The April 21, 2008 issue of Newsweek has an interesting cover story on divorce. The theme is the radical shift in attitudes toward divorce in a matter of only a few decades. I resonate with that. Having seen it up close now so many times, I have gotten used to divorce as a fact of contemporary life. But I have not changed my theology of divorce. I still see it as a terrible thing. Unavoidable in many situations—but still terrible.

These days when someone comes to talk to me about the personal pain of divorce, one that has happened or one that will soon happen, I typically tell them about the experience of a friend who went through two divorces. The first one happened when he was a member of a very conservative church. When his wife told him she was leaving him, he went to his pastor, who responded harshly by telling him that he wanted my friend—a lay leader in the congregation—either to resign his membership voluntarily or to face formal excommunication proceedings. My friend resigned and moved on to a congregation that belonged to a more mainstream denomination. Soon he remarried, but a few years later his second wife also filed for divorce. Again he informed his pastor, but this time the pastor seemed surprised that he would even bother to make an issue of it. Basically my friend was told, “No big deal.”

Soon after, he came to me to talk about his experiences. “You know what I want?” he asked, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I want to hear two things from the church. One is that divorce is a horrible thing, that it is one of the biggest failures a human being can experience. The other is that this is not the end of my life—that God may still have good things in store for me.”

I looked him straight in the eye and repeated both of those things back to him, and through his sobs he thanked me. I continue to be grateful to him. He brought together for me in a wise combination exactly what we need to be saying about divorce. Given the realities of our culture, to say either one without the other strikes me as a serious failing, both theologically and pastorally.

I have been invited by The New York Times to write for their blog about the Pope’s visit to the United States. You can check these postings out at: http://thepope.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/on-faith-and-human-rights/

Last Wednesday evening (April 9), some 150 people gathered in Fuller Seminary’s Travis Auditorium to sing old-time hymns. Young and old alike showed much enthusiasm in singing “Rescue the Perishing,” “Just As I Am,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” and other hymns that have shaped both the worshiping life and the personal piety of many generations of Christians.

On that same night, a hymn of praise rang out in a very different venue and before a very different crowd. The American Idol producers broadcast an “Idol Gives Back” TV special on Fox, and the “top 8” performers ended the show with a rousing rendition of Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord.” That night, the group substituted “My Shepherd” for “My Jesus” in the opening line, but when they performed it again the next night on another American Idol show, they went back to “My Jesus.” Both performances were witnessed not only by large studio and television audiences, but also by millions of others via You Tube and podcast. I suspect that many joined together with this group as they sang the words that are familiar to many present-day Christians. And the studio audience itself responded with applause, whistles and shouts, and even a shower of confetti, for the singing of a hymn of praise to the God of the Scriptures.

I regularly hear folks complaining that “the great Christian hymns” are from a bygone era, and are only available in worn songbooks, unopened hymnals, and outdated albums. Yet, thanks to last week’s American Idol, we are reminded that today’s Christian music also has an extraordinary ability to inspire us and bring us together as a worshiping community.

We focused this past week at Fuller on the influences of Christian music, with the help of keynote speaker Mark Noll, a gifted scholar, author, and history professor at the University of Notre Dame. With his theme “Then Sings My Soul: The Significance of Hymns for Evangelicals,” Noll reviewed the influences of Christian music in the past three centuries. In his lectures, Noll described Christian hymnody’s transformations, beginning with the early singing of psalms to Isaac Watts’ publication of “Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1707,” which “gave bold voice to new expressions” in Christian belief. Another transformation, after the Civil War, resulted in “movements of spiritual renewal and piety in the midst of the challenges” of that era. This was reflected in a hymnody that included, for example, “the metaphor of nautical rescue.” Noll went on to describe the transformation that began after World War II and continues to the present, when evangelicalism’s music reflects, and is even driven by, the powerful influences of television, youth culture, and popular entertainment, as well as by the innovations generated by the Vietnam era, Jesus movement, the growth of Pentecostalism and the emergence of charismatic renewal.

I was reminded this past week of my deep personal gratitude for the work and faithful commitments of songwriters of past generations: Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Fanny Crosby, and many others. Those writers and composers made marvelous contributions to the faith. Yet, I was also reminded this week of my deep gratitude for Darlene Zschech, author of “Shout to the Lord,” along with other current songwriters whose songs capture our hearts and point us toward a faithful Savior.

The Christian story continues to be sung!

