 A note came across the table at the Ray of Light Food Pantry a few weeks ago. Someone we feed every Saturday wrote to say thank you, and closed with "May your days be filled with His grace." They're not a member here. They may never be. That didn't stop grace from showing up at our folding table on a Saturday morning.
That sentence has been sitting with me ever since — not because it was surprising, but because of the word "His." She didn’t say "your grace" or "the church’s grace." She didn't even opt for a safely vague "spiritual grace." She used a personal pronoun. She said His. She saw through the volunteers, through the canned goods and the produce and the Saturday morning logistics, to something — or Someone — she recognized was doing the actual work. That is either a very casual figure of speech, or it is something much more interesting. I think it's the latter. And it raises a question I want to try to answer directly rather than with the kind of carefully managed non-answer that sounds pastoral but actually leaves everyone in the same fog they arrived in. How Do We Hold Fast to Our Confessional Convictions Without Putting God’s Mercy in a Cage? Here is the tension in plain language: Light of Christ holds a specific confessional identity. Word, Sacrament, the proclaimed Gospel of Jesus Christ — these are not decorative preferences. They are the delivery route we have been given and commissioned to use. We believe Jesus when he says he is the way, the truth, and the life. We believe that means something. We don't privately think all paths lead to the same place while publicly maintaining a polite ecumenical silence about it. And yet: a woman who may never have set foot in a church closed her thank-you note with a benediction that would not be out of place in the liturgy. Grace showed up. She named it correctly. What do we do with that? The worst answer — and the most common one — is to dissolve the tension by giving up one of its poles. Either we say it doesn't really matter what anyone believes, all paths lead to God, and quietly abandon the confessional conviction that sent those volunteers out on Saturday morning in the first place. Or we say that grace only operates where the proper theological credentials are in check, which turns salvation into a performance review and God into an auditor — and that is not Lutheran theology. That is not any theology worth the name. The better answer is a distinction the Reformers were careful about and that we have mostly forgotten how to make. What We Are Bound To, and What God Is Free to Do Luther insisted, with a consistency that is easy to miss if you only read him in fragments, that the means of grace — Word, Baptism, the Supper — are God's commitment to us. They are the places He has promised to show up. That promise is binding, reliable, and sufficient. We never have to wonder whether God might be present when the water is poured or when the Gospel is spoken into a specific human situation. The promise covers it. That is our lane. But — and this is the part that gets quietly dropped in most of these conversations — the promise is binding on us. It is not a cage around God. Luther put it this way in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church: God is not so bound to the signs and sacraments that he cannot work without them. The means of grace are His commitment to show up in those places for us. They were never His agreement to stay away from everywhere else. This is not a loophole. It is not permission to be vague about the Gospel or to treat confessional conviction as optional. It is a recognition that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is not a God of fine print and exclusion. He is a God who, at this very moment, is out looking for the lost sheep, the lost coin, the son who hasn't come home yet. That is who He revealed himself to be. There is no other God hiding behind that one. Two Different Questions Part of what makes this conversation difficult is that people tend to collapse two separate questions into one. The first question is our question: What have we been given to say and do? What is the church's lane? The answer is clear: proclaim Christ, administer the Sacraments, make disciples, feed the hungry, speak the Word into specific human lives. Stay in the lane. Don't shrink the Gospel down to a manageable tribal deity, and don't inflate it into a vague therapeutic affirmation that asks nothing of anyone. The second