LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 71

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THE DOCTRINAL ESSAY rel

stant discipline. The quickest way I know to turn the
clock back fifty years is to read a devotion of the late
Doctor Theodore Hoyer to my aged father and hear him
answer without fail: “Hoyer was a great preacher.”

There is only one church, we have been saying these
days, and only one edifying Word which is the life
breath of the church. As we ponder the agonizing
problems that beset the contemporary Christian family
as it tries to maintain its spiritual life against the erosion
of the world round about it and still raise youngsters
that can move out into the midstream of the world’s
need, let’s not forget the resources which the holy
Christian church makes available to it. This whole con-
vention is organized around the effort to plan those re-
sources and devise improvements. The family does not
walk alone; it works in phase with all its counterparts
in the church.

In recent years the effort has been made especially
in Europe to revive worship and the spiritual life by
dissolving the worshiping parish and stressing the wor-
shiping family. But that is precisely the excellence of
the parish, that it turns the either-congregation-or-
family into a both-and. It is the gathering of many
families into one both, each component of which helps
every other one.

What can the congregation do to help the members
of the family choose the good part and not have it taken
away? What can the servants of Synod and the church
at large do to help them?

Start with the most obvious: Families need a mas-
sive training in the practices of family worship. They
need more than materials that can be distributed, im-
portant as they are, but they need programs of demon-
stration, systems by which a number of families can
confer as to how they are progressing. Their worship
has to be worship indeed, the gathering of the minds
and hearts of the household into adoration of God as
Father, the bringing of family problems to God in prayer
and family blessings to God in thanksgiving. Their
worship has to be shared by the speaking and singing
and praying and questions and contributions of all who
are present. Their worship has to concern that family
for that hour. But it has to train for thought for peo-
ple who are not in that circle, widen the horizon of
love to reach next door and to the other side of the
globe. Their worship has to reflect the concerns that are
in the news and on the radio then and now. Their wor-
ship has to be an act of trust in a heavenly Father who
is kind and good and forgiving because of Jesus Christ,
whom He has already given for their healing and rescue.

Such family worship becomes the objective of the
finest talent of authors and publishers, the most canny
and resourceful planning of people and pastor.

Families need massive training in being the body of
Christ in that place. This comes self-evidently as the
children are small, and it wears thin as they get older.
But just as the members of the family accumulate years
and experience, just as their responsibilities and handi-
caps enlarge, they need to put that body of Christ to the
test. Don’t say: “That’s just not the way that people

live nowadays.” They never did. Furthermore, some of
the most respectable and unhampered activities of the
family are apt to be just as much at fault in disrupting
the mutual care of the members of the family as the
distracting and the fragmenting ones— remember the
two good ladies in the home in Bethany.

Each parish has a tremendous resource for this train-
ing, and that is the church’s schools and educational
agencies. They are our special concern in this year
and this convention. Good education is that which is
for practical use; good learning experiences are those
which are rooted in the actual life of the learners. This
means that religious education can never be satisfied
with mere accumulation of theological or Biblical detail.
Educators have to provide the experiences in daily life
by which these details are put to the test. In our story
our Lord employed object lessons that were so concrete
that we have found them to apply in our own situation:
a careful housekeeper flushed and damp with the com-
plicated tasks of her housekeeping, nettled at being left
alone with them, asking Jesus to put her sister to work
to help her; and then we hear Jesus saying: Among all
of those good things one thing is primary, and it is ter-
ribly risky to tamper with that priority in anybody’s
life. Every meal from that time on in the house of those
sisters and their brother Lazarus, whom Jesus raised
from the dead, was freighted with the realization that
something is worth more than food, and the remem-
brance of the great Guest who said, “I am the Bread of
Life.” The family first, and then the callings of bread-
winning and neighborliness and citizenship and friend-
ship, must provide the field experience that gives sub-
stance to religious education in our schools.

As we hear the complaints of weak Christians and
of today’s youth in particular, they make much of the
staleness, sameness, soberness, lifelessness of religious
worship and teaching. This is truly a disaster. For there
is hardly a single prayer or hymn or religious obser-
vance in which Christians can engage which does not
somewhere have thanksgiving, joy, good cheer, freedom,
release from death, hope of peace and healing in it.
Every time that Christians participate joylessly in reli-
gious forms, they are mangling the edifying Word, they
are halting its action in its tracks.

This means that our churches, from their synodical
helpers such as the Commission on Worship and the
seminaries and colleges and the high schools and parish
schools right on out to the parents in the family, have
to join in a movement to put meaning back into worship,
not just for the sake of restoring smiles and rhythm but
restoring the life of God in Jesus Christ. For the edify-
ing Word has to be spoken from person to person and
picked up in the chain reaction of adoration, praise, and
confession of faith. Again this training has to make the
field experience, the practice in the family and school
and parish, basic to the gaining of the skill and the
understanding of worship. We have been good at build-
ing buildings. They are splendid tools, but they do not
worship. People worship, and people have to be taught