November 9, 2017 Show with Matt Richard on “Ministry & Church Planting in an Ever-Changing Culture”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, We are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with, and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this ninth day of November 2017.

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And I'm delighted to have back today as a returning guest, the

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Reverend Dr. Matthew Richard, who is an author and also a pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinner, North Dakota, a congregation within the

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Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. And today we are discussing ministry and church planting in an ever -changing culture.

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And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, the Reverend Dr. Matthew Richard. Thank you,

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Chris. Good to be here. And in studio with me is my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And hello once again.

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And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is ChrisArntzen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. And please only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

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That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Well, one thing

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I wanted to bring up right away that I did not know the last time I interviewed you,

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Dr. Richard, is that you were before becoming a member of the

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Missouri Synod, the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, you were among the churches in the

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Lutheran Brethren denomination. And if you could please give us a definition of those folks because I am familiar with Brothers in Christ from the

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Lutheran Brethren. Ever since I have become a Christian back in the 80s,

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I was providentially running into folks in the Lutheran Brethren, but I never really understood quite how they differed from the

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Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod and some of the other perhaps more liturgical

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Lutheran churches. Yeah, yeah, I was a part of the Lutheran Brethren for, boy, you know, since my childhood actually, to be honest on that, and served with them for about ten years as an ordained pastor.

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And so I went to their seminary in Minnesota and then served churches out in California as well as the

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Montana, North Dakota area as well. And I would say it's been about four years now since I've been in the

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Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod and what kind of brought about the shift for me was I was kind of leaning towards more wanting to be a part of a church denomination that had a little bit more of a liturgical background, a little bit more of the liturgy, a little bit more of the aspect of the ancient church connected with it, as well as the

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Missouri Synod has probably a bigger emphasis, we would say, on the sacraments such as baptism and communion.

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So those were some of the things that kind of pulled me towards the Missouri Synod and it just kind of came to the realization that I was probably just a better fit for the

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Missouri Synod. So I did part ways with the Lutheran Brethren about four and a half years ago and it was a very, very peaceful break and so I don't want listeners to get the impression that I stomped out or I was kicking up a storm.

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It was just a peaceful break where I realized that I think I was a much better fit for the Missouri Synod. But regarding the

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Lutheran Brethren, it was probably, let's see, in the early 1900s that formed a combination of several churches coming together and they formed for the purpose of church planting over in Africa and China and so forth.

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And so the Lutheran Brethren has a real strong heritage of planting churches overseas.

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Some 1 ,400 to 1 ,500 churches in Africa, churches in Taiwan, Japan, and only about 110 churches, last

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I can recall, in the United States. But very much we would consider the church

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Lutheran Brethren being low church, meaning that it's not very liturgical. It would be very typical of maybe kind of a very typical

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Baptist -type church setting. The pastor is wearing a suit and tie, more of a relaxed church service, and that's what would really differentiate it from the

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Missouri Synod, where the Missouri Synod tends to be more high church, more liturgical, and a greater emphasis on the sacraments.

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And having discussed the high church -low church divide, I know that there's even differences amongst

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Lutheran Church -Missouri Synod congregations on how high or how low should you go.

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Right. Yeah. And in the North Dakota district, generally speaking, we tend to be a little bit more high church, and so it's not uncommon to have the chanting of, chanting the singing of the pastors, chanting the liturgy and so forth.

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And so with that in mind, there's this understanding of high and low church, but there's also an aspect as well that differentiates the

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Lutheran Brethren from the Missouri Synod, and that is kind of the emphasis of pietism versus confessionalism.

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That's a whole other conversation, but really what that looks like is more of an emphasis on the pietism, has more of an emphasis on the prayer houses, small group

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Bible studies, whereas the confessionalism has more of a focus on the rituals and then the

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Sunday morning services. So maybe—boy, how do we say this?

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A little bit more formal versus a little bit more blue -collar, and that's very, very much oversimplifying the subject, but you can see that difference as well between the two denominations.

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Well, I had the privilege on several occasions to go to the

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Tuscarora Inn. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but that's a— Yep, yep, yep, I've been there, yep. That's a

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Lutheran Brethren convention center here in Pennsylvania, Tuscarora, Pennsylvania. And although it was not for Lutheran Brethren activities, the congregation that was very closely affiliated with the church that I was formerly a member of before moving to Pennsylvania, from New York to Pennsylvania, Hope Reform Baptist Church in Medford, Long Island, New York, they had an annual youth retreat at the

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Tuscarora Inn. They still might do it. I have to ask them about that. But I have some very, very fond memories of the

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Tuscarora Inn. But today we are discussing ministry and church planting in an ever -changing culture.

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Actually, before I do that, I forgot to ask you once again to explain or give more information about Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinnett, North Dakota.

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I know you've done it every time you've come on the air, but we have a growing audience, and we seem to have new people joining our audience every day, so there may be quite a number of people that have never heard you on this program before.

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So if you could tell our listeners about Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinnett, North Dakota. Yeah, Zion Lutheran Church is, as you said, in Gwinnett, North Dakota.

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Gwinnett is a town just southwest of Fargo, about an hour. We're in the southeast corner of North Dakota on the

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North Dakota Plains. And what's unique about Gwinnett is we're about a town of about 800 people, relatively small.

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But right in the center of the town we have a huge Bobcat factory. Bobcat skid steers, the machinery, they are all manufactured here in town.

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And so our factory employs, boy, I don't know, 1 ,400 to 1 ,500 people. And so during the day our little town swells to over 2 ,000 people, and we actually have traffic jams on shift changes as people come and go for their shifts working at the factory.

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And the factory runs 24 -7, seven days a week, in manufacturing these machinery.

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And so we're kind of a bedroom community to Fargo. There's some open prairie in between us and Fargo, but a lot of people will commute from the area to come work here in the factory.

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So basically just imagine a factory on the North Dakota Plain, surrounded by some houses and a couple churches and a school, and that's

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Gwinnett. And I'm privileged to serve some wonderful folks here at Zion Lutheran.

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The church has been here since 1908, and so it's over 100 years old, the church here.

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And so we're a very, very modest -sized church, averaging right around 100 a Sunday, and very, very faithful people here, very consistent, very faithful, hardworking farmers and factory workers.

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And I forgot whether you were raised in that area, but you certainly don't have the accent of the characters in the movie

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Fargo. Yeah. I grew up, actually, in North Dakota.

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I grew up about 10 miles from Canada, up in a tiny town called

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Bottineau. And it's right in the middle of the state, and then if you go the middle of the state, all the way up to the Canadian border.

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So I grew up there, and I guess people told me that I have much more of a Canadian accent from growing up in Bottineau.

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And I grew up playing hockey up there, Canadian hockey, and we had French fries and gravy and all that stuff that comes with Canada.

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So, yeah, my roots are here in North Dakota. So I consider myself a North Dakota boy.

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You know, being back in my home kind of territory of North Dakota is just wonderful to be here. But about four hours from where I grew up.

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Now, if you didn't like hockey, you would be pretty much considered the way conservative

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Americans would view a communist. Well, hockey is really big up there in Bottineau.

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And like I said, I grew up playing Canadian hockey. We were so close to Canada, so we went all over the tiny little towns.

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And every Canadian town up there had two things. It had a bar and it had a hockey rink. And so we played in these tiny little towns and these tiny little hockey rinks.

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And we'd go up there, and when it was 20 below, we'd drive up there and be playing in these tiny little rinks.

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My dad would take us all over, my mom and dad. Great memories of shooting the puck around up there.