question is God's question: What does He do with the reach of His grace beyond the borders of what we can see and account for? The reformers' consistent counsel here is to resist speculating. We are not the accounting department. We look at the revealed God — the one whose face Jesus says you have seen when you have seen His — and what we see there is a God whose reach is not limited by the size of our maps. Those two questions need to stay separate. Confusing them in either direction causes problems: collapsing them toward God's freedom produces theological vagueness and eventually doctrinal collapse. Collapsing them toward our lane produces a God who is smaller than Scripture says He is, and a church that mistakes its delivery route for the destination. What This Looks Like at LOC Light of Christ is a congregation in genuine transition — financially constrained, numerically small by conventional measures, holding worship, running a food pantry that served somewhere in the range of 40,000 people last year while 30 showed up for worship on a given Sunday. By every standard metric in the denominational toolbox, we register as struggling. But consider what actually happened at that pantry table. The Gospel was not explicitly spoken in a sermon on that particular Saturday morning — nobody handed out tracts with the groceries. And yet, the woman who wrote that note went home and used the word "His." Something moved. Something was recognized, even if it wasn't named in the vocabulary of Lutheran catechesis. That does not mean the proclamation doesn't matter. It means the proclamation creates a field that is larger than any single moment of explicit verbal witness. The volunteers were the echo of Sunday's sermon, moving out in the world. They asked nobody's background, nobody's theology, nobody's immigration status — they were not doing a neutral act of charity. They were doing something that carries a theological signature, whether or not they narrated it aloud. And that signature apparently landed, even if the recipient wasn't reading the fine print of our specific dogmatics. The missional implication of this is significant: faithfulness to our lane is not in competition with the wideness of God's mercy. It is the condition for it. The pantry table does not accidentally become a site of grace. It becomes a site of grace because a specific community, formed by Word and Sacrament, decided that this is what fidelity looks like on a Saturday morning. The confessional conviction is not incidental to the grace. It is what generated the action that made the grace visible. Who We Are Not There is one more thing worth saying plainly, because congregations in transition are often tempted toward it. We are not here to perform enough visible ministry that God will reward us with survival. The pantry table is not a strategy for congregational turnaround. The volunteers are not earning institutional credibility by demonstrating community presence. If that is the frame — and it is an easy frame to slide into, especially when a congregation feels anxious about its own future — then the work of mercy has been quietly converted into a program, and programs have a way of dying when they stop producing measurable results. The frame instead is simpler and more demanding: we do this because we have been told to, and because we have been promised that He is present when we do. The accounting is His. The reckoning is His. The mysterious scope of His mercy, including what it does in the life of a woman who goes home and writes a benediction she may not have known she knew — that is entirely His. We stay in our lane. We pass the bread. We leave the rest to the God who was already out looking before we arrived to help. If you want to dig deeper into the full theological argument behind this tension—including what Luther actually said about the hidden and revealed God, and what the preposition in John 14:6 does and does not mean—the July full edition of The Marginal Note works through it in detail. Read "Our Lane, God's Freedom" on Substack → 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]
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 Our culture preaches a gospel of radical autonomy wearing the mask of freedom: “My life, my business. If no one gets hurt, what’s the harm?” We like to imagine our sins are private — personal, contained, no one else’s concern. As long as a sin stays hidden or feels small, we feel no urgency to name it.
