Church-Type Stuff That Happened: New Orleans, Part II
So, yeah. The church world is needlessly confusing. Over the past 500 years or so, we've broken ourselves into a bunch of tiny pieces based on differing beliefs on who-knows-what, and now we have a whole slew of different denominations. It seems to work out well for grown-ups, but it's a mess on a college campus. Consider the following:
School church (ELCA Lutheran, along with its associated student group, the Lutheran Student Movement-LSM) is not large enough to send its own group, so I wound up traveling with several members of the Episcopal congregation down the street... ELCA and Episcopal get along well. We also met up with a whole slew of other Episcopals from all over the place. They had done servant events and all knew each other, more or less. The conference was put on by the LSM along with the corresponding groups of the Episcopals, Presbyterians (refer back to the spring break trip), United Church of Christ (I think), several others, and at least one subgroup of Catholics. All of these get along well, although the Catholics being there surprised me... usually they keep to themselves.
Notably absent was LCMS Lutheran, another group that keeps to itself, along with its student group, the Lutheran Student Fellowship- LSF, not to be confused with the LSM. And here we begin to see the price of division: School church has roughly 20 people that show up on a regular basis, and I assume our sister LCMS congregation has about the same number. Now, prior to the breakup, that gives a 40 person church, which is a pretty nice congregation, especially for a student church. As it stands, 20 each gets kinda lonely. And we do our best to ignore each other, even though the two buildings are on the same block (which, interestingly enough is how I got started with school church- I just walked into the wrong building and stuck with it).
So how different are we, really? Well, we did church on the train on the way home, so we were without our hymnals, and everyone was working from memory. Yet, even though it was an Episcopal service, most of the chants and responses were the same as what I grew up with, plus or minus a word here or there. The big sticking point seems to be the ordination of women, which really can't be that big a deal, can it? Bottom line, the church would be well off to present a more united front in these difficult times, especially at colleges, where temptations are many and few are willing to get up on Sunday morning.
Anyway... despite the risk of being branded a heretic, I'm now in deeper with the LSM. I get to be regional treasurer, for lack of anyone else willing to take on the job. I'm more or less guaranteed to do a better job than the last guy, who didn't manage to get an account set up, so more or less nothing happened in our region all last year. Perhaps once this gets up and running, they'll set up retreats and I can drag others from school church along. But that's quite a ways off.
School church (ELCA Lutheran, along with its associated student group, the Lutheran Student Movement-LSM) is not large enough to send its own group, so I wound up traveling with several members of the Episcopal congregation down the street... ELCA and Episcopal get along well. We also met up with a whole slew of other Episcopals from all over the place. They had done servant events and all knew each other, more or less. The conference was put on by the LSM along with the corresponding groups of the Episcopals, Presbyterians (refer back to the spring break trip), United Church of Christ (I think), several others, and at least one subgroup of Catholics. All of these get along well, although the Catholics being there surprised me... usually they keep to themselves.
Notably absent was LCMS Lutheran, another group that keeps to itself, along with its student group, the Lutheran Student Fellowship- LSF, not to be confused with the LSM. And here we begin to see the price of division: School church has roughly 20 people that show up on a regular basis, and I assume our sister LCMS congregation has about the same number. Now, prior to the breakup, that gives a 40 person church, which is a pretty nice congregation, especially for a student church. As it stands, 20 each gets kinda lonely. And we do our best to ignore each other, even though the two buildings are on the same block (which, interestingly enough is how I got started with school church- I just walked into the wrong building and stuck with it).
So how different are we, really? Well, we did church on the train on the way home, so we were without our hymnals, and everyone was working from memory. Yet, even though it was an Episcopal service, most of the chants and responses were the same as what I grew up with, plus or minus a word here or there. The big sticking point seems to be the ordination of women, which really can't be that big a deal, can it? Bottom line, the church would be well off to present a more united front in these difficult times, especially at colleges, where temptations are many and few are willing to get up on Sunday morning.
Anyway... despite the risk of being branded a heretic, I'm now in deeper with the LSM. I get to be regional treasurer, for lack of anyone else willing to take on the job. I'm more or less guaranteed to do a better job than the last guy, who didn't manage to get an account set up, so more or less nothing happened in our region all last year. Perhaps once this gets up and running, they'll set up retreats and I can drag others from school church along. But that's quite a ways off.
posted by Kevin H | 3:00 PM
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