 Image: freepik.com I read Sam Rainer’s material when it drops in my inbox. Earlier this month, writing for Church Answers, he laid out the demographic mathematics of congregational decline with the kind of clarity that makes council members uncomfortable in the best possible way. The numbers are not complicated. A congregation loses roughly one percent of its membership to death every year. It replaces that loss with approximately one birth per year. In a congregation of 200, that means losing two to death, gaining one by birth, and losing two more quietly each year. If it loses just two additional people annually — to relocation, to disaffiliation, to the quiet exodus that never announces itself — it would still take twenty-five years to lose half its membership. The decline is real, continuous, and almost completely invisible until it isn't.
Rainer's point is that the slow death of established congregations is not dramatic. It doesn't announce itself with a crisis. It accumulates across decades while the offering plate still circulates, the core group shows up, and the council still meets, and nobody says the thing that everyone is beginning to suspect. One congregation he consulted with lost an average of eight people per year for forty years before anyone fully registered what was happening. What had been a congregation of five hundred was now a congregation of one hundred eighty. Four decades. Nobody noticed. The problem is not that congregations don’t see the decline. It’s that they ask the wrong question when they finally do. I have sat in enough council rooms to know that Rainer is describing something real. The demographic mathematics are accurate and the pattern is recognizable. Every interim minister has walked into a version of this situation — a congregation that has been declining gradually for longer than its current leadership has been alive, now facing the fact of its diminishment for the first time with any clarity. But demographic analysis cannot tell a congregation what it is for. It can only produce one prescription: reverse the trend. Get younger. Attract new families. Change what needs to change before the math catches up completely. That prescription is not wrong. But it is, by itself, insufficient — and in the hands of a congregation that doesn't yet understand why it's in the room it's in, it can actually foreclose the more important conversation. The congregation that knows only that it is declining will spend its interim period trying to stop declining. It will hire consultants, rebrand its signage, launch new programming, and call a pastor who, the search committee hopes, will finally be the one who turns things around. I have watched this cycle repeat itself across three decades of ministry and thirty different congregations. The turnaround strategy is not the problem. The problem is that it is attempted without the prior question having been honestly engaged. That question is not: How do we reverse this trend? It is: What has God been doing in this congregation, and what is God making us for now? Those are not the same question. The first is strategic. The second is a question about the work of the Spirit — one that cannot be answered by demographic analysis alone, no matter how accurate the analysis is. The Spirit who was breathed into the church at Pentecost did not promise congregations numerical growth or institutional survival. The Spirit promised presence, purpose, and a commission that does not expire when the membership rolls shrink. This is not complacency. The interim period is not a crisis to be managed. It is a kairos — a charged, particular moment that carries within it exactly the questions a congregation needs to have answered before it calls its next pastor, restructures its governance, or decides whether it has a future at all. A congregation that enters that season trying to stop decline will use the interim period to search for a solution. A congregation that enters that season asking what God has been doing in it — in its neighborhood, among its people, across its history of faithfulness and failure — will use the interim period to discern a calling. Those two processes produce different congregations and call different pastors — one looking for a fixer, the other for a discerner of vocation. Rainer is right that the slow death of established churches is often invisible until it's nearly complete. But that invisibility persists because the congregation has spent those decades answering the wrong question — optimizing institutional survival rather than inhabiting missional identity. Decline is not the problem to solve; it is the symptom that reveals a deeper question. The congregation that finally sees its situation clearly — that can look at the arc of forty years with honesty rather than denial — has something that the congregation still in denial does not have. It has the beginning of self-knowledge. And self-knowledge, in the context of a congregation in transition, is not a liability. It is the essential precondition for everything the interim period is designed to accomplish. A congregation that can name why it is dying is closer to resurrection than one still trying to outmaneuver the numbers. That is not a demographic observation. It is a theological one. And it is the kind of claim that no amount of church growth data can either confirm or refute — which is precisely why it needs to be made by someone who has sat in those council rooms and watched what actually happens when a congregation finally stops pretending. If your congregation is in that kind of season, the work is not first to fix it, but to understand it. That is the work I help congregations do. Find out more here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.
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 Image: freepik.com Every Pentecost I return to the same question that has shaped my ministry for more than twenty years: does the Holy Spirit still distribute extraordinary gifts to the Church — healing, prophecy, words of knowledge — or did those things end with the New Testament era?