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Well, now we can enter into our discussion on ministry and church planting in an ever -changing culture.

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And I understand that you have given a lecture on this issue where you basically summarize the entirety of Christendom into three major periods of existence of the

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Christian church and how the Christian church has fared in the world surrounding it, starting from being a tiny minority surrounded by either those faithful to Judaism or paganism, and then being more of a majority, not necessarily that the church ever was in reality, as far as regenerate people, a majority on the planet

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Earth, but at least there was more of a respect, a reverence for the

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Bible and Christian teaching where even the common folk that were not

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Christian had a cursory knowledge of our faith in some degree. At least a handful of the bullet points of essential doctrine would have been known by your average person.

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And then, of course, the drift back to being a minority again, even though perhaps many people in this country, even the

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United States, whenever you hear of polls being taken, you will see that the majority of people in the

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United States profess to be Christian, but that could obviously not be the case in reality.

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This would be a far different country, I believe, if the majority of citizens of the

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United States were actually regenerate people, born -again people. But if you could, go through some of these stages and what you believe brought about the changes.

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Yeah, first of all, we want to say, and you alluded to this in your comments there, that we're painting with a rather broad brush, an extremely broad brush, in looking at Western civilization.

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So we're going to really start with 32 AD, which is the date that I use for the crucifixion. Some people say it's 31, 32, 33, right in that range where Jesus was crucified and resurrected.

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And we consider that kind of the birth of the Church, the birth of the

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Church coming out of that resurrection. And so we start at that point, and then we're going to trace kind of the history from that point in the first century all the way to the present age right now where we're at here in Western civilization here in America.

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And so, again, we're going to look at approximately 2 ,000 years, and we're going to divide those 2 ,000 years into three segments.

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And as you said before, the first segment is going to be a minority position. So Christians are going to be in the minority.

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When we think of a minority, that means that we're second class. We're not in a position of power and authority.

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Christians are underneath another system. They don't have favor. They don't have this prestige that they would have otherwise.

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And so that stage, maybe if we could do this here, we'll maybe cover each stage, and I'll just kind of pause, and then we can discuss that.

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Would that work out, Chris? That's perfect. Okay. So, yeah, if we look at the very first stage, you know, we start, obviously, in 32

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A .D. with the crucifixion and the resurrection. And if we go from 32 A .D. to about 313

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A .D., so it's approximately 300 years, and what we see in that first 300 years is that Christianity is really in a minority position, as I stated.

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And what we see with that, obviously, is there's a lot of persecution of Christians. We can think of, you know,

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Nero, the emperor Nero in the first century. He would kill Christians. He would take them, and in order to amuse the people, the masses of people, they would dress these

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Christians in furs, and they would have them be killed by dogs or they would crucify

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Christians. And there's even reports in that first century where they would light up Christians on fire on crosses to light up the city of Rome.

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And so, obviously, at this point in time, we can sense a great deal of persecution. There were questions about who

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Christians were, what were they doing. They were labeled as cannibals because the rumor was that they were eating somebody's body and blood, which was, you know, basically a communion, but it was a misunderstanding what they were doing.

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And attacking the Christians from that perspective. We also understand that Christians, they conducted their worship in private homes and cemeteries and catacombs.

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And so, to be a Christian in that time, you weren't respected, you were persecuted, and you existed in a very, how would we say this, a very diverse and pagan society.

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And the Christian really had relatively no influence on the culture. So Christians were marginalized.

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They were on the outskirts of society. They were always under suspect and oftentimes killed.

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Yeah, well, that obviously is the birth of the church, which has really grew out of bloodshed.

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Not only the bloodshed of Jesus Christ. The primary bloodshed that is the foundation of our faith, without which we would have no faith, we would have no hope of eternal life, we would have no hope of a resurrection.

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But, so, tell us about how, more about how the church goes from being a persecuted minority, which actually began predominantly

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Jewish in its membership, to a more popular and generally accepted community of people that became predominantly

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Gentile. Yeah, well, the real big turnaround came probably right around that 300 mark.

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And around that 300 mark, there was an emperor named Constantine. And Constantine, he had, the story basically, paraphrasing the story loosely, goes that he had some sort of vision and so forth of victory over a battle.

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So he had all of his soldiers put the, it's called a kai in a row, it's the first two Greek letters of Christ.

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And they put it on their shield and they won a great victory. And as a great result of the victory,

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Constantine basically had a favoritism towards Christianity. He felt a gratitude towards it.

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And so in 313 AD, there came about something called the

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Edict of Milan. And what this edict was, was basically an establishment at that time that you can no longer pick on Christians.

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So in other words, you can't kill Christians, we're not going to basically bully them anymore.

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And so there was a stop to the persecution, a stop towards persecution towards the

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Christians. And then really right around that time, again in the early 300s of AD, there came about a favoritism towards Christianity, where we see that Emperor Constantine, he appointed a number of Christians to high positions in government.

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And this is kind of amazing, all the Roman soldiers were ordered to worship on the first day of the week.

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And churches were built and constructed for worship. And there was a sense later on,

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Christianity was declared the official religion of the Empire. And that happened sometime down the road after this.

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So what we see here is there's a shift that occurs some 300 years after Christ was crucified, where society begins to embrace

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Christianity, where the Emperor embraces Christianity, and where Christianity kind of became the end thing for people at that time.

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So instead of burning Christians on a crucifix, and instead of forcing

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Christians to worship and have their services in a cemetery, now we see the establishment of churches being built,

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Christians being in high positions of authority, and Christianity now having a voice where Christians could speak, and when they spoke, people would listen.

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So it's definitely a shift from this minority position for the first 300 years into what we call more of a majority position, where, again,

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Christianity is in a favoritistic -type position in society. Now I very routinely hear from various groups, or people within various groups,

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I'll give you an example, like the Seventh -day Adventists, a group of people who

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I think are a mixture of folks that range from being on the one extreme cultic and on the other extreme liberal.

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Believe it or not, there are very liberal Seventh -day Adventists. And in between, you have people that are very broadly evangelical, who might believe identically or nearly identically with your average modern evangelical, with the exception of the day that they worship.

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So they will very routinely blame Constantine, and I use the term that they would use, blame.

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I wouldn't use the term blame. But they would blame Constantine for initiating the

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Christian worship to be taking place every

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Sunday rather than Saturday. They would say that Constantine is the one that changed, radically changed, what would be considered the

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Christian Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Do you see any historical weight to that?

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You said something that triggered that in my mind, about it being the law, the binding law upon people to worship on Sunday, or to gather for worship, or at least consider it a holy day.

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But if you could explain or respond to the Seventh -day Adventists and other groups that would view

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Constantine as the origin of this. Yeah, you know, boy, I'm off the top of my head.

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Boy, I'm going to dig way back in the caverns of my memory here.

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If I'm not mistaken, I believe that Christians before that time of Constantine were actually having service on Sunday mornings, and the reason for that was because that Sunday morning was the day that they came to the tomb, and the tomb was empty.

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And so it's not that they were trying to be defiant of the Sabbath day on Saturday, but it was basically looked upon that Sunday was the morning that they came to the tomb, and Christ was not there.

