Why Lutheran?

[TurtleAnne]

Sorry, I know this is such a vague and open question, but I'm not sure how to better approach what I'm trying to understand. So, basically, why have you chosen to identify with the Lutheran denomination?

The reason I'm curious is because I haven't attended a church since I was a kid (almost 30 now), and some weeks ago was moved heavily by the Holy Spirit to find and join a church, and also to get baptized. Knowing next to nothing about the differences between all the many denominations, I just opened up a google maps search for churches in my area within a few miles of my home (since I am a pedestrian). There were many results, I knew almost nothing about the different choices, other than that the church of my childhood taught heavily to never worship or pray to anything or anyone other than the Trinity, so I was avoiding Catholic churches in my search based on my understanding (which is weak anyway) of Catholicism.

At the time I just said a prayer in my heart and mind asking Jesus to help me choose a church on the map. In the end I felt a very strong pull towards one church in particular, and continue to feel a very strong pull towards this choice. So I'm trying to obey that pull, since I asked Jesus to help me choose, and it's an Evangelical Lutheran church. Even when the leader of church responded to my email inquiry, I felt a much stronger response to it than other response emails from other churches, it was like those responses didn't even really exist. I took this all as the answer I had asked for.

But I know almost nothing about this denomination and have been trying to read up on it. There is so much material that is completely new to me. It seems to have elements of Catholicism in it, like it seems that Lutherans do respect the Pope a whole lot, which threw me a bit for a loop, and simultaneously I feel pretty intimidated going to this church to check it out given that I know and understand so very little about it. Like it just feels like.. I'm getting ready to sign up for something that I don't even fully understand. Yet at the same time, I asked for an answer, and I'm fairly confident that I was given one, so.

And maybe it's not even the denomination, but some other reason I'm supposed to go to this church in particular, I have no idea.

Is anyone up for sharing what drew you to the Lutheran denomination? Not asking anyone to persuade me or anything along those lines, but more so just curious about others' experiences.

 

[Tigger45]

Lutheranism is a very NT church and highly honors historic Christianity.

 

[TurtleAnne]

Lutheranism is a very NT church and highly honors historic Christianity.

Thank you for being willing to share. So were you just researching the different denominations, or hear about it from someone else, or some other way that you came to choose it? Was there an 'aha' sort of moment for you, or did you gradually warm up to it, raised Lutheran, etc?

 

[rocknanchor]

Is anyone up for sharing what drew you to the Lutheran denomination?

My Lutheran wife (For about the last five yrs)

It seems to have elements of Catholicism in it, like it seems that Lutherans do respect the Pope a whole lot, which threw me a bit for a loop

It does, but upon joining will immediately describe the difference

But I know almost nothing about this denomination and have been trying to read up on it.

You seem a bit apprehensive. Might I suggest looking at the evangelical synod statement of beliefs? Your Wisconsin Evangelical Synod will be by far the most conservative. By what I can tell, there are three or four different Evan-Lutheran and one Association. Not to mention two I believe merged a few years ago.

Lutheranism is a very NT church and highly honors historic Christianity.

In light of the degree of distance between the L-Synods, I can't quite get behind Tigger's overly generalized comment. Lest that comment represents a hard-lined expression of infallibility? I wouldn't know.

 

[TurtleAnne]

You seem a bit apprehensive. Might I suggest looking at the evangelical synod statement of beliefs? Your Wisconsin Evangelical Synod will be by far the most conservative. By what I can tell, there are three or four different Evan-Lutheran and one Association. Not to mention two I believe merged a few years ago.

Thank you for reply. I'm a very cerebral-driven person (not sure how else to better describe it, but like as opposed to emotion or spiritual trust - just to say that I don't mean cerebral as in 'smart' but more like akin to being on the autism spectrum), and I am also a total control freak (in regards to my own situations in life). Neither of these aspects of my personality make it easy to just trust moving blindly in a direction without understanding the finer details of it. I think the saying that humans fear what they don't understand, applies to me greatly.

And then I'm in a situation where what I have experienced in a very intense and urgent spiritual push to be baptized, and also to join a church. I ask Jesus to please help me choose which church, and find myself feeling very pushed towards one in particular, which is a denomination that I had never even heard of before.

I think a lot of the apprehension stems from the teachings of the church of my childhood, certain parts of which really lodged in my mind, even though I also lost my Christian faith in later childhood, as well. One of those parts was how we all needed to be very vigilant and wary about false teachings, and our church leaders had an especially obsessive bone to pick with Catholics in particular. So a lot of that is lodged in the back of my subconscious mind.

So when I felt a strong spiritual push towards a Lutheran church, and then started reading about it, I did start getting pangs of anxiety when I saw talk of the Pope and saints and so on. I was taught from early childhood to basically consider Catholicism as the church of the anti-Christ. Regardless of whether or not I see it the same way to this day, that subconscious vigilance is still there.