But Scripture tells a different story. Sin is never only your problem. What we keep in the dark doesn’t stay hidden — it festers, and it does not stay contained to the one carrying it. This is Law-work, and I want to be honest about that before going any further: this piece isn’t going to tell you how to fix it. That’s not what the Law is for. The Law’s job is to tell the truth about what’s actually happening when we sin — and the truth is harder, and stranger, than “I made a mistake.” The Illusion of Radical Autonomy Someone will object: “You’re telling me that some stranger’s sin halfway across the world lands on me? That if I lash out at my spouse, I’ve somehow wounded people I’ve never met?” Yes! That objection is exactly the autonomy the Law is here to expose. You are not your own. You were bought with a price. You were baptized into a Body — not a symbol, not a metaphor, but the actual crucified and risen Body of Christ. And in that Body, Paul writes, “if one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). That is not poetic exaggeration. It is the most literal thing Paul says about the Church. When you sin, the wound is not contained to your own conscience. It is a tear in the communion of saints. Our connection in Jesus is not sentimental — it is, as St. Cyril of Alexandria put it, that we are “blended together with one another and with God.” (In Jo. ev., 11,11:PG 74,561.) Picture a family gathered for a meal, and one member is down with the flu — coughing, sharing the serving spoon. Only one person is sick, but everyone at that table is affected. The mood shifts. Others may catch it. The celebration is marred, whether or not anyone names why. That’s a rough picture of what unrepented sin does inside a congregation: it doesn’t announce itself, but it changes the air everyone is breathing. The Weakest Link and the Air We Breathe Paul makes the same point to the Ephesians from the other direction, urging them to “preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) — as though unity were something that has to be actively guarded because it is just as actively threatened. A chain holds only as well as its weakest link. Ninety-nine sound links don’t save the chain when the hundredth gives way. In a congregation, the sins we think of as small or private are those fraying links. They erode trust slowly, but just as surely:
The High Cost of Hidden Sin Jesus prayed that his followers “may be one... so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). That means our disunity isn’t a private failing either — it’s evangelically costly. The world is watching whether the people who claim to be one Body actually act like it. And the sin of one member doesn’t stay isolated even when it stays hidden, because, as St. Paul warns the Galatians, “a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough” (Galatians 5:9):
This is what St. Augustine meant when he called the Church the Corpus Christi mysticum — the mystical Body of Christ — and preached to his congregation, “You are the body of Christ and his members... Be what you see; receive what you are” (Sermon 272). That sermon was preached at the altar, about the bread they were about to receive. It was not a pep talk about trying harder. It was a description of what they already were, true whether they felt it that morning or not. So here, for now, is where this has to sit: you do not get to sin privately, because there is no private compartment in the Body of Christ for it to stay in. That is simply true, whether or not it feels fixable. Next time, the other half of this: what the Body does with a wound it cannot heal by trying harder — which is not nothing, and is not what you’d expect. How have you seen seemingly “private” actions shift the spiritual air in your own communities? Let’s discuss in the comments below. 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]  When Dreams Become Spiritual Direction
I have a friend who is an Episcopal priest who recently woke with a heavy wave of emotion he couldn’t shake. In his dream, he stood in a sanctuary that looked almost exactly like his own church—except everything needed for Mass was hidden, misplaced, or impossibly out of reach. The room was packed with people worshipping with intense emotion: dancing, clapping, and shouting. Amid the noise, he tried frantically to prepare the altar, but obstacle after obstacle appeared. The chalice was missing, the wine and water were buried, and the hosts spilled and scattered the moment he finally located them. The altar itself seemed to elevate, forcing him to climb a platform just to reach it, only to discover the ciborium was entirely gone. He awoke before the liturgy could even begin. Too Much Pizza Before Bed or Something More? Many people dismiss dreams as random neurological noise—a cinematic firing of neurons as the brain tidies up for the night. Certainly, some dreams are exactly that, and Christians should always be cautious about making grand, predictive claims based on a midnight reverie. Yet the Christian tradition has never entirely ignored the sleeping mind. We see this even in the secular world, where some of history’s greatest breakthroughs arrived while the waking mind was offline. Elias Howe famously solved the mechanics of the modern sewing machine after dreaming he was captured by cannibals waving spears with holes near the tips. Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail. Even Thomas Edison relied on deliberate “genius naps,” holding steel balls in his hands that would drop to the floor the moment he drifted into the hypnagogic state, allowing him to capture the fluid insights of his subconscious. These stories remind us that the subconscious often sees connections the waking mind misses. Dreams in Scripture and the Christian Tradition For the believer, those quiet places of lowered defenses may also become places where the Holy Spirit gently brings hidden things into the light. Scripture contains significant moments in which God uses dreams as one means of guidance, warning, encouragement, and self-revelation. God speaks to Abimelech in a dream to protect an innocent family; Jacob envisions a ladder reaching to heaven, reorienting his understanding of God’s presence; and Joseph receives crucial direction before and after the birth of Jesus. In the book of Job, Elihu describes this pastoral function of the night: “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men while they slumber on their beds, then He opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction, that He may turn man aside from his conduct, and keep man from pride.” (Job 33:15–17) What is striking in Job is that the emphasis is not primarily prediction but correction and illumination. The dream exposes what ordinary consciousness avoids. Discerning believers throughout church history have understood dreams not as new revelation meant to rival Scripture, but as a diagnostic mirror—a way for the Spirit to illuminate hidden dynamics already operating within the human heart. A Simple Framework for Listening to Dreams In my own work with spiritual direction, I’ve learned to look at dreams through this exact lens. When a lingering dream needs to be tested against Scripture and parsed with humility, I use a simple five-point framework to look past the surface details:
Looking Beneath the Surface of the Dream When my friend and I began to look through that exact window, it became clear that the dream was not primarily about race or worship styles, even though those vibrant details initially grabbed his attention. Because dreams communicate symbolically, the emotional core was his repeated, frustrated struggle to prepare the Lord’s Table. That detail changed everything. Technically, everything necessary for communion already existed in the room—the chalice, the wine, the water, the bread, and the altar were all present. Yet nothing could be accessed easily; the essential resources had been misplaced, neglected, or hidden from immediate reach. When Grace Gets Buried The image of the hosts buried behind junk is something almost every leader eventually encounters. Sometimes grace is not absent, and the means of healing are already available, but they are completely obscured by layers of accumulated disappointment, institutional memory, wounded relationships, and deeply ingrained habits of mistrust. The Body of Christ remains present, but access to it is blocked by the historical baggage that has gathered around the altar. The Missing Ciborium When the bread was finally retrieved, it scattered—mirroring the exhausting reality of leadership: the feeling of trying to gather people into a single body while personalities, politics, and competing loyalties continually pull them apart. This brings us to the missing ciborium. The ciborium—the vessel that holds the consecrated bread together—became, in the dream, a living image of the Church’s calling to gather the many into one. Its absence was not a failure of resources, but a cry about the missing structure of unity itself. When Dreams Reveal the Real Conflict Shortly after our conversation, my friend saw this play out in real time. Difficult meetings emerged, old loyalties resurfaced, and he realized people were saying one thing to his face and something entirely different behind closed doors. Questions of control and competing visions for the future were coming to a head, leading him to write to me: “This is not about race, but power.” Perhaps that is true on a natural level, but I wonder if something even deeper lies beneath our battles over power. Again and again in ministry, leadership, and family life, we encounter the exact same mystery: How do people actually become capable of communion? How do we gather a community when everyone arrives carrying their own history, disappointments, and old defenses? How do we prepare a common table when the elements themselves seem determined to scatter? The Spiritual Work of Preparation What strikes me most about my friend’s dream is not the chaos that occurred, but the tragedy that didn’t. The church building didn’t collapse, the altar didn’t break, the people didn’t abandon the room, and nothing holy was destroyed. The Mass simply remained unfinished. The dream seemed to invite my friend to stop pretending the clutter was not there. Rather than forcing quick solutions, it suggested beginning with honest conversations and naming what had remained hidden. Stay at the Table In spiritual direction, I have often found that God rarely meets us in neatly wrapped, completed stories. More often, the Spirit encounters us in the preparation, the interruption, the waiting, and the unfinished business. What hidden chalice or scattered host might the Spirit be asking you to notice this week? In the end, my friend’s dream didn’t foretell disaster—it revealed what was already true. The elements were present but buried. The people were gathered but scattered. The altar was accessible but unreachable. The invitation wasn’t to magically finish the liturgy; it was simply to stay at the table, look honestly at the clutter, and realize that the work of preparation had only just begun. 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]  Every congregation at some point asks the same unspoken question: “If Jesus has already won the victory, why does it still feel like we’re losing?”