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I mean, that's the good news that we have of the Resurrection, that everything that Jesus did and accomplished for us was really that finalized, and then we could see that Resurrection was that icing on the cake for the

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Christians at that time. But really when it comes down to it, we would say that the whole point and purpose of having a

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Sabbath day, a day of rest, which really comes back to the third commandment, remembering the

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Sabbath day by keeping it holy, is that we're setting aside a time in the week for us to gather together to hear

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God's Word. And really, I mean, every day should be a Sabbath for us as Christians as we open

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His Word and as we hear His Word. We're captive to the Word of God as Christians. But more specifically though, at least here in our town, we have

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Sundays set aside, and that's the time that we lay all of our work down, that we come and gather together as Christians, and we just set aside the busyness of life, and we sit down and we receive

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God's Word, we hear His Word, because our life is hinging upon that Word to hear about our sin, and then to also hear about that forgiveness of sin that was accomplished for us in Christ.

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And so I think what can happen is that we can really miss the main point of the third commandment, which is all about being receptive and taking time to set aside to hear

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God's Word. But when we go the other route, boy, I guess we can really miss the real main emphasis of it, which is, again, receiving

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God's Word. We're going to go to our first break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

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USA. And please only remain anonymous if it is about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

25:25

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. God willing, we're going to be right back after these messages with our guest,

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Dr. Matt Richard, and our discussion on ministry and church planting in an ever -changing culture.

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We'll be right back, God willing, so don't go away. Tired of box store

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Because they actually are a monthly advertiser with us, and they help keep us on the air. Without their advertising dollars, we would most likely go off the air because we are having such financial difficulties ourselves these days.

34:15

So that is my plug for Solid Ground Christian Books for the day, and I hope that you take heed to it.

34:24

And we are back now with our discussion with Dr. Matt Richard, author and pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinnett, North Dakota.

34:33

We are discussing ministry and church planting in an ever -changing culture. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

34:42

Before we go back to our topic, Dr. Richard, why don't you tell our listeners, even though we've already spent two hours discussing this with you on a previous interview, why don't you tell our listeners something about your book that has been brought into print by Concordia Publishing House, Will the

35:01

Real Jesus Please Stand Up? 12 False Christs. Yeah, not a problem.

35:07

Yeah, the book Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up was released last June, I believe it was

35:12

June 6th, by Concordia Publishing House. And it is a book that focuses on the 12 false

35:20

Christs of our American society. And obviously there are going to be more than just 12, but these are 12 prevalent ones.

35:26

And when I say a false Christ, these are false Christ idols that we create in our own mind.

35:32

And so oftentimes what happens is that individuals do not want to reject Jesus, but yet the

35:38

Jesus of the Bible they find to be maybe too complicated or too threatening to their own ideas and their own hopes and aspirations.

35:48

And so what they do is they refashion Jesus in their mind, kind of like an idol. They take a hammer and a chisel and they chop away the aspects of Christ that are not palatable for them.

36:01

And then they add on different expansion packs of ideas and personalities in order to craft

36:08

Jesus into an image of themselves, which is ultimately an idol. And so these 12 false

36:14

Christs really explore the journeys of different individuals, fictitious characters based upon real life events, these fictitious people that you meet in the book.

36:23

And you get to know these individuals and the false Christ that they subscribe to. And the book is very, very helpful from the perspective of helping the reader understand and spot false

36:33

Christ in society. And then there's also a section on more of an apologetics, a defense of the faith, how to expose the false

36:41

Christ, confront them, and then ultimately at the very end confess the real Jesus of the Bible.

36:47

Great. Well, you can also get that book through cvbbs .com. Just call 800 -656 -0231.

36:55

800 -656 -0231. And if they don't already have it in stock, Todd and Patty Jennings can order

37:02

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up by our guest today, Dr. Matthew Richard. And you can also mention to Todd and Patty that that is a

37:11

Concordia Publishing House publication. So we hope that you order that today and get your $50 worth of purchases to receive the free book by R .C.

37:24

Sproul and Stephen Jay Nichols, The Legacy of Luther. But we are going to a listener now, a listener question from Slovenia.

37:35

And this is Joe in Slovenia. And I had Joe's question right in front of me.

37:42

Oh, here it is. Dear Brother Chris, thanks so much for having Brother Matt back.

37:47

I enjoy his insights into historical cultural trends and application of the gospel to the current hodgepodge of contemporary worldviews.

37:57

I found this quote in his online presentation of your topic. We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the

38:08

United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that it is seriously connected to the actual historical tradition.

38:17

It is not so much that U .S. Christianity is being secularized. Rather, more subtly,

38:23

Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly,

38:30

Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by quite a different religious faith.

38:37

Wow, that's pretty powerful stuff, but I couldn't say that I disagreed with a single word of it. What are the colonizing forces that are displacing

38:45

Christianity with quite a different religious faith? What is that quite different religious faith?

38:52

And what should we be doing and being? Thanks again for an awesome topic for our day.

38:58

That's Joe in Slovenia. Yeah, yeah, boy, that's good stuff.

39:04

You know, the thing is, as we're kind of examining this historical move, the shifts that have been happening, where we're at right now since probably the 1970s is that we've moved away from that majority period where Christianity was kind of in the mainstream.

39:24

And what has happened is we've been drifting away from that. But, you know, like anything, when you drift away from something that was in a majority position, what can happen is that you retain different aspects of it, and then you allow it to amalgamate or blend with other ideologies happening in the culture.

39:44

But the point of that, the key of that, that quote there, though, is that the Church itself within, the

39:51

Church itself, Christianity itself, has bought into all these ideologies and is implementing these ideologies within the very walls of the

39:59

Church. And so what that means is that you can oftentimes go to churches and you will hear different ideologies, different ways of thinking that are definitely not from the

40:10

Scriptures, but they're being promoted and shared within the Church, even from the pulpit, as being a

40:17

Christian truth. And so not only have we allowed those ideologies to come into the

40:23

Church, but oftentimes we find pastors, boy, this just makes us, this should make us say,

40:28

Lord have mercy, but we hear pastors not promoting the theology of the Cross.

40:34

They end up promoting self -help garbage, I don't know how to say it nicely, but self -help garbage, rather than the

40:40

Gospel of Jesus. And so the blame can be, to a certain extent, be put on culture, but we as Christians have to look inside and look at our own house and realize that we've made a mess on the inside of the house, doing it by our own selves, by our own endeavors.

40:59

And so, yeah, definitely very, very problematic. And this really, you know, to get to this point, it's really kind of this history that we're kind of talking about today, how we actually got here, and this dating all the way back to the majority period, how we kind of came out of it to where we are now.

41:17

Well, thank you, Joe. Please keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and keep spreading the word about the program in Slovenia and beyond.

41:26

Well, our guest, or should I say our listener in Slovenia, kind of pushed us forward in time, but let's backtrack a little bit because we did take quite a leap forward in regard to where our discussion was before he sent in his question.

41:43

We reached a point where it actually, in the Roman Empire, became the law to worship as a

41:52

Christian. Now, did that mean there was no tolerance for any other religious faiths under the reign of Constantine?

42:01

Well, you know, this is the thing. I mean, we have to understand that 313, that Edict of Milan, that's kind of the point where, again,

42:10

I'm going to back up here again, we're painting with a rather broad brush in talking about this. So I'm using that 313

42:17

A .D. mark as that point where Christianity was no longer allowed to be persecuted, which then, you know, time and history, things take time to evolve and then come about through the different circumstances and events.

42:31

And so really what we see is we see Christianity going from that minority position where it was misunderstood, people didn't understand the narrative of Christianity, the general idea of, you know, the story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, the story of his life, those basic stories of, you know, the

42:48

Ten Commandments and Moses and Noah. The basic biblical narrative was not realized in the first 300 years.

42:57

However, after that 313 mark, where Christianity then started to see some favor within the economy and the culture of that time, and that's when it really emerged to a much more prominent position.

