Stan Hauerwas is not a Lutheran and does not understand Lutheran doctrine, as witnessed by his memoir. He grew up Methodist, attended Catholic mass at Notre Dame, where he communed, and married a Methodist minister after his first wife died. However, he is the most theological of the modern theologians.
His response to Church Growth in Methodism is instructive. He and his wife loved the previous woman minister, Susan, at their Methodist church at Duke, Aldersgate, an almost Lutheran name. Susan retired due to Altzheimer's Disease.
The new minister, Paula, was fresh from Duke Divinity School. She was a drama major in college.
"The outreach and pastor-staff committees were called together to hear her plan for the future. She had been to a church-growth seminar. She told us she knew how to make the church grow.. First, we needed two services. We woudl have a contemporary service at nine and a more traditional service at eleven. Second, we would have a phone-a-thon, during which we would call 20,000 people at random. That would ensure that the church would attract two hundred new members. Sociologists had confirmed such a result." (p. 258)
"Most new people would be attracted to the church because of the activities and pastoral services the church could provide, not because of a sense of belonging to a community." (p. 258) [GJ - Kelm's "felt needs?"]
Stan went on to say:
"I was stunned by her plan for the church. I said little at the meeting, other than blurting out 'over my dead body' when she said that she was going to lead a delegation of our members to Willow Creek Church in Chicago to see how a church that utilized these methods works. The pastor at Willow Creek is said to have once declared that there is no cross in the church because 'it gets in the way of the gospel.' I could not believe this was happening. Everything I detested about mainline Protestantism in both its liberal and conservative modes had come to roost in the church I loved." (p. 258f.)
The proper thing to do is meet with the person, and Stan did that. To put this in Lutheran terms, this was like Robert Preus making an appointment to see the new pastor. Hauerwas is world-famous among the mainline denominations, the Catholics, and the medical ethicists.
"I waited a few days and made an appointment with the pastor. I told her that what she was proposing was against everything I was about. She accused me of being against evangelization. Surely I wanted to bring people to Jesus. I hate that kind of pious language. But I told her the problem was not that she wanted to bring people to Jesus, but that she wanted to do so with means shaped by economic modes of life incompatible with the gospel. She asked me how I could be so critical of what she was trying to do. She had, after all, graduated from Duke Divinity School. I told her that I found it profoundly embarrassing that she was a graduate of Duke Divinity School. What in the world were we doing to produce people who did not seem to have a theological clue about what they were ordained to do?" (p. 259)
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GJ - Does this sound familiar, WELSians? Missourians? Little Sect on the Prairians?
1. The denomination decided the parish should be bigger.
2. The brand-new pastor knew that the right methods would produce the desired results.
3. This Phone's For You, widely used by WELS, was proposed as the way to gain 200 new members at once.
4. The pastor would take a bunch to Willow Creek, just as Don Patterson took a bunch to Exponential. WELS, Missouri, and the Little Sect also sent their leaders to Fuller, Willow Creek, and heaven-only-knows.
5. Opposing this is the same as being against evangelism.
6. Meeting with a Shrinker is like meeting with a terrorist, except you can negotiate with a terrorist.
Stan summarized WELS in Columbus in the 1980s, although he would have been appalled that DP Mueller and VP Kuske had a notorious ex-pastor, Floyd Luther Stolzenburg, take charge of the effort.
Moreover, the Fuller/Willow Creek false teachers of WELS had themselves promoted to ever-higher levels of leadership, one man scratching the other man's back.
But this happened only because the laity and pastors did nothing, said nothing, and went along with the racket. Stan and his wife openly opposed all these moves and told the minister why. Mrs. Hauerwas would not participate in turning Holy Week worship into chancel drama. The couple left the congregation when discussions failed. Stan wrote about it too, rather than keeping quiet to be the company man.
Missouri, WELS, and the Little Sect have thrown away their Lutheran heritage while boasting about their greatness.
