In Christ Alone

By Joe Hootman

A landmark movement has arisen in the ELCA, dedicated to removing the mandatory imposition of an "historic episcopate" (h. E.) as the unconditionally exacted price by the Episcopal Church for "full communion" with the ELCA. Called "Word Alone Network," WAN organized itself in March (see the last issue of FOCL -Point for details). Birthed and originally nurtured exclusively by internet players, it is a first in successfully rallying American Lutherans to a vital confessional cause via cyberspace. Its webmaster, Joe Hootman from the Univ. of Texas, wrote a vision statement which brings to mind Martin Luther's "Ninety-Five Theses" that set off the fireworks of the Reformation and changed the course of history. We share his thoughts with our readers.

With WAN's constituting convention, incorporation, and election of a board of directors, a lot of folks have asked some questions about WordAlone's purpose.

One thing useful to remember is that WordAlone is first and foremost a renewal movement. It has an official Network to help coordinate the practical accomplishment of some goals (all of which are important and worth spending time and energy discussing), but the Holy Spirit does the real work. That work is the awakening of individual people, families, congregations, and broader groups of Lutheran Christians to the power of a life lived solely in Christ alone.
So, spend time encouraging the Board of Directors, focus hard on achieving tactical results, but remember that the most important work begins first in your own life, your own mind, your own heart. As a huge act of grace, the Holy Spirit is calling us out of our own self-reliance, our own self confidence, and leading us into deep repentance for making ourselves (all churchy and pious) the object of our faith. After that shattering, God wants to usher each of us in to an fresh, edgy, powerful, over-abundant life lived in reliance on Jesus alone.

The Network will and should take on the pragmatic matters of some national life together. We will use it to work for the liberty of an "h. E.-free" life in the ELCA. We will use it to create our own space for congregations and pastors needing a fresh connection. In doing so, we will work in the freedom of the "earthly kingdom" to use a variety of pragmatic organizing strategies, each of which is important to discuss and implement.

Bigger than the Network
But the movement is bigger than just the Network, although it will be shaped and tempered by it. The movement bears fruit in the most intimate, powerful, local places: within your own life, your own family, your own congregation, your own region.

We need help organizing. We need help strategizing. But we also need help in:
• meeting together locally for prayer and mutual encouragement for repentance and renewal in the Word
• preaching Christ alone, and him crucified (1 Cor 2.2) - and sharing the results of that preaching with each other for common encouragement and shared learning
• writing new bible studies and devotional material that uncovers the power of a life lived in sale trust of Jesus in a way that becomes real and alive for people in their own circumstances: facing peer pressure at high school, sighing under the weight of an empty nest.
• thinking and talking about the concrete reality of the priesthood of all believers: how can I offer up my sitting in rush-hour traffic as an act of worship acceptable to the Father, because of Jesus?
• helping people return catechesis and discipleship to the home, instead of hoping that the institutions will "take care of it"

Denominational Lutheranism
Understanding this movement as a reality is of critical importance. We are living in the final, dying stages of denominational Lutheranism in America. It is being ushered away, crushed under the weight of its too-great attachments to an adiaphoristic traditional European cultural inheritance. Its children are falling into a stifling mainline religiosity or defecting to other healthy congregations, but wanting for the freedom of that Luther's witness to Christ alone can bring.
The Episcopal-Lutheran Called to Common Mission (CCM) is but a tacit recognition of that fact, and a class striving hope that our bones might find distinguished burial in the upper-crust cemetery at the top of the hill.

The average age in both the ELCA and LC-MS is over 55. The average age in America is 35. Both major Lutheran denominations lack the vision and hope that would enable them to raise up their own future leaders (as currently defined: "clergy"). The demographic base that has produced past harvests for both denominations is both changing and dispersing. The great 20th Century experiment in Grand Institutional Lutheranism in America is dying.

I don't know whether God will decide to let it finally, unalterably, die. But I do know that Luther's witness to the freedom that Jesus offers is "so-o-o-o0-0" much bigger than the 20th Century manifestations of Institutional
Lutheranism. And I know that America desperately needs that witness as a bold, vital, living voice singing out clear and strong in the American Church.

A Voice to the Darkness
If that voice will have a future, it will not be in shuffling the institutional cards and hoping for a resurrection of some much-loved institution of the past. Instead, the voice will start out simply and quietly, in humbling self-reflection, as it listens to the Holy Spirit lead it into repentance. It will grow fresh and bold as He ushers it into the radical freedom and hope of living a life that rests in Jesus alone. It will grow more beautiful, as God uses it to attract others to join it in a households and congregations singing in many harmonies. It will grow louder and more confident as it reaches out to the dumb, and sees how God awakens first their ears and then their tongues to join in a new song. It will echo across mountains and plains as it connects with other voices singing the same song. And, as the sun sets and time melts into the final darkness, it will stand overjoyed at the dawning of the new world, shouting out "honor and glory and power and might" to the Lamb who is seated and reigns upon the throne, forever and ever.