To understand that tension, we have to look back to 1946, when the theologian Oscar Cullmann reached for the freshest analogy available to him. The Second World War had just ended. The images of Normandy beaches were still vivid. And Cullmann, writing in Christ and Time, saw in D-Day the precise structure of New Testament eschatology: a decisive battle that determines the outcome of the war, followed by an interval of continued fighting before the final surrender. June 6, 1944 — the Allied landing at Normandy — marked the turning point. From that moment, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The strategic initiative had shifted permanently. What remained was not a question of whether the Allies would win but of how long the interval would last before the final surrender. The fighting continued for nearly another year. George Eldon Ladd spent his academic career at Gordon-Conwell filling in the map of that contested ground — the Kingdom of God present and arriving, already inaugurated in Christ and not yet fully consummated, breaking into history from the future. Together, Cullmann and Ladd gave the church its most durable framework for the world it actually inhabits. That world still feels like a battlefield. Understanding this changes everything about how a congregation understands its authority — and its assignment. The Tension of the Interval
What Jesus Actually Saw Matthew 9:35–10:23 is one of the hinge passages of the Gospel. Jesus has been moving through the towns and villages healing, teaching, proclaiming. And then Matthew pauses the narrative to tell us what Jesus saw when he looked at the crowds. He saw people who were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. The word translated “harassed” suggests people who have been beaten down, thrown to the ground, and worn out by the blows of life. Jesus looks at humanity and does not see villains or victims in neat categories. He sees wounded people. People burdened by the sins they have committed and the sins committed against them. Often, a transitioning congregation looks in the mirror and sees itself as the wounded one. But Jesus radically redirects our gaze outward. He tells us that the people are harassed — and then he says something that should stop us cold: “The harvest is plentiful.” We look at our cultural moment and see decline. Shrinking congregations. Institutional fatigue. A generation that wants nothing to do with organized religion. We call this a barren field. Jesus, however, calls it a plentiful harvest — precisely because the people are so harassed. They are not looking for a new religion; they are exhausted by the old powers. They are broken by the crushing weight of meritocracy, the endless demand to curate a self-worth presenting, and the internal monologue that whispers: You are not enough. You will never change. You are too broken. That voice is not conscience. It is the Accuser doing what the Accuser does. The Accuser’s Actual Move Scripture gives a specific name to the figure whose particular work is condemnation: ha-satan — the Accuser, the one who brings charges. The Accuser is a world-class lawyer with a terrible heart. He does not usually lie about facts. He lies about futures. He takes your very real, indefensible failures and draws one conclusion: because of this, therefore you are beyond grace. Think of the person lying awake at 2 a.m., replaying the sentence they should never have spoken, the promise they broke, the relationship they damaged, their heart pounding with shame. This is the Law turned into a weapon of despair. It is extraordinarily effective because it uses true premises to reach a false verdict. The crowds are harassed and helpless because they are listening to a legal argument they cannot win on their own. The church’s response to this is not advice. Not inspiration. Not a program or a therapy or a motivational message. It is a counter-verdict. Spoken with authority. By someone authorized to speak it. That is what the Office of the Keys actually is. The Office of the Keys as Courtroom In Lutheran pastoral theology, the Office of the Keys is not a liturgical courtesy or a historical relic. It is the courtroom in which the Accuser’s charges are dismissed — not because they were inaccurate, but because the Judge has already ruled and Someone else bore the verdict. Jesus does not hand his disciples a set of best practices for community development. He gives them authority — the same authority by which he was healing and proclaiming — and sends them out. The Kingdom of God does not advance by better programming. It advances by the exercise of authority that Jesus has already won and now distributes to his church. The absolution pronounced by a pastor over a penitent is not pastoral encouragement. It is not a spiritual pep talk. It is a legal declaration rendered in the court where the decisive battle has already been decided. “As a called and ordained servant of the Word, I forgive you all your sins.” That sentence carries the full weight of the cross behind it. The Accuser’s case is dismissed. Not because the charges were false — they were not — but because the penalty has already been paid in full. This is why private confession and absolution is not optional spiritual hygiene in the Lutheran tradition. It is targeted pastoral medicine for a specific wound: the wound of a conscience that has been told, by a very good lawyer, that grace does not reach this far. It does. The court has ruled. The Interval and the Foxhole We live in the interval — between D-Day and the final surrender, between the resurrection and the return — it is the pastoral situation every congregation inhabits every week. The outcome is secure. But the enemy has not yet laid down his weapons, and the foxholes are still occupied. For many congregations in transition, this contested ground feels particularly long. The pastoral vacancy. The shrinking budget. The Sunday mornings when the harvest Jesus described seems invisible from where you are standing. The mourners have already arrived. Jesus was not deterred by that then. He is not deterred by it now. The church does not go out because it feels powerful. It goes out because Jesus is powerful. We do not go as experts in overcoming darkness — we go as people who have been brought out of darkness and now speak of the One who did it. Sometimes that looks dramatic. More often it looks quiet: a prayer offered at a food pantry gate, a confession made in a hospital room, a promise kept when no one is watching, a wounded conscience comforted by a word it did not earn. The laborers are few, Jesus said, precisely because the sent life costs something. The people who keep showing up — to preach, to serve, to forgive, to comfort — when nothing in their circumstances is giving them permission to do so are not failing to find a better assignment. They are holding ground that He has already cleared. What This Means for Congregations in Transition The interim period has a particular temptation: to spend the entire season asking what the congregation has lost rather than what it has been given. What it has been given is the authority Jesus distributed to his disciples in Matthew 10. Not a strategic plan. Not a program portfolio. Authority. The power to forgive sins, to proclaim the Kingdom’s arrival, to speak a word of life into situations that look like death. A congregation that knows this does not enter the interim period as a patient waiting for a diagnosis. It enters as an outpost of the Kingdom in the interval. To actively “hold the ground” during a pastoral transition, a congregation must step out of waiting mode and take up three specific tasks:
Cullmann was right. The decisive battle is won. The outcome is not in question. The Accuser’s charges are dismissed. Ladd mapped the territory we are living in. It is occupied but not abandoned. Contested but not lost. Go hold the ground. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ELCA-rostered intentional interim minister and congregational consultant based in the greater Houston area. He writes on congregational transition, spiritual formation, and the theology of the unseen at The Marginal Note on Substack. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  There is a kind of faith the church doesn't know how to talk about.
Not the faith of the triumphant testimony — the dramatic conversion, the answered prayer, the healing that arrived on cue. Not the faith of the theologically confident, who can articulate what they believe and why. The Gospels not only make room for this kind of faith; they name it and celebrate it. But there is another type as well. The faith that has been worn down by twelve years of bleeding, silence, and shame until it's barely recognizable as faith anymore. The faith that cannot make it to the front of the room. The faith that reaches sideways, invisibly, for the hem. That faith is all over our congregations. We mostly do not see it because we are not looking for it in the right places. The Woman and the Number Twelve Matthew 9 places two healing stories in deliberate parallel. A woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years reaches for the hem of Jesus's robe in a crowd. A twelve-year-old girl — the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus — is dying. One has lived her whole adult life in suffering. The other has barely had a chance to begin. The number is not accidental. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel. Twelve is the whole people of God. Matthew is making a structural argument: these two individuals represent everyone. The ones who have been sick longer than they can remember, and the ones cut off before they could begin. The exhausted and the barely-started. Both belong to the Twelve. Jesus goes to both of them. The woman's situation is specific and worth unpacking. Under the purity codes of her day, her condition made her ritually unclean. Anyone she touched became contaminated. She could not enter the Temple. She could not sit in community worship. She could not be held. For twelve years, the way the purity system was functionally applied in her context marked her as a problem to be managed from a distance. So she does not approach Jesus directly. She