I mean it's just sort of like little waves of cognitive dissonance I'm dealing with, between the teachings lodged into my mind since childhood, and my present experience of asking Jesus to help me choose a church and then feeling a very strong pull towards a church that then turns out to have elements of Catholicism in it. Just a bit anxiety-inducing, since I want to be sure I am really doing what God wants me to do.

But, the more I am reading about Lutheranism, it's starting to seem more like a middle ground approach, in a way? As though they tried to prune the perceived negative aspects of Catholicism while trying to retain certain things that they felt were important, none of which (the things retained) so far are the things that conflict with the teachings of my childhood church. So I'm starting to ease down off the ledge where my mind jumped up startled initially.

 

[Tigger45]

Thank you for being willing to share. So were you just researching the different denominations, or hear about it from someone else, or some other way that you came to choose it? Was there an 'aha' sort of moment for you, or did you gradually warm up to it, raised Lutheran, etc?

I was raised catholic but when I was 30 started investigating evangelical churches. What drew me first to Lutheranism was that it was evangelical and Catholic. The more I researched the early church the usage of the liturgy and the understanding of the sacraments just helped reinforce my choice of Lutheranism. I also appreciate law and gospel to interpret scripture and theology of the cross as an approach to interpreting God's plan for us over theology of glory.

I would like to point out that there are two distinct groups of Lutherans, that's why there are different Lutheran sub forums here at CF. One is liberal for ELCA synod congregations another is conservative for confessional synods like the LCMS and the third sub forum is the main sub forum for Lutherans.

 

[TurtleAnne]

I also appreciate law and gospel to interpret scripture and theology of the cross as an approach to interpreting God's plan for us over theology of glory.

That is something else I had never heard of before, theology of cross vs of glory, looking it up now.

One is liberal for ELCA synod congregations another is conservative for confessional synods like the LCMS and the third sub forum is the main sub forum for Lutherans.

Yeah I think the church I am going to attend is the ELCA type.

 

[TurtleAnne]

So I found this, and if this explanation is accurate, then yes I very strongly agree with this, as well.

Theology of Glory vs. Theology of the Cross

I didn't know that these distinctions had names, but I think I totally understand where it is coming from. Or well, at least maybe.

That was one of my major peeves with the church of my childhood, was that they assigned everything perceived as positive to God, and everything perceived as negative to satan, but in a specific way, specifically that if someone had a positive experience (raise at work, recovery from illness, winning a basketball game, etc) that it was a sign that God loved them, and that if someone had a negative experience (laid off from job, develops cancer, loses their basketball game, etc) then it was God letting satan punish them for bad things, and only if they truly repented would God make the bad things stop happening.

And it was that last part, that was a major peeve of mine, because I don't think that negative experiences are always a form of punishment. Maybe intrinsically due to original sin, but not necessarily more directly. I think that sometimes negative experiences are meant to grow a person, spiritually and otherwise. Maybe to give them a deeper empathy that they can show to someone else in the future who will go through the same thing, maybe to increase one's understanding of something that leads to a deeper or clearer understanding of yet something else, or maybe even to dissuade them from going in a certain direction with their life for their own good, etc. I mean who knows??? It's just a matter of the person trying to figure out what God's plan is for said-person, or should be, in my personal opinion.

So like instead of seeing the bad experiences as opportunities to grow as people, the bad experiences were seen as needing to be stopped immediately and that if the bad experiences didn't stop, it just meant that God was punishing the person, no other possibilities. This was something that I strongly disagreed with, and still do.

 

[rocknanchor]

Thank you for reply. I'm a very cerebral-driven person (not sure how else to better describe it, but like as opposed to emotion or spiritual trust - just to say that I don't mean cerebral as in 'smart' but more like akin to being on the autism spectrum), and I am also a total control freak (in regards to my own situations in life). Neither of these aspects of my personality make it easy to just trust moving blindly in a direction without understanding the finer details of it. I think the saying that humans fear what they don't understand, applies to me greatly.

And then I'm in a situation where what I have experienced in a very intense and urgent spiritual push to be baptized, and also to join a church. I ask Jesus to please help me choose which church, and find myself feeling very pushed towards one in particular, which is a denomination that I had never even heard of before.

I think a lot of the apprehension stems from the teachings of the church of my childhood, certain parts of which really lodged in my mind, even though I also lost my Christian faith in later childhood, as well. One of those parts was how we all needed to be very vigilant and wary about false teachings, and our church leaders had an especially obsessive bone to pick with Catholics in particular. So a lot of that is lodged in the back of my subconscious mind.

So when I felt a strong spiritual push towards a Lutheran church, and then started reading about it, I did start getting pangs of anxiety when I saw talk of the Pope and saints and so on. I was taught from early childhood to basically consider Catholicism as the church of the anti-Christ. Regardless of whether or not I see it the same way to this day, that subconscious vigilance is still there.

