 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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