The Missouri Synod Lutherans are arguing with each other about “traditional” versus “seeker-sensitive” styles of being church. And the debate has spilled over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In its March 28 issue, the WSJ published an op-ed piece by Mollie Zeigler Hemingway, a former member of the denomination’s Board for Communication Services, criticizing the church leadership for canceling a respected radio program that discussed current issues from a Lutheran perspective. Since then some letters have appeared, debating the pros and cons of the claims she made about the significance of the cancellation.

Here is her basic thesis:
“The program was in all likelihood a pawn in a larger battle for the soul of the Missouri Synod. The church is divided between, on the one hand, traditional Lutherans known for their emphasis on sacraments, liturgical worship and the church’s historic confessions and, on the other, those who have embraced pop-culture Christianity and a market-driven approach to church growth. The divide is well known to all confessional Christian denominations struggling to retain their traditional identity.”

I have no views about the cancellation of the program, which I have never listened to. Nor do I know how to assess the claims and counter-claims about the actual motives at work in this particular case. But the larger scenario presented by Ms. Hemingway points, as she makes clear, to some important issues for all of us who care about traditional confessional identities. Indeed the Lutheran version of the issues is laid out in much helpful detail in Stephen Ellingson’s 2007 book, Megachurch and the Mainline: Remaking Religious Tradition in the Twenty-first Century. Ellingson, a sociologist, provides in-depth accounts of the ways in which nine Lutheran congregations in the San Francisco area are responding to new challenges for the church’s life and mission. While each of the congregations has its own unique character, Ellingson sees two very different patterns being explored. Borrowing terminology from the sociologist Robert Bellah and his Habits of the Heart colleagues, he sees some congregations attempting to be “communities of memory,” while others are promoting a model associated with “communities of interest” that draw on “seeker sensitive” themes.

It is unfortunate that the debate is often posed in terms of those who care about traditional theology and those who have sold their souls to “marketing” techniques. (I can’t resist the temptation to observe that there is some irony in Ms. Hemingway’s choosing the Wall Street Journal as the venue for making her case against the influence of “market-driven” strategies on church life.) I won’t develop my own argument in detail here, but I am convinced that in my own Reformed tradition there are important theological resources for taking “seeker” sensitivities very seriously in reflecting on the life and mission of the church. In fact, I look directly to John Calvin himself for positive encouragement on this subject. In the Institutes Calvin introduces two themes for understanding what he sees as the indelibly spiritual character of human existence, even in its fallen condition: the sense of divinity (sensus divinitatis) and the seed of religion (semen religionis). All human beings, Calvin says, have a sense of the divine, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. This is due to the fact that God has planted the seed of religion in every human heart. Human beings, even sinful human beings, yearn for God. As St. Augustine put it in the form of a prayer at the beginning of his Confessions: “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”

To be sure, the yearnings of the sinful human heart are fundamentally misdirected. As Calvin also put it: “The human heart is a factory of idols…Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.” When, because of our sinful rebellion, we cut ourselves off from a vital relationship with our Creator, we seek to satisfy our hopes and calm our fears by putting our ultimate trust in something creaturely, in something that is less than the true God. But it is precisely because we are created for fellowship with the Living God that our idols never really satisfy our deepest yearnings. Our hearts are restless until they rest in the Living God.

So we have the present-day question that is being debated by the Missourians and others: should we attempt to be communities of interest or communities of memory? The Reformed answer, it seems to me, is that we must focus on both. The experienced “needs” of the unbelievers whom we want to reach with the gospel are themselves expressions of deep, although certainly misdirected, yearnings that are planted by God in their hearts. Those needs, those quests and longings, are not wrong in themselves. Rather, they are misdirected. People who are trapped in sinful lives are looking in the wrong places to find ultimate meaning and true satisfaction.

I have put the case here in Reformed terms, but I am quite sure Martin Luther would agree with the basic point. As Thomas Aquinas. And the Wesleys. And maybe even Menno Simons.

When the new-style congregations emphasize the importance of welcoming “seekers,” then, they are pointing all of us to something important. We need to see our congregations as places of safety, as spaces into which we can invite wandering sinners to come home to the Living God. And those of us who care deeply about confessional identities need to be willing to learn important lessons from those newer congregations about how best to welcome this new generation of seekers. We do need to think new thoughts, in the new cultural situations in which we find ourselves, about the tone and atmosphere of our worshiping life–and about the kind of language that best communicates the truths of God’s Word to people who desperately need to hear the Good News of a Savior who was sent to minister to “the hopes and fears of all the years.”