I mean it's just sort of like little waves of cognitive dissonance I'm dealing with, between the teachings lodged into my mind since childhood, and my present experience of asking Jesus to help me choose a church and then feeling a very strong pull towards a church that then turns out to have elements of Catholicism in it. Just a bit anxiety-inducing, since I want to be sure I am really doing what God wants me to do.

But, the more I am reading about Lutheranism, it's starting to seem more like a middle ground approach, in a way? As though they tried to prune the perceived negative aspects of Catholicism while trying to retain certain things that they felt were important, none of which (the things retained) so far are the things that conflict with the teachings of my childhood church. So I'm starting to ease down off the ledge where my mind jumped up startled initially.

Catholics? Some of those early Catholic scholars of the canons and apologetic thought have an impressive contribution. Helpful? Yes. As for Lutheran, they consider themselves small-case "c" catholic. Stepping back to come up with a competence ratings chart would be nice, but the best you could hope on that is a manual.

As an outlier tool to inform oneself for the prospects of a Church home would be to check out one of the Handbook of Denominations that are out there. This is hard to find in a library here in the states these days.

But a word on choosing if you don’t mind. These verses are among the best to guide the searcher through the jungle we have to deal with in finding a Church home,

“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, , lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.”
(2 Timothy 3:1.2,4,5)​

An open minded person isn’t instinctively driven to turn away from people who have idle opinions they offer in a very warm tone, But I was confronted with this face to face one day by a Church’s pastor whom I thought I knew.

The eternal peril one places himself in over cessation of the power of the Holy Spirit is one of the biggest upsetting issues facing the protestant Church. Sure, they can present you with words of approval of the power, but it is one thing to acknowledge a verse in one moment, but quite another to have it all whisked away by the fruit of their actions,

“They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him” (Titus 1:16)​

May the Lord provide what you’ll need for this effort.

 

[TurtleAnne]

Catholics? Some of those early Catholic scholars of the canons and apologetic thought have an impressive contribution. Helpful? Yes. As for Lutheran, they consider themselves small-case "c" catholic. Stepping back to come up with a competence ratings chart would be nice, but the best you could hope on that is a manual.

Yeah I wanted to emphasize for a reason that it was the teachings of my childhood church, not necessarily my beliefs, and that it was just lodged in my subconscious mind because I heard it so much as a little kid. So that is where the trigger-like apprehension response came from.

But a word on choosing if you don’t mind. These verses are among the best to guide the searcher through the jungle we have to deal with in finding a Church home

May the Lord provide what you’ll need for this effort.

Thank you. I'm trying to just trust God to do that, although trust is not my strongest uh, anything.

I even asked my grandmother for some advice (and she was one of the people in my life that was frequently taking jabs at Catholicism in my childhood), and her response was like both a word of warning and a word of encouragement at the same time. She was originally leaning towards advising me not to go to the Lutheran church, she was pressuring for a Baptist church, but in the end her advice concluded with:

"We know for certain...there isn't any church that has it ALL right, ours included. But believing the Bible is the true authority is essential. Don't go into a church expecting to agree with all they teach. Go into a church and ask God to show you the part that is for YOU," and in that advice seemed to give me her personal blessing to try the Lutheran church, due to their "Sola Scriptura" part.

 

[rocknanchor]

Duplicate

 

[FireDragon76]

I agree with Tigger, Lutherans are not necessarily anti-Catholic. My pastor is married to a Catholic woman, in fact. Historically, Lutheran churches looked very much like Catholic churches, and even the worship looks very similar. Lutherans do have images in churches and defend their use. But the preaching has an evangelical emphasis. In fact, I would say that Lutheranism is the true middle way between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The reformation for Lutherans was a response brought on by abuses in medieval religion, it was not the creation of an entirely new religion based on the Bible alone (the role of tradition in Lutheranism is higher than in Reformed and other Evangelical churches). So it's more like a tweak rather than a major overhaul, in my mind.

I go to an ELCA church that is more conservative than most. I don't think the national denominational politics are that important in choosing a church. What's more important is that you feel at home there and grow spiritually. Going to a church simply because you like the national image is bound to lead to some dissonance, because local churches are invariably going to vary (as my experience did). The Church really exists completely wherever people gather around the Word and Sacraments: the Church is always local.

