 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]
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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.  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. 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]  Walpurgis Night at the Heidelberg Thingstätte, 2007 Image: I, AndreasF, CC BY-SA 2.5 There is a specific kind of restlessness that accompanies the last night of April.
In the Gulf Coast heat of Texas, we feel it as the final gasp of manageable air before the humidity of summer descends. But in the older, colder soil of our ancestors, this transition carried a different kind of weight. On the night of April 30, the world crosses a threshold. In the liturgical calendar we are still basking in the afterglow of the Resurrection. But the folk memory of the West has another name for this night: Walpurgisnacht — the eve of May 1, when winter yields to spring and, in older imaginations, unseen powers stirred. For those of us who serve as pastors in the Lutheran tradition, that ancient European rhythm lives somewhere in our spiritual DNA. Our forebears preached and prayed in those same northern lands where St. Walpurga herself once carried the faith. So even here in Texas, far from the Harz Mountains, the night still feels familiar — a faint echo from the old country reminding us that the battle between light and shadow is both ancient and ongoing. The Paradox of the Patroness It is one of the more profound ironies of church history that this night bears the name of a saint. Walpurga was a seventh-century English missionary to the Germanic tribes — a woman of courage and intellectual seriousness who traveled into the heart of pagan darkness to lay the foundations of the faith. When she was canonized on May 1 in the year 870, her feast day became a kind of spiritual fortification. Her relics were said to produce a miraculous oil used for healing, and the medieval mind naturally turned to her for protection against the harmful magic believed to be most potent on the eve of her feast. Walpurgis Night was, in its origins, a night of Christian defense — the Church bearing witness on terrain the darkness had claimed. But as centuries passed, the name of the saint gradually became shorthand for the very darkness she came to dispel. The Witches’ Night of the Harz Mountains eventually swallowed the memory of the missionary. The cultural inheritance of Walpurgisnacht arrived in modernity with the Christian content largely stripped out — leaving a celebration that flirts with the diabolical while having forgotten entirely the woman whose name it bears. This is how it usually goes. The Church names something, consecrates it, and then watches the name outlast the consecration. The Reality of the Night Here is something worth saying plainly, because many pulpits decline to say it at all: for some people, tonight is not a metaphor. While most people mark April 30 with nothing more sinister than a bonfire and a beer, there are practitioners for whom this night carries genuine spiritual intention — people who approach it with deliberate seriousness and whose intent, whatever we make of its ultimate efficacy, is not neutral. We do our congregations a disservice when we pretend otherwise. The world is more spiritually inhabited than the secular imagination wants to admit. Pastors who have spent any time in the margins of parish life — in recovery rooms, in homes where something feels wrong, in conversations that happen after the meeting ends — know this without needing to be convinced. The appropriate response is not fear. It is not obsession. It is clear-eyed pastoral awareness, grounded in the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord of every night, including this one. We are not uninhabited people. Christ dwells in us. That is the unshakable center. The Waffle House Index of the Soul In emergency management, the Waffle House Index measures the severity of a disaster by whether the restaurant is open, operating on a limited menu, or closed entirely. A Waffle House that stays fully open through a hurricane is a sign that things are not as bad as they could be. The spiritual equivalent is worth considering. A faith that is primarily a social habit closes when the pressure rises. A theology that is thin moralism operates on a limited menu — it can manage ordinary days but has nothing to offer when the atmosphere turns heavy. A robust confessional faith — one grounded in the Real Presence of Christ, the authority of the Word, and the identity conferred in Baptism — stays fully operational precisely when everything else is shutting down. The bonfires lit across Europe tonight are meant to frighten the darkness away. They are man-made and temporary, producing more smoke than light. We point instead to the Easter Fire — the light that the darkness has not overcome and will not. Every Easter Vigil, when the Paschal Candle is kindled, we proclaim that there is no night Christ has not already entered. A Pastoral Word Do not be afraid. But do be aware. Our work on a night like this is the same work it is on every other night — and that is exactly the point. We are not a people who hide under the bed on April 30. We are a people whose protection is not dependent on the calendar. The sign of the Cross was made over us at Baptism. The Name of Jesus was spoken into our lives before we had the language to receive it. The body and blood of Christ have been placed in our hands at a table that has been set against the presence of our enemies. That is our craft. The ancient Creeds are our confession. The Word and Sacrament are our weapons. The Resurrection is our victory. Not because we have conjured anything, but because Someone else already won the ground being contested. The sun will rise on May 1 — not because of a fertility rite or a folk custom or a bonfire on a German hillside, but because the Lord of Life has commanded the earth to bring forth its fruit. The darkness, whatever it intends tonight, does not get a vote. So we stand with Saint Walpurga — heirs of the same missionary courage, children of the same confessional faith, whether in Bavaria, Saxony, or south Texas. Reclaim the night. The Easter Fire is still burning. For more on the Christian theology of blessing, sacramentals, and spiritual disturbance, the teaching document "The Warfare of Things: A Guide to the Sacred and the Profane" is available as a free download 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 contact me about this topic start the same way. They apologize first. They say something like, “I know this probably sounds crazy,” or “I don’t know if this is even a real thing,” before they get to what they