cannot. What she does is push through the crowd — invisibly, without permission — and reach for the kraspedon: the ritual fringe, the tzitzit (the blue-tasseled fringes commanded in Numbers 15 as a daily physical reminder of God's commandments). It is a theologically suggestive act of faith. A woman told for twelve years she was outside the covenant reaches out and grabs hold of a visible sign of that covenant. She is not reaching randomly. She is reaching for a sign that she still, somehow, belongs. What Jesus Does with What the World Calls Inadequate Faith Under the Law, contact with an unclean person should have made Jesus unclean. Instead, the logic of the Kingdom takes over: his cleanness spreads to her rather than her uncleanness spreading to him. This is the atonement in miniature. In Matthew 9, Jesus repeatedly crosses lines he was not supposed to cross — eating with tax collectors and sinners, allowing an unclean woman to touch him, taking the hand of a dead girl. Each time, the same thing happens: uncleanness does not transfer to him. His life transfers to them. Jesus stops. He turns. He does not ask how she ended up here. He does not make her explain the twelve years. He does not tell her to come back when she is cleaned up. He looks at whatever scraped-together, desperate, last-scrap faith she dragged to him — the faith that could not even make it to his face, the faith that reached sideways and invisible — and he calls it enough. Then he names her publicly. "Daughter." In front of everyone. He is not just healing her body. He is ending her exile. He is restoring her to the community that had classified her as a contaminant for twelve years. The word he uses — tharsei, "take heart," "take courage" — is a word of commissioning. She is not just healed. She is sent back in. Hesed Against the System This radical re-integration is the flesh-and-blood fulfillment of Israel's prophetic hope. What Hosea names, Jesus enacts in real time on a body the system had excluded. Seven hundred years before this moment, Hosea named the same tension. God's people had run through the cycle of faithlessness and consequence until the silence of God felt like abandonment. And into that silence Hosea speaks: "Come, let us return to the Lord. For it is he who has torn, and he will heal us. He has struck down, and he will bind us up." The God who tears also heals. The God who strikes also binds up. This is the shape of hesed — not a passing feeling, but a stubborn covenant loyalty that does not break. It is the love that holds fast regardless of the other party's condition. It is loyal love that goes all the way to the cross. Jesus brings this hesed into direct conflict with the religious metrics of his day. When the Pharisees object to his eating with sinners, he quotes Hosea: "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." The system, as she experienced it, treated her as a contamination risk. God's hesed says otherwise. What This Means for Pastoral Care The people who approach God sideways are not doing it wrong. They are doing exactly what the hemorrhaging woman did. They cannot come boldly. Years of suffering, or shame, or silence have made boldness unavailable to them. What they can do is push through the crowd and reach — invisibly, without permission — for whatever part of the Word they can get their hands on. The pastor who knows this will build communities differently. Consider these practices:
The question is whether you can see it. If your ministry is calibrated to recognize visible, articulate, participatory faith, you will likely miss it. It often looks like a brief prayer at a food pantry table. A quiet presence in the back pew. A hospital room where someone can only whisper the name of Jesus. That is last-scrap faith — and it is met, again and again, by hesed with skin on. What Is Your Twelve Years? So, what is the thing that wakes up with you? The thing that drains you quietly, day after day. The thing you have stopped telling people about because nothing has changed and you are tired of looking disappointed. Twelve years of trying to stay sober. Twelve years of leading a congregation that will not turn. Twelve years of praying the same prayer against the same silent ceiling. He stopped for her. He went to that house. If all you can do is reach sideways, reach. If all you can reach is the hem, reach for the hem. He has already stopped. What is your twelve years? I'd love to hear where you're reaching for the hem these days — leave a comment below. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ELCA-rostered intentional interim minister and congregational consultant based in the greater Houston area, with fifteen years on the faculty of the FIND School for Spiritual Direction in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. He writes on congregational transition, spiritual formation, and the theology of the unseen at The Marginal Note on Substack. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: freepik.com A church with 30 people in worship fed more than 40,000 people last year — more than the entire population of the city where it operates.