In my case, my choice of a Lutheran church was pastoral need. I was attending an Orthodox church for many years and the experience left me wounded by perceived legalism and poor pastoral care. That kind of intense religion can really weigh on a sensitive conscience, and eventually I just started cracking up mentally and left Christianity for a while, only to come back later and get the same kind of treatment. There was no reconciliation happening. I've always been a bit partial to Luther as far as religion goes, and found myself drawn back to church attendance. For a while I attended an Episcopalian church but I found a certain oppressiveness and stuffiness in the atmosphere. And after some weirdness around an incident where they were reluctant to baptized a child, I just started questioning their teaching concerning baptism and the Lord's Supper (I believe they are effectual gifts that cannot be earned). So, I started praying about where to go because I was feeling desperate, and one Sunday I heard "A Mighty Fortress" as the closing hymn and I just said to myself, "I really need to check out a Lutheran church". So, I found the nearest ELCA parish and I went to visit the next Sunday. As coincidence would have it, the pastor at the Lutheran church had a Greek father and had Orthodox ancestors, so he understands where I am coming from. Most Protestants on the other hand know little about Orthodoxy so I might as well be Klingon.

 

[Tigger45]

So I found this, and if this explanation is accurate, then yes I very strongly agree with this, as well.

Theology of Glory vs. Theology of the Cross

I didn't know that these distinctions had names, but I think I totally understand where it is coming from. Or well, at least maybe.

That was one of my major peeves with the church of my childhood, was that they assigned everything perceived as positive to God, and everything perceived as negative to satan, but in a specific way, specifically that if someone had a positive experience (raise at work, recovery from illness, winning a basketball game, etc) that it was a sign that God loved them, and that if someone had a negative experience (laid off from job, develops cancer, loses their basketball game, etc) then it was God letting satan punish them for bad things, and only if they truly repented would God make the bad things stop happening.

And it was that last part, that was a major peeve of mine, because I don't think that negative experiences are always a form of punishment. Maybe intrinsically due to original sin, but not necessarily more directly. I think that sometimes negative experiences are meant to grow a person, spiritually and otherwise. Maybe to give them a deeper empathy that they can show to someone else in the future who will go through the same thing, maybe to increase one's understanding of something that leads to a deeper or clearer understanding of yet something else, or maybe even to dissuade them from going in a certain direction with their life for their own good, etc. I mean who knows??? It's just a matter of the person trying to figure out what God's plan is for said-person, or should be, in my personal opinion.

So like instead of seeing the bad experiences as opportunities to grow as people, the bad experiences were seen as needing to be stopped immediately and that if the bad experiences didn't stop, it just meant that God was punishing the person, no other possibilities. This was something that I strongly disagreed with, and still do.

Here's what theology of glory looks like in the lives of Christians past and present.

 

[TurtleAnne]

In my case, my choice of a Lutheran church was pastoral need. I was attending an Orthodox church for many years and the experience left me wounded by perceived legalism and poor pastoral care. That kind of intense religion can really weigh on a sensitive conscience, and eventually I just started cracking up mentally and left Christianity for a while, only to come back later and get the same kind of treatment. There was no reconciliation happening. I've always been a bit partial to Luther as far as religion goes, and found myself drawn back to church attendance. For a while I attended an Episcopalian church but I found a certain oppressiveness and stuffiness in the atmosphere. And after some weirdness around an incident where they were reluctant to baptized a child, I just started questioning their teaching concerning baptism and the Lord's Supper (I believe they are effectual gifts that cannot be earned). So, I started praying about where to go because I was feeling desperate, and one Sunday I heard "A Mighty Fortress" as the closing hymn and I just said to myself, "I really need to check out a Lutheran church". So, I found the nearest ELCA parish and I went to visit the next Sunday. As coincidence would have it, the pastor at the Lutheran church had a Greek father and had Orthodox ancestors, so he understands where I am coming from. Most Protestants on the other hand know little about Orthodoxy so I might as well be Klingon.

Thank you for being willing to share, as well. I think I can relate somewhat. It has taken me multiple decades to be able to separate in my mind, my experiences with the church of my childhood from my faith itself.

 

[Daniel9v9]

Thank you for sharing! I'm Norwegian and I spent most of my years in the UK and Japan, so I'm not really qualified to speak about the style and practices of the various branches of the Lutheran church in the US, but for what it's worth - I was born and raised pentecostal and I spent most of my years in a charismatic environment, only to later, reading the Bible and actually finding that Lutheran theology is (to my understanding at least) far more Biblical than the teachings I grew up with. Now, it should be said that I fundamentally believe in one holy Church, and it's not my intention to take a stab at other denominations, but put short, looking at Scriptures and looking into church history; particularly the various heresies and controversies that have appeared throughout the ages and how the church responded to it, and what the early church fathers believed and confessed, and what the creeds say - I find that it all works pretty seamless and harmoniously with the Lutheran understanding and teaching. I can go on about this, but this is a long-winded way to say that the reason I personally hold to Confessional Lutheranism is just that I feel like it's sound doctrine.

If you have a desire to get baptized, then that's truly wonderful! It's a gift from God! I can think of no other church that takes Holy Baptism more serious than the Lutheran church, so you should be in good hands