It don’t fit in a radio station either
“Issues, Etc” was a Lutheran call-in radio talk show was pulled off the air due to some seemingly dubious reasons.
If they were really dubious or not, I will never know. I won’t really care either. I hardly ever listened to the show, and when I did, I found it relatively lacklustre. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to listen to either.
After being pulled off the “real” radio, the folks from Issues, Etc. did the only smart thing - they went on the Internet. Now they’ve syndicated as an online radio station calling themselves “Pirate Christian Radio”. That’s cool. I’m glad that they did that and I’m glad that lots of people have their faith bolstered because of it.
Here’s what I’m not glad about…
When I saw this image at another Lutheran blogger’s website, it reminded me of a conversation that I had with someone here at my church, University Lutheran. This person was smart, interested in confessional Lutheranism and apologetics. We talked about those issues from time to time. We didn’t always match ideologically, but we could volley back and forth and still be civil.
That’s until we went out to lunch one day after I had noticed a 3 week drop off in church attendance. I called to go to lunch and basically ask “what’s up with this?" The response I got was that "Well, we’ve been going a few different places, but mostly on Sunday mornings we just listen to….." you know what’s coming next ”….Pirate Christian Radio.“
It’s not often that I get so mad that I want to burn down an entire recording studio, but let’s just say that the producers of "Pirate Christian Radio” should be glad I didn’t put together a mailbomb that day.
“But, Jay…it’s not the fault of the radio station that this guy is a schmuck. It could even be your fault.”
That’s true. I can’t imagine that the folks at Issues, Etc or Pirate Christian Radio actually recommend that people don’t attend church on Sunday. Maybe they do. If they do, we should go back to that mailbomb plan…with gusto. It could be that it was my fault for not being a good contextual steward of God’s word to this dude.
However, it does remind me that we should be careful with the recommendations and ideals that we give people and how those things can go awry, sometimes without our realizing it.
Sometimes when we’re being very vehement and passionate about what we believe the church should look like, it tells the people listening to us that they shouldn’t attend a church if it doesn’t look like the ideal we’re communicating. It happens.
I had a bunch of college students graduate this past year. Some of them are going to end up in churches that simply don’t care about them and would be just as happy if they stayed or left - University Lutheran tries to make every person who walks into the door important. Some of them will end up in churches that have no younger leadership like University Lutheran tries to promote. Some of them will end up in churches that work better than University Lutheran. All of them will end up in churches that are different than University Lutheran.
Many of them will be disillusioned by what they find in the wider church — but I hope that their time here has been one that has taught them to go to church to receive the Word of God, to change church when it sins, to lead where they can (not where they need to lead, but where they can lead), not to complain without a plan to make things better.
I hope that whatever your ideal is, whether it be “confessionalism” or “missionalism” or whatever - that you’re not telling people not to go to church, not to experience Christ in community, not to receive His Body and His Blood.
It felt good to get that off my chest.