”. We can argue the differences between the contemporary service and traditional liturgy separately once we have covered the only point that really matters – keeping Christ at the center of it.

What we need is simply Christ crucified for our sins, every week – don’t accept anything less. Your faith and salvation are on the line.

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.

…And what I do I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.
(2 Cor 11:3-4, 12-15)

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners
(1 Tim 1:15)

At work today I saw a lady wearing a lanyard for her keys and some sort of ID badge, and printed on it were the words “I love Jesus” but instead of the word ‘love’ there was a heart.  I have seen bumper stickers like that too.

To be honest, it made me a little uncomfortable.  Not that I doubt her love or devotion to Jesus, but often have questioned my own.

I trust Jesus, but to say ‘I love Him’ …  well I do, but it’s a constantly changing thing.  More often than not I can identify with Peter, who when asked by Jesus if he loved Him replied, basically, “I like you a lot.”

Maybe that is one reason that I have been uncomfortable with many contemporary worship songs that have the congregation professing an ardent, almost romantic love for the Savior. I have never been one to have what the culture calls a ‘man crush’ on anyone.

There are men that I can say I love; my dad, my grandfather, and some friends and mentors. (One friend calls this non-homosexual male philia.) I can say there are times when I feel like that towards Jesus.

It also seems like a private thing to me. I gladly and publicly confess to being a Christian or a follower of Christ, but my love, devotion and personal feelings are just that; personal. (So here I am writing about it. Yeah, I know.)

The church at large might benefit by looking into this subject especially in regard to why more men don’t attend worship, instead of adopting wholesale feminine categories of intimacy and love in our worship services.

Anyway, these are one man’s thoughts on the matter, FWIW.

Welcome to another installment of the ‘Weekly Word, our effort to highlight Gospel centered preaching from Lutheran pulpits.

The first sermon is by Pastor Bill Cwirla of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Hacienda Heights, Ca. and the next one is by Pastor Kevin Kolander of First Lutheran Church in Lake Elsinore, Ca.

We saw this and it is self-explanatory.  We’re just sayin’…

“Sunday’s Coming” Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

A weekly Bible study lesson from one of our local Lutheran churches today. We will try to bring these samples of Lutheran teaching to you somewhat regularly.