No. 45. >> Wow, the church as a vendor machine. That's an interesting choice of words. What do you mean by that? >>DR. KLAUS DETLEV SCHULZ: Nick, our society, we have to admit if we are a little critical has a tendency to view its life as one that makes choices. You buy your car. You do all kinds of things. You look for insurance. Everything that we do is based on choices we make. And in this way, also, the church tends to creep in as an institution that we look for. It's basically understood as a church that we go to and look at it for a while and maybe if it is amenable to our liking, that is something that we as a family or as an individual would like to go to, then we declare our membership and enter it. I would like to caution us not to think only along those lines. The church we know existed already before we even lived in this world. It existed already in the Old Testament. In the New Testament. And the centuries before us. So in a way, we need to understand ourselves once we come to faith, once we are baptized, as those who enter the church. Those who are being put in. We have no option but to be added to it. You read those texts in the book of Acts. There's a certain word there that is often used. And there were people, sometimes 3,000 or less, a certain number were added. And the verb there "were added" is important to understand. That we, through our baptism, are placed into a community that already exists before we had, at our infant baptism, even known about it. One important thing here as we look at the issue of choices is that the church is also often seen as something that follows our individual relationship with Jesus Christ. Luther tries to correct that view already in the Large Catechism in his explanation of the creed in the Third Article. Therein he says that we are placed into the bosom of the church, the church as mother. And we have to understand that he thereby means that we as individuals do not exist outside of the church as Christians. For just imagine if we were not to be given food to drink, we would not be able to sustain our life. And so, also, our faith works. We need to sustain it spiritually speaking through the preaching of the Word, through the reading of the Bible, through the singing of the hymns and the sacraments. And for this reason, it's not possible to see ourselves in our spiritual life divorced from those activities. Individualism can work its way against the church. There is an author who is called Abraham. See, I have his book in front of me. He wrote the book called "The Logic Of Evangelism." William Abraham says this significant thing. And I would like to quote it here, a passage on Page 118. There he says: Pietists, Methodists and revivalists over the years have given the distinct impression that the heart of evangelism has nothing to do with the rites and ceremonies of the classical liturgies of the church. For them evangelism is centered on new birth and conversion. The individual stands alone before God in need of personal regeneration, which no church can supply. Only God through the action of the Holy Spirit can meet this need. The church rather than helping in this arena has been at best indifferent and at worst thoroughly hostile. On the one side is the church, he says, with its dead formalism, boring liturgy and moralistic sermons, which are unlikely to convert anyone. On the other side is the individual soul, stricken in conscience over sin and desperately hoping to find relief in the Gospel when called to repentance and faith. The two are set against each other in a relation of mutual hostility. If he is true in his diagnosis, then we should be concerned. In the previous question I've mentioned that our coming to faith is directly related to the work of the Holy Spirit as it is paired with the church. So as individuals, we need to see ourselves always in connection to the community of believers. And also, the activity of preaching and administering the sacraments. I think that is absolutely crucial to counter a vendor mentality, if you will, that sees the church as a machine to which one goes like one goes for a -- looks for a Coke bottle and draws from it something that is important. But in the ultimate, maybe irrelevant to one's personal spiritual life. Of course it happens to everyone. All of us, as we move to a next town or city, that there are churches that we look at carefully. And there is an idea of hopping. And I have to admit I, myself, have also done that in the first years as I came to the seminary. I looked at the preaching of the pastor. At the music and the liturgy that they sing. And it was important for me to see whether the Gospel is being preached there. Whether the activity that the church does is something that agrees with my principles. So we Christians are all looking for something in the church, in the community where we worship. And at times it is unavoidable to think of actually hopping from one church to the other. Underneath all of that, however, we need to point out, again, as I've said, that these Christians that we enter fellowship with at a particular locality share that faith also with others around the world. So in a way we have to understand no matter where we go, if the Gospel is preached in that community, if the sacraments are administered, if these activities occur, we need to be certain and maybe (sic) that the gift of forgiveness is being given. I have been also traveling around the world and visited various churches. And have discovered that people put certain characteristics on the church that might not agree with ours here in the United States. We here in the United States generally have a tendency to look at the church as an institution where activity takes place. And we ourselves like to be entertained. We often judge the preacher for his good preaching. And make certain other judgments on that what occurs on a Sunday morning. Other Christians in Africa, for example, live in a spiritual environment that is dark. Something that Luther also knew of when he explained that the world around us is permeated with the activity of the devil. So there is a certain spirituality around us that encroaches and tries to take away from our faith in Jesus Christ. For that reason we they'd to see the church as something very important that sustains our faith. And maybe the Africans, who live in the reality of spiritual warfare, maybe more than we as Christians in the United States do, maybe they have something to tell us and to remind us that life as a Christian is always in the danger of being influenced by the world and society outside.