43:11

So we have to keep in mind that before this time, Rome was very much, very paganized.

43:17

And so they tolerated Christians, you know, they persecuted them, but they also tolerated them to a certain extent.

43:24

But then we see after 313, Christianity moved into a much more favorable position, and that narrative, that story of Christianity began to take root in Western civilization.

43:36

And so then from that 313 A .D. and on, we see much, much more of that narrative, the story, art, artwork, language, the mentality of the individual began more and more to be

43:51

Christianized. And so the point being that I'm trying to make here is in this second period from 313

43:59

A .D. all the way up to the 1970s, again, very broad stroke when we make that, we can assume at that time, in this majority position,

44:09

Christianity was, in a certain extent, respected, the story of Christianity was understood.

44:15

So then when you can talk to a person in society, whether or not they were a Christian or not, they had a general understanding of the narrative, of the story, of a, you know, a theistic, a theist, more of a

44:29

God -centered worldview, I guess we'd say it that way. And so there was a common understanding when it came to evangelism.

44:37

You could start from the perspective of there being a God, start from a perspective with the understanding of what grace actually was, or the atonement.

44:45

You could say these words, and for the most part, the average person would have a basis of understanding that you could bridge and talk to them when evangelizing.

44:56

Now I would have many of my Calvinist brethren very upset with me if I didn't say something here, and I'm certain that you might have a number of your own

45:06

Lutheran brethren, and I don't mean Lutheran brethren as the Lutheran brethren denomination, I mean your

45:11

Missouri Synod Lutheran brethren, very upset if we did not make a clarification that although we would all share much of the patristic era as our own as well, the

45:28

Roman Catholics do not have ownership of the patristic period.

45:34

Their claims that the Church Fathers were all unanimously in favor of their understanding of religion and salvation and so on is just a lie.

45:46

It's a revisionism of history. In fact, many of the primary dogmas of Rome today are not to be found anywhere in the patristic writings.

45:57

But we do have to bring to the attention of our listeners that we do not believe that during the dark ages and so on where you had so much power that was being wielded by the

46:12

Church of Rome that this era was an era where the gospel was everywhere to be heard and believed and that there was not serious persecution going on by those claiming to be

46:29

Christian, meaning the Roman Catholic Church, wielding their sword against those who are beginning to discover the true gospel and the truths of scripture underneath the rubble of Rome's idolatry and superstition.

46:44

I mean, isn't that true? As you are generalizing here about this being a period within what we would call

46:54

Christendom, it's still not a pretty sight for those who actually believe in the true gospel.

47:00

Yeah, yeah. Again, as you stated there, when we're talking about this, we're talking about just a basic understanding of how the

47:08

Church was treated by more, we would say, more so the secular sphere, right?

47:15

And so the left -hand kingdom, the kingdom of the left hand, which would be the government, the state itself.

47:21

And so we see really, like I said, that 300 mark and on. Generally speaking, the state itself was more favorable towards Christianity.

47:31

But unfortunately what happened, as you alluded to here, what happened was the Church grew to the point where the right -hand kingdom, we

47:38

Lutherans use, and I'm not sure if this is familiar with your background, but we use left and right -hand kingdom, left being the state and the right -hand kingdom being the

47:47

Church. And what we see here is as time went on, the Church became so influential that the right -hand kingdom began to dominate over the left -hand kingdom.

47:58

And so we really see a reversal of what was happening in that first minority period, where if you date back to the early

48:05

Church, the state was burning Christians, the left -hand kingdom was stomping all over the right -hand kingdom of the

48:11

Church, whereas we see in the time of the height of the

48:16

Roman Catholic Church, the Pope had so much power. I mean, the Pope wielded, the

48:22

Catholic Church wielded a tremendous amount of power even over the state itself. And so that's the shift that's happening.

48:29

So the point being made here is during that time, generally speaking, the narrative was there.

48:36

Now, again, as you hit, I don't think we can say that everyone got the narrative. Everyone understood the message of the

48:42

Gospel, but the pieces themselves were actually there for them to understand the basics of Christianity.

48:51

But we can hit this a little later on, too. In my humble opinion, though, the Church, the

48:56

Christ Church, typically functions much, much more healthy when it is in that minority period, when it's actually being persecuted itself.

49:06

But we can get on to that a little bit later on as we discuss that second minority period.

49:14

Well, where would you like to bring us now as far as leaving the age where at least there was a common understanding and respect and reverence towards what would be called

49:28

Christendom and the Scriptures and a general cursory knowledge of some main beliefs within Christianity that were commonly known amongst even those that were not either religious at all or perhaps even members of other religions?

49:48

Yeah, if we can kind of take that journey from, again, a broad brush here, if we go from 313

49:55

A .D. and we go throughout all of Church history, now we're going to be kind of jumping over a huge section of the

50:01

Reformation and so forth, the 1400s and 1500s and 1600s. But if we take this journey from over in basically

50:09

Israel and Europe and we travel all the way over to the United States, what we find here in the

50:15

United States is that at the very foundation, at least, there was definitely a Christianity itself found itself in a majority position.

50:24

You know, you look at our founding documents. You look at the founding fathers of our country.

50:30

Now, there could be a whole lot of conversation whether or not, you know, what was the actual Christianity flavor of some of our founding fathers, but nonetheless,

50:39

I don't think anyone can deny that that basic narrative of Christianity was there, that the pieces were there.

50:46

And so we see in the American landscape, you see, you know, towns springing up, and at the very center of the town you would see a church, and the big steeple would actually be over top of the trees, and it would be at the center of the city.

51:01

And the pastors of these churches were oftentimes the most educated and well -respected people in town, and so church was much more prevalent where many times individuals were at church four, five, six times a week.

51:16

So the message of Christianity was there in our American culture at its roots, very prevalent in society, and again, in this majority position.

51:27

But this all kind of came to a halt and it changed, and the date that I kind of use is the 1960s and 70s.

51:34

And at that time in the 60s and 70s, we have for the first time attendance in churches starting to, you know, shift and change.

51:46

Before that time, you would go into any church and you would find a consistent amount, a number of people in their 20s and 30s and 40s, 50s and 60s.

51:55

In fact, across the board you would have a very, very blended church service with having people of all different ages in the church.

52:03

But after the 1960s and 70s, for the first time what we see is that churches then are being vacated by oftentimes we could say the younger individuals of the church.

52:15

And then we see from that time on, we see that school, in schools, prayer was removed from school in 1962.

52:22

We can also see the teaching of evolution in the public school. We see that devotional

52:27

Bible reading was removed from the school in the 60s. And then there's been, ever since then, there's been attempts to remove

52:34

God from the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments being removed from courthouses.

52:39

So we see this shift since the 1960s and 70s, all the way up to our current day and age, this shift where there's a rejection of the church having a prevalent spot in society.

52:53

So again, we're shifting away from that majority position and we're entering into a second minority position, much like how we see in the very first 300 years of the church.

53:06

Well, we're going to a break right now. I'm going to read a listener question to you that you can mull over during the break and answer it when we return.

53:15

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who says, Are you speaking primarily in regard to American Christianity?

53:28

Because I understand Europe is practically a barren wasteland, which has even a worse existence for the church in our day and age than the

53:40

United States. So I'm wondering if they would have perhaps a different timeline. And you can answer,

53:47

RJ, when we come back from our break. If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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01:10:24

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01:10:30

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01:10:37

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01:11:01

and please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence. Dr. Richard, before we went to the break,

01:11:06

R .J. in White Plains, New York, was wondering if this time chart that you have, this evaluation of when things radically changed, especially in the modern era, are you including in your understanding what was happening globally in the church, especially in Western Europe, or is this exclusively the

01:11:31

United States and North America, perhaps, that you're talking about? Yeah, when I say the 1960s and 70s,

01:11:38

I'm referring to just, we would say, basically the United States. And again, you know, you could look at Europe, and obviously when we look at Europe, I mean,

01:11:46

I think, boy, the most recent stats I heard was that three to four percent of the population attends church over there.

