I Didn't Grow Up in the LCMS
By Chris Brademeyer
[Note: Pastor Brademeyer posted this on Facebook today. Republished here with permission. ~ Ed.]
I didn’t grow up in the LCMS. I entered as an adult, colloquizing as a pastor from another Lutheran body. Why did I do this? Because I wanted to freely teach and preach what the Bible says and publicly hold to the doctrine drawn from it and confessed in the Book of Concord without compromise.
I wanted full-strength, high-octane, historic, traditional, evangelical Christianity. Not a watered-down version. Not something made more palatable to modern audiences by trimming off the edges.
This was not an easy move.
Though I became increasingly dissatisfied with the public confession of my former denomination, I had, and still have, deep generational ties to my home congregation and family who remain in that church body. I poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into that place. It shaped my faith, my vocation, and my psyche. Walking away was not easy.
I lost friends. Seminary classmates stopped corresponding. Some dismissed me as a fringe fundamentalist. Others drifted away with time and distance. If you’ve been through seminary, you know how hard it is to replace those "foxhole friendships" forged in the trenches of pastoral formation.
When we joined the LCMS, I had panic attacks. I questioned whether I was doing the right thing. I remembered the criticisms I had heard growing up. I worried about providing for my family. We had to move into my parents’ basement. Few things wound a man’s sense of self more deeply than bringing his wife and three children back to the room where he grew up.
I don’t say this to gain sympathy.
I say this to show how seriously I take the doctrine and practice of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. I risked my career, friendships, finances, and family relationships for the sake of this confession of faith. It cost me more than time and effort.
That’s why it is so frustrating, no, infuriating, when I see “fourth-generation” LCMS pastors throw away our rich heritage of faith, beautiful hymns, and clear, correct teaching in order to mimic generic, vacuous evangelicalism. It horrifies me to see pastors who grew up in this confession failing to recognize how precious our doctrine, our hymns, our liturgy, our very life together, truly are. They ride on the shoulders of giants, men and women who gave much to ensure confessional Lutheranism would endure in our midst. And yet some cast it aside to win favor with the world and with those raised in the shallow waters of pop-American evangelicalism.
But that movement does not give the Gospel. It offers instead a secularized, counterfeit good news, what scholars call Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It may appeal to the comfortable and well-adjusted, but it does not forgive sins. It does not raise the dead. It does not give Christ.
We need bold men and women, especially bold pastors, to stand firm in the truth of the Scriptures as confessed in the Lutheran Confessions. We are stewards of a rich theological and liturgical inheritance, and we must hand it down faithfully. Every compromise lets in something foreign. A little Enthusiasm here. A little Therapeutic Deism there. Eventually, the faith is no longer recognizable.
Revival-style praise music invites Enthusiasm, trusting emotion and experience alongside, or above, God’s Word. Abandoning the liturgy teaches that church exists to cater to personal feelings and consumer desires. These are not minor matters. These are the fault lines.
Our Lutheran hymns, liturgy, and culture are not just good, they are the best in Christendom. When we replace them with the empty, saccharine drivel of the pop-evangelical industrial complex, we do no one any favors. We rob them.
Pastors: stand fast.
Hold to your ordination vows.
Pay no heed to empty trends.
Treasure and steward the inheritance we have received, for the good of your people and for the generations to come.