I am the supply preacher at that congregation. I watch it happen every week. And I want to tell you what our standard instruments for congregational health would say about this church — and why that should trouble every mission board, every judicatory committee, and every denominational leader who makes decisions about where to invest missional resources. What the Numbers Actually Say In 2025, the Ray of Light Food Pantry — operated by Light of Christ Lutheran Church in La Porte, Texas — served more than 40,000 people, distributed the equivalent of more than 430,000 meals, and moved more than 600,000 pounds of food. The tracked value of what passed through its hands exceeded $1.1 million. That figure is a floor. It does not count the prize-winning steer donated from the Pasadena Livestock Show, the fresh seafood diverted after a contract snafu, or the pallets of unsold bread from the local Panera. The human engine behind it: roughly a dozen core volunteers, an 8-person board, and approximately 140 volunteer hours poured into the neighborhood every single week. At the Independent Sector's current valuation of $36.14 per volunteer hour, that is more than $260,000 in annual labor — more than four times the congregation's entire operating budget — generated entirely off-books, fueled by nothing but neighborly devotion and a theological conviction that the person at the door is not a client. Now here is what our standard instruments would say about this congregation: small, under-resourced, no resident pastor, no program staff, no strategic plan. Attendance: 20–30 on a good Sunday. Budget: under $60,000 for all of 2026. By every metric the institutional church uses to assess congregational health, Light of Christ is a congregation most denominational bodies would overlook — or quietly flag for consolidation conversations. That is not a small problem. That is a broken instrument. What We Are Actually Measuring The metrics we have built our missional infrastructure around — attendance, budget, staff, facilities — measure one thing: institutional viability. Whether a congregation can sustain itself as an organization. They do not measure missional vitality. Whether a congregation is an actual presence of Jesus in its neighborhood. Those are not the same thing, and we have spent decades pretending they are. A congregation that scores well on viability may be scoring near zero on effectiveness. A congregation that scores poorly on viability may be doing things no strategic plan would have generated and no spreadsheet will ever capture. We keep making resource decisions based on the first set of numbers while the second set of numbers goes unmeasured — and therefore unseen. Roland Allen identified this problem in 1912, writing about the contrast between Paul's missionary strategy and the Western missionary apparatus. Paul planted churches that could stand on their own within months because he trusted the Spirit to do what the Spirit does when given room. The Western model, Allen argued, creates dependency rather than capacity — importing systems rather than trusting what the Spirit was already cultivating in the local soil. A century later, the apparatus has changed considerably. The structural tendency Allen identified has not. What Better Instruments Would Measure Intentional interim ministry work has taught me that the questions a congregation asks during a transition period reveal what it actually believes about itself and its mission — not what its metrics say. The same principle applies to the instruments denominations use to assess congregational health. The questions we ask reveal what we believe is worth measuring. Here are four questions that would produce better data:
Learning to See What Is Already There Light of Christ does not need to be fixed. It needs to be seen — clearly, with the right instruments, by people with the authority to name what they are seeing and invest accordingly. The congregation that learns to be the church without waiting for institutional permission is not a congregation that failed to grow up. It may be the congregation that never needed to. The Spirit does not wait for institutional permission. The Kingdom is advancing in places our spreadsheets were never designed to find. If you are a denominational leader, a judicatory staff member, or a congregation council member trying to understand what your congregation is actually doing in its neighborhood — the instruments matter. The questions you ask determine what you are able to see. The full version of this argument, including the data behind it, ran in the June edition of The Marginal Note right here. If you work with congregations in transition, the interim period is exactly the right moment to recalibrate those instruments — before a new pastor arrives and the old assumptions reassert themselves. That is the kairos inside the crisis. It does not last indefinitely. 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 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.  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. |