01:11:53

And so you have huge churches over in Europe, and many of them are being transformed into nightclubs.

01:12:01

I kind of gasp at that, but that's just unfortunately true. Yeah, but you have a lot of churches in America that are nightclubs.

01:12:07

I mean, that's how they worship. Yeah, very true, very good truth. And, you know, even in Canada, I mean,

01:12:13

Canada is going to be a little bit further down the road than we are, much more down the road than we are for the timetable.

01:12:20

So, yeah, when I refer to this, this is very much a tracing from right here in America, backwards in Western civilization all the way back to 32

01:12:30

AD. And even in America, though, we would have to acknowledge that there's going to be a vast difference between this, you know, what we're talking about on the west coast and east coast versus the

01:12:40

Midwest. I think the Midwest, North Dakota, where I'm at, I believe we have the highest attendance of church attendance in the

01:12:49

United States percentage -wise here in North Dakota. And so, you know, definitely the narrative of Christianity is much more prevalent here.

01:13:00

You know, and then I guess, boy, my little tiny town of Gwinner, 800 people. There's only really three churches here in town.

01:13:07

But in a lot of ways, I'm the town pastor. And, you know, when I say the town pastor, I pretty much know everyone.

01:13:15

And, you know, if there's a concern, they, hey, go talk to Pastor Richard. Even if they're not a part of my parish,

01:13:21

I get people coming to talk to me. And so you definitely have, to a certain extent, that respect for the church itself.

01:13:29

In fact, in our little town of Gwinner, at 12 o 'clock, 3 o 'clock, and I believe at 6 o 'clock, you have the bells going off.

01:13:39

Our bells chime at 3 o 'clock. We have it at the time that Jesus was crucified.

01:13:45

And so the bells go off. The other church has it going off at noon, and another bell system goes off at 6 o 'clock.

01:13:51

So you have church bells ringing throughout the day. And that definitely shows, in our little tiny town, that we're still kind of in that majority position, where there's a little bit of that influence of the church, where the pastor's respected, and where the

01:14:05

Christian narrative is there and prevalent. But, again, if you go to the

01:14:10

West Coast and the East Coast, and even, you know, seen in maybe some of the bigger cities here in North Dakota, you're seeing a shift away from that majority period to that minority period, where Christianity is being marginalized to kind of the outskirts of society.

01:14:27

Well, if we're going to be honest, though, isn't the popularity of Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinner, North Dakota, because of the

01:14:34

Gwinner, Gwinner chicken dinner? Yeah. We have

01:14:39

Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. I'm kind of curious, as you're going through this,

01:14:44

I'm thinking through the 60s and 70s, because the tail end of that is where I came into all of this.

01:14:49

And I'm just wondering if you could comment on how much of our move away from the majority position was caused by, for example, we had a massive

01:15:01

Sunday school movement, a gradation of the ages.

01:15:07

Like a segregation of the ages. Well, yes, the separation of, you know, all of a sudden, the

01:15:15

Sunday school matched the public schools as far as the grades, the grade levels separating people, of course.

01:15:23

And then there was the massive bus movement. You know, there was jokes about Jerry Falwell's buses, you know, crashing with Jack Howell's buses in Texas, you know, that kind of stuff.

01:15:33

But, you know, the emphasis became so much on numbers and bringing people in that the emphasis kind of came off of the mission of the church anyway.

01:15:42

And, you know, it was more important that you did whatever gimmicks came down the pike to get those people, just to get the numbers in there.

01:15:51

Do you think that had a lot to do with what changed everything in the 70s? You know, there's going to be a lot of different factors,

01:15:59

I mean, coming into this. And, I mean, you could trace this back to, even back to the Enlightenment, the assault of rationalism upon the church itself.

01:16:09

There's also, within America, the anti -intellectualism that kind of came about at our foundation.

01:16:16

So there's all these different reasons for this happening. But what we can know for sure,

01:16:21

I guess I want to be careful how much I speculate, but what we do know for certain is that David Kinnaman, in his book,

01:16:30

You Lost Me, he's president of Barna Research Group, and he does point back to the 1960s and 70s, and he really points to that mark and says, you know, something happened in the church with attendance.

01:16:43

People were fairly consistent with attendance. So, in other words, you would see the 20 -year -olds there.

01:16:49

You would see the teenagers there. You would see 30s and 40s and 50s. Everyone was there. But after the 60s and the 70s, you saw very much a breakaway.

01:17:00

And, you know, I don't want to point fingers at each generational group, because every generation has its own struggles.

01:17:07

But we really see this with the baby boomer generation, almost kind of that revolt, when we think of Woodstock, that revolt against the establishment, the revolt against authority.

01:17:18

And so there's kind of a pushing back of grandpa and grandma or mom and dad's religion, right?

01:17:24

And so there was definitely a breakaway from that. And then mixed with that, obviously, you're going to have different ideological movements at work.

01:17:33

And so what we have to understand is that in society, you have ideas, and ideas have consequences, and ideas are being taught.

01:17:44

And they're very, very big. They're like tectonic plates, and they shift and they move. And then as a result of that, you have the rumblings in society.

01:17:52

So what we're seeing even right now in our day and age is this is a whole different topic.

01:17:58

This would be fun to have a different show on this one. But what we see right now at work is a neo -Marxist ideology at work in our college campuses, not every college campus, but that's resulting in many of the different protests that we're seeing today.

01:18:12

And so it's driven by an idea. It's driven by a system of thinking.

01:18:18

And so back to that, I mean, all the details as far as changing the numbers,

01:18:24

I do think that the church picked up on this in the 1960s and 70s, seeing that there was a decline, especially in the younger people coming to church.

01:18:35

And the church started to realize at that point in time, you know, this idea like, boy, I think something's wrong, where we're starting to lose people.

01:18:43

And as a result of that, there was definitely a push, a reaction to that, a response to the 1960s and 70s, which we can see that happened with different evangelism programs where there was a sense we were going to try to stop the bleeding, you know, to attack that and to stop the bleeding of the loss of numbers.

01:19:04

And so we've really had, since the 1960s and 70s up into the 80s and 90s, we've had all these different programs that have developed.

01:19:12

We think of Rick Warren with the church growth movement. We think of the Emerging Church, you know, that developed with people such as Rob Bell and Brian McLaren.

01:19:22

You have all these different movements that are attempting to stop the loss of numbers to try to withhold the reality that we're entering into this minority period.

01:19:33

But to really pinpoint it on one thing, boy, I think it would be very, very difficult. I think you're going to have multiple different ideologies at work, as well as different sociological things at work within that as well.

01:19:45

Yeah, one thing that is interesting and tragic is that you have evangelicals who are supposed to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, who are supposed to be believers in the primacy of preaching, people who are supposed to be concerned about honoring and revering

01:20:09

God and not treating God and His worship in a trite way.

01:20:15

You have the evangelical movement so desperate to reclaim people that have left their midst that they are willing to do their best to lure goats back into the pen by throwing goat food out the window and attracting goats in by trying to appeal to and appease the tastes, interests, and desires of goats.