Most Lutherans don't formally deny it. They just don't expect it. I've spent a long time with that assumption. What does Scripture teach? There is no kill switch in the New Testament. No moment where the promises are marked temporary. No sunset clause on the gifts of the Spirit. Cessationism is not derived from careful exegesis followed by a reluctant conclusion. It is constructed after the fact, to explain an absence already present in the church's experience — and then the inference passages are recruited to provide the biblical rationale. It is not primarily an exegetical position. It is an apologetic one. Which raises the uncomfortable prior question: what kind of church life produces that absence in the first place? A congregation whose calendar is organized around activities requiring no particular intervention from the Holy Spirit is unlikely to encounter such intervention. You don't need a word of knowledge for a bake sale or discernment of spirits for a car wash. The absence of the gifts and the absence of expectation are not independent phenomena. They produce each other. Here's the Lutheran angle that I find most compelling: we confess that Jesus is genuinely, bodily present in the bread and wine of communion — not symbolically, not in memory, but actually. If Jesus is genuinely present in the bread, we should be slow to argue that He is absent from the suffering body brought in prayer before that same altar. Real Presence, properly understood, is not a fence. It is a door. I've had almost thirty years of parish experience pressing on this question — three Alpha courses a year at Good Shepherd Lutheran in Pasadena back in the mid- 2000’s, a traveling team that went from Houston to Canada, a trip to Uganda in 2007 where deliverance ministry looked exactly like Mark 1:21-28 on an ordinary day in an ordinary place, and a recent healing evening at Light of Christ Lutheran a person's impaired vision was restored to 20/20 and has remained so. I'm not building doctrine on experience. I'm arguing that cessationism provides the least adequate theological account of what the Church continues to witness — and that what Lutherans already believe about Real Presence points somewhere more interesting than we usually follow it. None of this is an argument for religious enthusiasm. The gifts are for the neighbor, not for spiritual self-promotion. Not everyone is healed — suffering is a real participation in Jesus, not a failure of faith. Word and Sacrament remain the Church's sure and certain means of grace, and nothing supersedes them. A direct word to preachers: on Pentecost Sunday you will read 1 Corinthians 12:3-13 from the lectern. Someone in your congregation will hear that passage and feel something move — a recognition, a hope they've been carrying quietly for years. They will look at you to find out whether it means anything. You don't have to have all the answers. You do have to have thought it through. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor… to set at liberty those who are oppressed." (Luke 4:18) Come, Holy Spirit. The full version of this argument — with exegesis, Lutheran theological framework, global witness, and parish testimony — is available at The Marginal Note on Substack. Look for “There is No ‘Kill Switch.’” Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ordained ELCA minister, spiritual director, and intentional interim specialist based in the greater Houston area. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: freepik.com People contact me about their homes more often than you might expect. I'm not a handyman or a realtor. They reach out about a persistent unease they can’t quite name — a particular room or corner that feels “off,” an atmosphere that ordinary explanations and ordinary prayer don’t lift.
Sometimes there is a history attached to the place. Sometimes there isn’t any history they can find, which is its own kind of unsettling. They are not, as a rule, people who are given to dramatic spiritual claims. They are people who have reached the point where ordinary explanations don’t fully account for what they’re experiencing, and they are looking for a pastor who will take them seriously rather than refer them immediately to a therapist. I take them seriously. I do not assume a supernatural cause. But I also do not assume there isn’t one. And I want to explain why, theologically — because the theology matters, and because getting it wrong in either direction causes real harm. The Two Errors One common error is to treat every spiritual disturbance as a demonic infestation requiring aggressive intervention. This amplifies fear, imports frameworks that don’t fit, and occasionally makes things considerably worse. Another common error is to treat every spiritual disturbance as a purely psychological symptom requiring clinical referral. This leaves people alone with something real, in the hands of a framework that was not built to address it, and sends the message that the church has nothing to say. The tradition has something to say. It has always had something to say. We have simply stopped saying it. A Theology of Place Start with the theology of the Spirit and created matter. In Genesis 1, the Spirit of God hovered over the waters before the first word of creation was spoken. The Hebrew word — ruach — is wind, breath, spirit. It is not a disembodied force operating at a safe distance from physical reality. It is moving over the surface of the deep, present to the material world, attending to it the way a bird attends to a nest. The Spirit has never been indifferent to physical things. In John 20, the Risen Christ breathes emphysaō — the breath of new creation — into a room. Not into a concept. Not into a theology. Into a specific place, with specific walls, where specific frightened people were standing. The Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost fills a house before it fills the people in it. The Acts account is precise about this: it filled the entire house where they were sitting. The Spirit’s relationship to physical space is not incidental to the New Testament narrative. It is woven through it. This