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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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:

• The Attractional Question: What kind of pastor will we like?
• The Incarnational Question: Who are we, and who are we sent to be?

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]