01:20:46

So you have more and more people involved in these mega -churches and these seeker -sensitive churches where you don't even know how many people within the membership ranks are actually regenerate people.

01:21:00

You have people that may be there just purely to be entertained, purely to have their needs met, their physical needs met, or perhaps even emotional needs met, because sermons are becoming more like counseling sessions in a pop -psychology sort of way rather than a biblical way than they are actual worship services.

01:21:21

And something interesting just happened recently that the

01:21:27

Rev. Buzz Taylor is familiar with. I had a pastor's luncheon just a few weeks ago, and the invitations were exclusively for men in ministry.

01:21:40

And there was a local woman who has some sort of pastoral role at an

01:21:47

Elka congregation, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America denomination, which is obviously an ironic name for that denomination because it is neither evangelical nor Lutheran.

01:22:03

But she started a bit of an uproar on Facebook, especially in complaining to the guest of honor who was at the luncheon,

01:22:14

Steve Bloom, who is a Pennsylvania state representative running for Congress. He is a conservative,

01:22:19

Bible -believing, unwaveringly dedicated Christian. And this woman was complaining that I did not invite women in ministry, and it really erupted into a mini -firestorm of over 200 comments, many of them nasty, on the

01:22:37

Facebook page of Steve Bloom. But one of the women said something very interesting and very revealing as to this mindset of modern

01:22:47

Christianity, and I use the term Christianity very loosely. She said, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't have her quote in front of me, but she said something to the effect, and I know this is very close to what she said,

01:23:00

Hopefully we will begin to learn more from society on how to change the church in such a way that it will not hurt and exclude people.

01:23:14

Now, isn't it interesting that she believes society is supposed to be a light to the church rather than the church being a light to the world?

01:23:23

Yeah, yeah, and then right there, I mean, what we see that's happening is this, is to be a

01:23:29

Christian in that majority period, for the most part, it's relatively without persecution, we could say.

01:23:38

You know, it's easy to be a part of something when everybody else is doing it, but when you enter into this second minority period from the 1960s and 70s, it's going to become much like that first 300 years of the church.

01:23:53

The Christian himself or herself is going to be finding more and more that they're going to be in the minority position in culture.

01:24:01

So as a result of that, we really are faced with two options, and those two options are simply this.

01:24:09

If you're in the minority, if you're not the popular kid on the block, you can either say, you know what, it doesn't matter, and say,

01:24:16

I know what I believe, and I believe it, and I confess it with boldness, and I'm not going to really pay attention to the winds of culture, so when culture's like a re -blowing in the wind, snapping back and forth, it can blow and do whatever it wants, it doesn't matter,

01:24:31

I'm going to remain steadfast in the word of Christ and in the great confession of who Jesus is for me.

01:24:38

Kind of be that stick in the mud. Or the other option is this, is that you capitulate. You go along with the crowd, you become that lemming, and you just follow the crowd and the culture of the age.

01:24:49

And that's really what we're finding right now in Christianity. Right now in 2017, we are much more in that minority position, and when that heat comes from culture, that persecution, and that military term, that blowback of culture, when it comes and we find ourselves being under that pressure and that persecution, it's either going to cause us,

01:25:15

Lord willing, to dig our heels in and say, I respectfully disagree, this is what

01:25:21

I believe, and this is why I believe it, and I'm a Christian in Christ, or we capitulate, and we jump ship, and we go the way of culture to harmonize that, to maybe be relevant.

01:25:34

Boy, how many times have I heard that term, that the church needs to be relevant? Which is code word for you give up on your grandpa and grandma's religion, and you just kind of go along with culture.

01:25:43

You drop that dry and dusty old Bible and maybe kick it to the side of the curb and get with the times.

01:25:51

All of these phrases that we hear are attempting to get that church to adapt to the new position, but the reality is this, is in the first 300 years, the church was in a minority position, and it confessed

01:26:06

Christ. And right now, it doesn't change. In fact, we're going to have to be getting used to, in my opinion, more and more persecution, more and more of a sense where we are marginalized as Christians, but that really doesn't matter.

01:26:22

It doesn't stop the confession of Christ. It didn't stop the confession of Christ in the first 300 years, and nor should it do it now.

01:26:29

Yeah, it is ironic that in some senses, even though you would probably hardly ever find somebody who would admit it in quite this blunt and clear and honest way, but you have the church that should be on a rescue mission to search for and find and compel to come in those who are lost, those who are wandering and searching in the wrong places, those who are even the enemies of Christ.

01:27:09

We are supposed to be on a rescue mission to enable them to discover the gospel, to hear the truths about the scriptures, and many churches, even ones that profess to be evangelical, are now viewing the lost world around us as the rescuers because they are going to rescue us by making our numbers grow, by making our coffers more filled with money, by enabling us to finish or start building projects so we can build a bigger sanctuary to fit all of these goats that we fill our auditoriums with, and to build gymnasiums, and to build everything else that they need to be more comfortable in our houses of, quote -unquote, worship, to have it really resemble more of a shopping mall, like the

01:28:14

Mall of America or something, rather than an actual house of worship. It's as if we are looking to them to rescue us, isn't it?

01:28:24

Yeah, absolutely. Here's the thing that we have to keep in mind, is back in that majority position, that majority time, if you do evangelism, again, we can say this, in that majority time, if you do evangelism and outreach to a person, you can start with the assumption that they knew the basics of the

01:28:40

Christian faith, the basic story. So really, to bring in somebody who was unchurched, back in that majority period, it wasn't a whole lot of work for assimilation, right?

01:28:53

I mean, they kind of understood the basics of how a church was and the story itself.

01:28:58

So they could relatively walk right into the church and after hearing the gospel, become a member.

01:29:06

But now in our day and age, again, we have to understand now that our culture has lost the basic narrative, the basic story of Christianity.

01:29:15

And so the words that we use, our worldview that we have as Christians, is completely foreign to the average person in society right now.

01:29:24

So then that leaves, here's the big crux, here's the really, again, two ways we can go.

01:29:30

We can either adapt the church, change the church to fit the culture, which

01:29:36

I would say that is us selling out. And individuals will say, well, aren't you supposed to know the culture?

01:29:42

And I would say, yes, we know the culture. We have to understand sociology, we understand how culture thinks and who they are, so that we might evangelize and speak to them in a way that they can understand.

01:29:55

But then here's the burden of the church. We don't change the church to become like the culture.

01:30:01

We actually take individuals from the culture, and here's the word that we use as Lutherans, is that we catechize them.

01:30:08

The word catechize is to teach them. So we teach them the faith. So we bring them into the church, and we teach them the essentials of the

01:30:18

Christian faith, which for us as Lutherans is the small catechism, which is basically taking them through the

01:30:24

Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, the very meat and potatoes of the

01:30:30

Christian faith. So the burden is, again, not, you know, I see so many churches trying to adapt to culture, and there's very little emphasis on saying, no, we need to get people the culture and teach them and catechize, assimilate them into the church, but the burden is on them to learn the

01:30:47

Christian faith rather than us selling out. If you could, Reverend Buzz Taylor, hold on to your thought.

01:30:53

Don't forget it, because we're going to our last break, and you could ask your question or give your comment when we return. And if anybody would like to join us, now is the time to do it before we run out of time.

01:31:02

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be back with our final half hour of our discussion with Dr.

01:31:11

Matt Richard of Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinnett, North Dakota, on the theme, Ministry and Church Planting in an

01:31:17

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01:39:29

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the USA. And by the way,

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01:40:38

But yep, yep, you're correct. I think it was a couple of years ago that they opened it up to a larger market.