pattern has deep roots. In the Old Testament we see places and objects set apart for God’s purposes — Jacob anointing the stone at Bethel, the tabernacle and temple consecrated with oil and prayer. The pattern is consistent: God claims material reality. What a Blessing Actually Does This is the theological ground on which the church’s practice of blessing stands. When a pastor blesses a home, or an object, or a space where something has gone wrong, the act is not magic and it is not theater. It is a claim — spoken aloud, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, by someone entrusted by the church to speak it publicly — that this place belongs to God. Not that it will belong to God once the spiritual atmosphere improves. That it belongs to God now, because the Spirit who hovered over the deep before creation has not become indifferent to physical space, and the authority given by the Risen Christ and poured out at Pentecost was never restricted to interior spiritual states. The blessed object — the water, the oil, the medal, the cross on the wall — is not a talisman. It does not protect by its own power. It marks a claim — the same way a wedding ring does not create love but publicly testifies to a covenant already made. Not a sacrament in the same sense as Baptism — instituted by Christ with a promise attached — but flowing from the same sacramental logic: the Word of God setting apart material reality for God’s purposes. The same logic that makes baptismal water holy — not the chemical composition of the water, but the Word spoken over it, the purpose to which it has been set apart — applies to a room, a threshold, a household. The Spirit works through physical things. The entire sacramental theology of the church is built on that premise. The practice of blessing spaces is simply that premise applied consistently. How I Approach a House Blessing Discernment matters here — paying attention to psychological, environmental, and spiritual factors without collapsing them into one another. This is why I always begin by asking about obvious natural explanations first: carbon monoxide, mold, electrical issues, grief, trauma, or mental health concerns. Good spiritual care never skips responsible medical and practical steps. Blessing complements them; it does not replace them. What I bring to a home where something is wrong is not a specialist’s toolkit or an elaborate rite. It is the ordinary authority of the baptismal commission, the prayers of the church, and the confidence that the Spirit who was breathed into creation has not vacated the premises. I pray. I speak the name of Jesus into every room. I anoint thresholds with oil. I may leave blessed objects if the family wants them — not as protective charms, but as physical markers of a claim already made. Often, that is enough. Not because of anything I did. Because the authority was already there, and someone finally showed up to use it. Reclaiming This Practice Reclaiming this aspect of our tradition is a quiet, steady work — one that replaces fear with the peace of Christ. If you are dealing with something in your home or your space that fits what I have described here, the most faithful place to begin is not an internet search for deliverance ministries. It is a conversation with a pastor who knows the tradition and will not either dismiss you or frighten you further. You don’t have to carry this alone. If you want to understand the theology of sacramentals more fully — The Warfare of Things — is available here. Also...If you missed my long-form piece on navigating the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit for Pentecost—and why Martin Luther wasn't a cessationist—you can read "There Is No Kill Switch" here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: Freepik.com Most people who come to spiritual direction are waiting—not for the session to begin, but for themselves to be ready.
They are waiting to feel like they believe what they say they believe. They are waiting for the fog to lift, the doubt to quiet, or the sense of God’s presence to return—or arrive for the first time—before they feel they can really begin. There is a version of the spiritual life that quietly trains people to clean themselves up before they speak. It treats prayer as something you earn access to by getting your interior house in order first. It suggests you must feel sufficiently sincere or resolve the outstanding business between you and God before you presume to show up at the door. I want to explore where that version comes from, and why it misses the radical nature of grace. The Breath in the Locked Room On the evening of the first Easter Sunday, Jesus walked through a locked door into a room full of people who had spent the weekend in hiding. He said peace—before they had explained themselves, before they had demonstrated remorse, and before they had shown any sign of having learned a single thing from the previous three days. And then he did something that John describes with a word that appears only one other time in Scripture. He breathed on them. The Greek word is emphysaō. The only other place it appears in the biblical text is Genesis 2:7, when God formed the first human being from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. What Jesus did in that room was a new creation act. The same breath that animated a human being from dust was exhaled again into people who had not earned it or prepared for it. The Spirit is not the reward for readiness; the Spirit is what makes readiness possible. The Grace That Goes Before This is what the tradition calls prevenient grace—the grace that goes before. That same breath is not just a moment in a locked room; it is the pattern of how God deals with us. It is the grace that exists before your first conscious prayer, before your decision to take the spiritual life seriously, and before you sat across from a spiritual director for the first time. The breath had already been exhaled. In the waters of your baptism, the same Risen Jesus who stood in that upper room breathed the life of new creation into you—not because you were prepared or understood what was happening, but because that is what God does with dust. What this means for the interior life is more practical than it sounds: You do not begin to pray in order to establish contact with a God who is waiting at a distance. You begin to pray because the Spirit who was breathed into you is already praying. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The prayer is already happening. You are not initiating it—you are joining it. Grace First, Comprehension Following This changes the posture of the whole interior life. You are not reaching for what has not yet arrived; you are learning to live from what was already given. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, understood this deeply. He put candidates for baptism through the rites of initiation first—in the dark—before they fully understood what was being done to them. They went into the water before they could explain it. The body received the oil. Only afterward were they told what had happened. His point was not that understanding is unimportant, but that the Spirit was not waiting for understanding to arrive before showing up. The grace came first. The comprehension followed. It still works that way. The Honest Starting Place Spiritual direction, at its best, is simply the practice of helping someone notice what the Spirit has already been doing in them—often in the places they were least expecting it, and frequently in the experiences they most wanted to leave behind. If you have been waiting to feel ready—ready to pray, ready to trust, ready to believe that the forgiveness is actually for you—I want to suggest that the waiting itself, with its doubt, hesitation, and quiet fatigue, may be the very thing to bring to prayer. Not as evidence that something is wrong, but as the honest starting place it already is. You are not behind. You are not disqualified. You are dust that has already been breathed into—and the breath has not left you. That is where the interior life begins. Not with your readiness. With his. If you find yourself waiting like this, spiritual direction can be a place to begin—not once you are ready, but exactly where you are. You can learn more about how I work here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack. The Missional Secret to a Successful Interim: What Frost and Hirsch Got Right  Image: freepik.com Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch wrote The Shaping of Things to Come in 2003. It is a book about the "missional church"—about what happens when a congregation stops asking “how do we get people to come to us” and starts asking “who are we sent to be for the people around us.” It has been influential in church planting circles for twenty years, but it is not widely read in interim ministry circles.
It should be—especially for congregations in pastoral transition and those guiding them. The "Field of Dreams" Problem The central argument Frost and Hirsch make is that most Western congregations have drifted into what they call an “attractional” mode—a Field of Dreams ecclesiology: build it and they will come. The problem is not only that this mode is evangelistically ineffective in a post-Christendom culture. This is not simply a question of outreach method; it is a question of what the church believes itself to be. The deeper problem is that it produces congregations that have organized their entire identity around their own preferences, their own programs, and their own comfort. They gradually lose the capacity to ask the harder question: What is this congregation for, beyond its own perpetuation? The Anxiety of the Vacancy That question—what are we for?—is exactly the question that comes loose during a pastoral transition. Yet, it is exactly the question most congregations in transition never get around to asking. They are too busy managing the anxiety of the vacancy to sit with anything that uncomfortable. I have served four congregations as an intentional interim pastor. In every single one, the presenting question from the leadership was some version of “Who should our next pastor be?” But in every case, there was a more important question that had to be answered first:
Most congregations assume the first question is practical. In reality, it is the second that determines whether the first can be answered truthfully. Identity Precedes the Search Frost and Hirsch provide a framework for that second question. They call it “incarnational” ministry—the idea that a congregation’s identity is not self-referential but is always defined in relation to its context, its neighborhood, and the specific people it is positioned to serve. A congregation that has done that work knows what kind of pastor it needs. A congregation that hasn’t will almost inevitably call the wrong pastor—or call the right pastor into a situation structured for failure. The Gift of Disruption The interim period is the moment to do this work. Not because the interim pastor has a program for it, but because the departure of a pastor creates a natural disruption of the status quo. This entrenched habit of ecclesial introversion is best addressed when things are already shaken. In that sense, the interim is not merely a gap to be managed but a moment of discernment given by God. When the status quo is disrupted, the question of identity becomes accessible in a way it rarely is when things feel stable. People are already asking who they are; the interim pastor’s job is to ensure they ask it seriously, with good theological tools, before the anxiety of the vacancy pushes them toward a premature answer. Frost and Hirsch may not have intended to write a book about interim ministry, but they diagnosed the very thing that good interim ministry exists to address. Interim ministry, at its best, is the work of helping a congregation recover its sent identity before it seeks its next leader. If your congregation is in transition, the vacancy isn't a problem to be solved—it’s an opening to be seized. Are you looking for a pastor to maintain the “Field of Dreams,” or a leader who will help you walk into the neighborhood you’ve been sent to serve? Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] |
