 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]
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 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. 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] |