01:40:46

And we do have the Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co -host, who has something he wanted to say. Yeah, I hope I'm clearly connecting the dots here, because this is based on conversations that I actually had with people of late.

01:40:58

But you are mentioning, one clear thing that is present in our worship that is a good thermometer is the music of the church.

01:41:08

And we're talking about trends here, about going from the majority to the minority position and the quest to hang on to the numbers and so forth.

01:41:20

But you also mentioned at the beginning of the program that the particular group that you are a member of in the

01:41:29

Lutheran Church is less liturgical, if you will, than the others.

01:41:36

And I'm just kind of wondering how all that affects the music of your church compared to the others and how that fits into the broader discussion of the trends that we're discussing.

01:41:46

Yeah, definitely. I mean, you look at the lyrics of music. You definitely hit on something very, very key there.

01:41:51

If you turn to some of the older hymns, you look at the language and the story, what they communicate.

01:41:58

I'm thinking of a recent hymn that we sing by Martin Luther that was ten verses long. And the lyrics are just rich.

01:42:06

They tell the whole story. And it's just absolutely incredibly rich lyrics.

01:42:12

But yet, then we see today, and I'm not trying to be, when I say this, I'm not trying to come across as just a cantankerous old person, you know, grumbling at young people's music, but I have a serious concern with the music that is being sung these days.

01:42:29

The music itself is very, very shallow, and I don't think we can deny that. It's very shallow, the lyrics, very repetitive.

01:42:37

And it really doesn't tell the story that it once did. I mean, all you have to do is, again, look back four or five hundred years ago to the hymns that they were singing.

01:42:46

Definitely much more rich in the theology of Christianity.

01:42:52

And again, I would say that comes back to a more well -educated laity in a lot of ways.

01:42:59

So I think the way that the Church also sings its songs is going to give way of evidence of whether or not they have succumbed to this second minority period.

01:43:10

In other words, really, like I said, there's two options. Either you know what you believe in, and you believe it itself, and you hold on to it in this second minority period, or you start to capitulate and give into the culture.

01:43:23

And I think that's very, very much true when you start divorcing yourself from the rich theology that we have.

01:43:29

And our music sounds more like the Grammys than it would from the historic music itself.

01:43:36

Now, being less liturgical than your other Lutheran brethren, is your music...

01:43:44

Actually, it's the reverse. Missouri Synod is more liturgical. Yes. Missouri Synod is going to be much, much more liturgical.

01:43:53

The music that we sing is going to be much older. And there's also a thing on this, too.

01:43:59

I mean, I think... Now, this is not true all the time, but I would say that if you ask a

01:44:05

Christian what the authors that they're reading, I think it's really characteristic to ask a person what they read.

01:44:11

And I would say I read mostly dead people. You know, I read dead theologians.

01:44:17

And I find that I'm most helped by the sermons of Luther. I mean, each week when

01:44:22

I preach my sermons, I'm reading Luther from the 15th. I'm also reading

01:44:28

C .F .W. Walther. I mean, I'm reading a guy, Bo Geertz. He was a

01:44:33

Lutheran over in the Scandinavian country. And so I'm reading these dead theologians, these dead pastors.

01:44:40

And not that we can't have some excellent stuff out there now, but I think when we look to the past, if we're suspicious of the past and we're thinking, you know, the past needs to go away,

01:44:50

I think that's a very, very key characteristic that one is kind of capitulating under the pressure and the persecution of the second minority period.

01:45:00

Now, obviously we have to admit, too, the second minority period, at least in America, we're not facing near the persecution of that first 300 years.

01:45:08

And no way, shape, or form is it the same. But my whole point is that we're shifting out of that time of comfort, that time of majority, the time of influence for Christianity, to this place where we are finding ourselves on the sidelines of culture.

01:45:25

Didn't you have a thread that you were going on there? Well, I was just kind of curious how the differences in the

01:45:31

Lutheran groups were manifest in music because of one being more liturgical than the other.

01:45:37

And I'm in agreement, I mean, but like I said, this is something that I've been studying out of late is church music and so forth, and how it affects, well, how it's used in worship.

01:45:49

And I was just wondering, like, in a less liturgical Lutheran setting, is there more contemporary music?

01:45:56

Yes, I would say that, generally speaking, that is true. I would say that the more that one rejects the liturgy, the more you're going to have the contemporary.

01:46:05

But we also have to keep in mind, though, too, there are some definitely very, very liturgical churches out there that are extremely liberal, that have looked at Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture, and Scripture is nothing more than a book of myths to them.

01:46:19

And so we've got to be careful that we don't overcharacterize on that, but I think the general observation, could you say that churches that are less liturgical have more contemporary worship, and more of the spirit of the age,

01:46:32

I would say that, generally speaking, is a yes. Whereas the more liturgical that you find yourself, the more you're going to be reaching back in time to some of these really rich hymns that came before.

01:46:45

But it's not only that, necessarily time, but it's also, there are hymns and there are songs today that are very, very good, but they're going to be by authors and individuals who have refused to buckle under the pressure of going along with times that are going to remain steadfast.

01:47:01

I love that word, steadfast. They're going to remain steadfast in the confession of the Scriptures, steadfast of who we are in Christ, and they're not going to be that reed blowing in the wind, snapping to and fro, being tossed back and forth by the waves of whatever is popular in the moment.

01:47:17

And I just have to put my own two cents in as a Reformed Baptist and being from a very low church tradition.

01:47:25

The Reformed Baptists are not typically known. I'm not saying that there are no Reformed Baptists that haven't caved into the modern worship movement.

01:47:36

And not to exclude anything that's modern. Keith Getty and his wife have been producing some really remarkable and God -glorifying,

01:47:48

God -centered, biblically rich music, and they are contemporary artists.

01:47:57

In fact, one of the duo, Keith, is going to be speaking at the

01:48:04

G3 conference coming up in Atlanta, Georgia. But I'm sure that as someone who is a part of a highly liturgical group, you would even admit that the other problem in that realm is that you can cave into dead formalism and even vain repetition and that kind of a thing, as the

01:48:27

Church of Rome has been famous for. And even the Church of Rome, by the way. I am a former

01:48:32

Roman Catholic, and the Church of Rome, since the 60s, I can remember the folk mass, which

01:48:40

I don't know if that is as common as it was then. Of course, it may be with different kinds of music than I grew up with.

01:48:48

But they were actually singing, believe it or not, and I kid you not, when I was growing up as a young boy in the

01:48:54

Catholic Church, during the folk masses, they would actually be singing, at times,

01:49:00

Beatles music, like Let It Be, just because of the fact that the lyrics include in those times of darkness,

01:49:08

Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom. But anyway,

01:49:14

I digress. But would you admit that high liturgy is not any certainty of something very seriously wrong entering into the worship?

01:49:27

Well, I would say that when it comes to liturgy, definitely there can be a problem where it becomes just the rote of what we do.

01:49:34

And that would be, I would say, that would be a failure of teaching. You know, everything that we do in life, and especially like in the

01:49:42

Church service, we do things for a reason. And so I would say that here at Zion Lutheran, we're constantly teaching what we do and why.

01:49:52

And so the way that I face the Church and the way that I talk, the way that my body language all has a reason and a purpose for serving the

01:50:00

Gospel, for serving the people. You know, we say here at Zion that we want to have good order, not for the sake of being a bunch of legalistic nitpicks, but having good order for the sake of clarity for the people so they know what's going on in the service.

01:50:16

So it's always about teaching them. But you're right, I mean, with anything, we can go down that road so we can fall off the ditch on the one side where we just go through the motions and do the liturgy and not know what we're doing.

