 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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 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]  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] 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] |