actually called to say. And what they actually called to say is usually some version of this: something is wrong in my house, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I want to say clearly: it doesn’t sound crazy. And yes, it is a real thing. The Christian tradition has always understood that places are not neutral to us. Because of the Incarnation—the fact that God became flesh in Jesus—we know that the physical world matters deeply to Him. What has happened in these spaces continues to affect those who dwell there: through memory, through relationships, and sometimes in ways we do not fully understand. This is not because places themselves hold some independent power, but because God’s creation, though good, is not untouched by sin, suffering, and history. For that reason, blessing and consecration matter—not as magic, not as superstition, but as the church’s practiced response to the reality that the physical and spiritual are not as neatly separated as modern Western culture assumes. When the church blesses a space, we are speaking God’s Word into it, naming it as belonging to Jesus and placing it under His promise. A blessing properly done does truly set a place apart. It becomes more than a mere building; it is consecrated—rightfully reclaimed and marked as holy ground for the life of the family and the glory of God. The ancient church blessed homes, fields, ships, tools, and thresholds. The medieval church developed rites for the reconciliation of spaces marked by violence or desecration. Martin Luther retained the practice of blessing and the liturgical tradition has never entirely lost it. In practice, this often looks like a pastor moving through the rooms of a home, speaking Scripture aloud, praying specifically over each space, and anointing doorposts and thresholds with oil—a physical, unhurried act of reclaiming territory for the Lord who already owns it. What the church has mostly lost is the pastoral fluency to talk about it plainly. So let me offer a framework. These are not steps to diagnose a phenomenon, but ways of listening carefully so that what is needed can be brought to bear. The Weight of History First, I want to understand the history involved. What do you know about what happened in this space before you arrived? Not because every difficult history produces spiritual disturbance, but because history matters. Sin and trauma leave what we might call a “social debt” in a space—a residue of what has taken place that continues to shape the life of those who dwell there, both visibly and in ways harder to name. We look at the past to see where the peace of Christ needs to be specifically applied. Discerning the Experience Second, I want to understand what is actually being experienced. There is a significant difference between a vague sense of unease, a pattern of relational conflict tied to a space, recurring nightmares, a sense of presence, and phenomena that are more difficult to categorize. I am not interested in sensationalism. Many presenting problems are explainable in the physical or psychological realm—structural issues, environmental factors, or even the heavy lingering fog of personal trauma and grief. (I recently saw a meme that showed a guy with a flashlight exploring his attic with the words, “Homeowner relieved to discover disturbing sounds in attic to be ghosts and not structural issues he can’t afford to repair.”) But I am going to take your report seriously, helping you discern whether what you are feeling is a matter for a home handyman/contractor, a counselor, or a pastor. The Spiritual Landscape of the Heart Third, I want to understand the spiritual condition of the people in the space. This is not a judgment—it is a pastoral question. A Christian is not defenseless; you belong to Jesus. But where we turn away from Him—toward things that promise control, knowledge, or power apart from God—we can place ourselves in a state of confusion and vulnerability. We must be honest about the fact that such vulnerability is rarely left a vacuum. Jesus himself describes malicious spirits as creatures who, finding themselves wandering through arid places, are perpetually looking for a place to rest (Matthew 12:43–45)—and they are more than happy to take up residence where the door has been left unlatched. When we seek spiritual agency outside of Jesus, we inadvertently offer a standing invitation to forces that exploit our desire for control. This is not to say that suffering is always the fruit of one’s own choices, but that the doors we open matter. Our interior lives shape both what we perceive and how we bear it; therefore, the remedy is not just “clearing” a room, but a return to the protection and presence of the Lord. The Church’s Provision Fourth, and most importantly, I want to point toward what the tradition actually offers. There is no space in which Jesus is not already Lord. The question is not whether He is present, but whether His presence is being trusted, spoken, and received. Theologically, we live in the “between time.” Because of Good Friday and Easter, the decisive victory has been won; the cosmos is redeemed. In military terms, D-Day has passed and the outcome is certain, yet we have not yet reached VE Day. In this tension, there is still resistance, suffering, and “groaning” as we await the final fulfillment of that victory. While the greater strategic battle is over, skirmishes remain in the shadows. The church has specific resources for this reality: prayer, the formal rite of blessing, the speaking of the Word into the space, anointing, and the presence of the community. These are not folk remedies or spiritual placebos. They are the church’s concrete, practiced response to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord of every space, every history, and every power that operates within creation. We are simply applying the victory of the King to the territory He has already claimed. Now what? This is not paranormal investigation. I am not interested in evidence of the supernatural for its own sake. I am a pastor. My concern is for the people who are suffering and for bringing to bear the gifts Jesus has given His church. This is not something you are meant to carry alone or solve privately. If you are carrying something like this and don’t know where to bring it—and I understand that making that first contact can feel as awkward as the apology you rehearsed before calling—the contact page is the place to start. 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 There is a diagnosis at the center of Lutheran theology that is either the most liberating thing you have ever heard or the most uncomfortable, depending on where you are when you encounter it.