01:50:28

And on the other side, we completely divorce everything from the history, and we, like you said, bring the

01:50:35

Beatles in, and we've gone off the ditch on the other side. And so I would say, you know, when it comes down to it, it's about confessing

01:50:42

Christ and his gifts for us clearly as we can. And I mean, this really brings us to the point of this last segment of time that we're talking about.

01:50:53

In this minority period that we find ourselves in, we as the

01:50:58

Church, we have to buckle down and know what we believe and why, which means that we have to study even more than we've ever had to study before.

01:51:05

We need to know the truth of the Scripture, to know our Bibles, to be able to know the culture, because we can no longer assume that those around us are friendly and assume that everyone gets it.

01:51:17

We have to be able to have more teaching, not less, so that we can engage a culture with a robust confession and oftentimes do apologetics defending the faith in the marketplace.

01:51:30

And so it's really disheartening when I see many churches, you know, dumbing things down.

01:51:36

But right now in our time and place in the second minority period, we need to actually be going the opposite direction, which means more teaching, more

01:51:45

Bible studies, more preaching, more devotions of the family, being rooted deeply, because the storm is coming.

01:51:53

You know, the storm of the second minority period is coming, and it's going to be very, very easy for Christians who are not rooted in the

01:52:01

Word to just get swept along. Unfortunately, I hate to say that, but that's really the thrust of where this is all going, is to know what we believe and to believe it and to confess it with boldness, trusting

01:52:14

Christ, whatever the future may hold. And Reverend Bustilla? I have learned not to apply that term, dead orthodoxy, to liturgy because I was raised for the first, like, eight years or so of my life in the

01:52:31

Episcopal church. And, of course, then for like nine years we didn't go anywhere, and then we started going to a fundamental

01:52:38

Baptist church where my whole family came to Christ, and we got churched after that, after a long lull.

01:52:44

And I called my brother and my sister, just for fun on something, and I said, can you recite the

01:52:51

Nicene Creed? And both of them started reciting it verbatim. And I'm like, how do you know that?

01:52:56

They said, well, because we used to sing that every Sunday in the Episcopal church. And I'm thinking, now, dead orthodoxy, we would have claimed in later years that we never heard the gospel in the

01:53:09

Episcopal church, but yet right there in the creeds and in the epistle readings and in the various Bible readings, it was clearly there.

01:53:17

But this is the foundation that I believe that, if I'm hearing you correctly, we don't have today.

01:53:23

When we talk about God the Creator, people are like, there's no Creator. We don't have any of that backdrop.

01:53:29

They know nothing about Jesus being the Son of God. They know nothing about the Holy Spirit proceeding from the

01:53:34

Father and the Son. All these things that used to be fairly common knowledge in society are no longer that way.

01:53:42

Yeah, yeah, Matt, that's the exact point that I'm saying. I mentioned earlier that book by David Kinnaman, You Lost Me, and in his concluding chapters,

01:53:52

I'll just read this brief quote. He says this, After countless interviews and conversations, I'm convinced that historic and traditional practices and orthodox and wisdom -laden ways of believing are what the next generation really needs.

01:54:06

And so I guess the point is, and this is what you hit at here, is that we need an anchor.

01:54:12

I mean, we really do. Thinking about being a ship, we need to have an anchor as we enter into this next period of time as the church, where we are no longer in a place of comfort, where we no longer can take these things for granted.

01:54:26

We need to have an anchor, something that we attach to and we hold on to as culture goes left and right.

01:54:33

Again, that imagery of the reed blowing in the wind or the waves going up and down, we need to have that anchor.

01:54:40

And not as a dead orthodoxy, I agree with you there, that not just something that we recite, but something that we recite and we know what it means and what it's talking about.

01:54:50

So when we say the Lord's Prayer, we can know exactly what Jesus is teaching us to say in the Lord's Prayer, that that great prayer of Jesus is forming all of our prayers.

01:55:00

And then the Ten Commandments themselves, those Ten Commandments are shaping and forming our ethics of what is right and what's wrong, what

01:55:07

I should do and what I should not do. And then we come to that Apostles' Creed, which is just a real great summary of the

01:55:14

Christian faith, so we know who God is and what He has done for us. And having those basic teachings as an anchor that we hold on to and that we learn from, not only helps us weather the storms, but it does, in a sense, connect us to those

01:55:33

Christians who came before us, dating all the way back to that first 300 years, that first minority period.

01:55:41

And if you could, Dr. Richard, give us about three minutes of summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today, uninterrupted.

01:55:51

Yeah. I would say simply this, is that as we look to this next how many hundreds of years that we have before us,

01:55:59

I think we can learn the most by looking to those Christians of the first 300 years. We have a lot more in common with them, living a life of maybe persecution, living a life of not necessarily being the popular kid on the block.

01:56:13

And in so doing, we really need to guard. God protect us from wanting to jump ship.

01:56:20

God protect us from wanting to, again, like I said, capitulate to culture, but rather to remain steadfast in His Word, studying more, knowing what we believe and why, having those anchors in the

01:56:33

Scriptures themselves and remaining steadfast for whatever is before us.

01:56:39

Because really, ultimately when it comes down to it, whether the Church is favored or whether it's in the minority position, whether good times are good or bad, like Paul says to Timothy, we preach the

01:56:51

Word in season and out of season. And right now, we are, as a Church, becoming out of season. But that doesn't matter.

01:56:57

We confess Christ for the forgiveness of sins till our last dying breath because Jesus Christ is our hope and our salvation, and He has purchased and won each and every one of us by His shed blood for us.

01:57:10

Well, I know that the Zion Lutheran Church of Gwinner, North Dakota's website is ziongwinner .org.

01:57:20

That's zion, G -W -I -N -N -E -R dot O -R -G.

01:57:25

I also know that your blog can be found at pastormattrichard .com.

01:57:33

Pastormattrichard .com. Do you have any other contact information that you care to give? I'm also involved with an organization called

01:57:41

World View Everlasting. They're on YouTube with several other guys, Brian Wolf -Muller and Jonathan Fiske, and we do weekly vlogs.

01:57:51

Basically short little snippets of videos that we do on YouTube itself.

01:57:57

So if people want to check that out, World View Everlasting, if you just search that on YouTube, you can find that as well.

01:58:06

Great. And I'm almost certain that that name, Jonathan Fiske, sounds very familiar. I think that Chris Roseborough recommended that I interview him.

01:58:16

Can you tell us something more about Jonathan? Yeah, Jonathan, he works at KFUO Radio in St.

01:58:25

Louis, so he has a couple programs that he does at KFUO Radio in St. Louis. I believe it's the longest and oldest

01:58:32

AM radio station in the St. Louis metro area. He was a former pastor up in my neck of the woods here in North Dakota, a very, very gifted pastor, and he has also a gift of being able to be on YouTube.

01:58:45

He has quite a few big YouTube videos. I think the YouTube station that we're a part of, it's really mainly his kind of production.

01:58:54

There's several million hits on it, so it's very, very popular on YouTube, especially among Lutheran circles.

01:59:01

Great. Well, I will look into inviting him. And, of course, we've already had Brian Wolfmuller on, and intend to have him back on again in the future.

01:59:08

But it was so great to have you back on the program, Dr. Richard. We look forward to your return. I want to thank everybody for listening today, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:19

I want to thank my co -host, the Rev. Buzz Taylor, for being here. And I hope that you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

01:59:29

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward for your questions tomorrow for our guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.