Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 7, 1990 TAG: 9007070306
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Bosserman may have been stretching to make a point, but Mission90 is a new plan to win people to Christian commitment.
It employs video technology and encourages active church members to tell others about what God has meant in their personal experience. The program stresses the Lutheran view that people can do nothing to win God's love; his grace is there despite human failings.
But in saying that this was more than "just another program," the Lutheran leadership was avoiding the suggestion of compulsion from the church's hierarchy. Church officials are aware that an attitude of independence from national church organizations is never far below the surface in Western Virginia.
A national merger of three Lutheran bodies is into its third year and early anxieties have faded. Now, leaders on all levels are apparently eager to get on with the major task of winning people to Christ.
For Lutherans, that process starts with personal commitment and education about the basic beliefs of the German-originated denomination.
The Lutheran church in Virginia has undergone some change in recent years.
Many families in the Roanoke and New River valleys have been Lutheran for generations, but in the past 40 years they have been joined by migrating Midwesterners of Scandinavian heritage.
In the past generation, the church in Virginia has expanded from its familiar territory of the Roanoke Valley to the north and east.
At the 1990 convention, Mission90 was the major business. The convention was set up to educate delegates to opportunities for evangelism.
Will Mission90 play in rural Virginia?
Talks with several delegates from churches in the New River Valley and southwest mountains indicate that it will take more than a nationally promoted vision from Lutheran headquarters in Chicago to make much change in the mostly tiny family dominated congregations.
Problems exist in the state's cities, too, said a young, white woman from a racially mixed neighborhood in Richmond. Her church is only 25 years old, has 100 on its membership rolls, and can seat 150. But normal attendance is scarcely 30, she said, even though the church has done all the things recommended to make its building attractive and its people responsive to newcomers.
The only black woman in the workshop spoke up. Now living in Charlottesville, she said she had become a Lutheran upon her marriage to a man from the West Indies. On arriving in the university city, she spoke with a black friend about attending the Lutheran parish in which she is now active.
"But it's a white church!" she said her friend exclaimed. The workshop participants laughed, some a little uneasily. There are few black Lutherans, although the church is working to make minorities feel welcome.
Delegates liked the first segment of a six-session video produced for the Mission90 renewal of the church.
They praised its content, artistic qualities and evident effort to bring such glibly familiar words as "grace" to a level understandable by those with little or no religious background.
National Lutheran Bishop Herbert Chilstrom is a star of the first film, the topic of which is grace. To discuss baptism as an entry into the community of people who put Christ first in their lives, Chilstrom shows the glass bowl from which he was baptized in 1931 by a relative in a Midwestern farmhouse.
The bishop does not weigh the film with heavy theological jargon. He shares scenes with a young man who starts asking questions about God when he loses his job and his wife becomes ill.
Chilstrom doesn't issue an altar call and promise the man that seeking Jesus will end his troubles either. But later we see the man telling a small group at church how he experienced grace.
The availability of God's grace despite people's weakness is what's important, viewers learn. "Undeserved and Free" is repeated seven times in the film. Martin Luther said that for his time 500 years ago, quoting St. Paul.
It's time Lutherans learned more about grace, said the Rev. Terry Clark, an evangelism specialist for the church in Virginia and the Carolinas. He quoted from a poll that only 39 percent of Lutherans can give a theologically literate answer to this central belief of their denomination.
by CNB