Atlantic District Publications

Letters from the President - Progress

January 4, 2010 at 12:20 PM

As we rise on 1/1/10 to face the new decade, it’s a great time to consider whether we’re getting anywhere and/or going anywhere.   As I looked out at the congregation on New Year’s Eve and we dialogued about resolutions and outlooks, it became clear that to a 17 year old, the next decade is all about hope and next steps – graduation, first big job, living on your own, maybe marriage, maybe starting a family.  Major stuff, entering the world and making a difference stuff.  Whereas for a guy like me, I’m thinking I’d like to stay alive and alert and be relatively healthy.  Hanging in there stuff.  Are we getting anywhere?  Are we going anywhere?  What do we share in common in that Lutheran Christian endeavor for the next year and decade of years?

Certainly for starters we share a common destiny – by grace our lives have already been hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:2), which is a great definition of “saved.”   We are safe, secure, inside the very being of God eternally because of Christ, our Lord.  We are perfectly righteous, holy, redeemed and restored, in Christ.  Nothing needs to be added.

However, secondly, we live every day as a day of rebirth.  That’s what baptismal renewal is and means to a Lutheran Christian.  Every day, because we are still human and frail, we need to start over, confess our sins and shortcomings, ask for mercy, receive it, and are sent forth into the daily mix forgiven and refreshed in the renewing waters of our baptismal grace. 

Sometimes, unfortunately, that’s where it stops for Lutherans.  Progress is not our most important product - in fact it’s not a product at all.   Robert Benne comments on this progress-restricting feature in a recent article in Lutheran Forum ( a recommended “product” for you to receive in 2010, by the way).  Under the heading “The Hazards of Lutheran Distinctives,” Benne writes, “Simul Justus et Peccator” (at the same time sinner and saint) is another Lutheran distinctive that can become hazardous.  If that profound doctrine gives permission to become complacent in recurring and habitual sins, its accentuation diminishes the Christian life.  Lutheran Christians should be able to wrestle more vigorously with specific sins…than our tradition has allowed.  Such a struggle could lead to PROGRESS in the Christian life, a notion seemingly abhorrent to Lutherans.”

I’d like to suggest that we prayerfully and humbly consider steps we might take toward progress in our personal lives and our lives as members of parish communities.  Fight the good fight.  Start and remain beneath the cross.  Anchor all in the reception of God’s grace in the Word and in the Holy Meal.  But individually let’s resolve to live out, as a friend puts it, to live FROM the Life Who has been given to us.  And as parishes, let’s not be afraid to say we’re moving forward, toward our destiny, and with plans to bring others along and to do so in a winsome way with a wonderful group of fellow-believers, not stuck in the sanctuary, but out engaging the world with the Gospel of hope. 

That’s me and that’s my word to you – we PRO-GRESS, we move forward, in hope.  Listen to Paul describing the movement of hope in the world in Romans 5 (King James version!):  “Hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”  Shed the love of God abroad in 2010 and for this decade – it is the demand and promise of hope!