Martin Luther called this incurvatus in se — a life “curved in on itself,” bent inward, unable to receive life from outside itself. The heart that has folded its doors inward on itself. The soul that keeps recycling its own air, trying to find life within its own limited resources. The person who believes that if they just try harder, think more clearly, breathe more deeply of their own oxygen, they can save themselves. You cannot resuscitate yourself. That is the diagnosis. And it is not primarily a moral judgment — it is a structural one. The problem is not that you are bad at trying. The problem is that you are trying to do something that is, by definition, impossible. You cannot pump your own lungs back to life. You cannot be both the patient and the physician. I see this in spiritual direction more than almost anything else. People come in having worked very hard on themselves. They’ve done the therapy and the reading, built the routines, cultivated a solid interior life. And then something happens — a loss, a failure, a season of dryness that will not lift, a sin they keep returning to despite every intention otherwise — and suddenly the air grows thin. Stale. Familiar in the worst way. They sit across from me and say some version of: I do not understand why this is not working. I have been doing everything right. The problem is not that they have been doing it wrong. The problem is that they have been doing it alone. The disciples in John’s twentieth chapter are doing the same thing. Locked in a room. Breathing the same stale air of Friday — the air of the tomb, the air of endings, the air of what cannot be undone. They are not bad people. They are simply sealed inside the limits of what they can produce on their own. Fear circulates. Grief circulates. Anxiety circulates. Everything becomes recycled air. And then Jesus walks through the wall. Not through the door — through the wall. Without a key, without permission, without waiting for them to get their act together first. He simply occupies the space where their fear has been circulating. And his first word is not a rebuke. It is not a correction. It is not a to-do list. It is Shalom — peace — spoken as a creative act. Not describing a reality that already exists, but calling one into being. Then he does something even stranger. He breathes life into bodies sealed by fear. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically in a distant sense. Breath into lungs that have been locked against hope. If you were a first-century listener, your mind would go immediately to Genesis — to the moment God leaned over dust and breathed the breath of life into nostrils that had never drawn air. John is telling us this is a new creation moment — the Spirit’s breath renewing what fear has sealed shut. The Upper Room has become a new garden. The Risen One stands in the middle of a room full of people surviving on recycled air, and he gives them what they cannot generate. You cannot breathe in a vacuum. You cannot manufacture the breath. You are the recipient of a gift. This is what spiritual direction is, at its best — not a technique for generating spiritual experience, not a system for optimizing your interior life, but a space in which you stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to notice that Someone else is already breathing into the room. The director’s role is not to supply the air. It is to help you notice that the room is already being filled, and to help you stop holding your breath against it. Sometimes that involves naming what is true. Sometimes it involves silence. Sometimes it involves learning to discern the difference between the noise of your own fear and the quieter, steadier breath of grace that is already present but often ignored. The practices matter — lectio divina, centering prayer, the examen, confession. They matter the way open windows matter. They do not create the air. They simply stop you from sealing the room shut. They make space for what is already being given. If you have been working very hard on your interior life and finding that the air still feels thin, that is not a sign that you are failing. It may be a sign that you have been trying to do alone what was never meant to be done alone. Life is already in the room. The only question is whether you will stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to receive it. If you want a companion for that kind of work, spiritual direction is where I do it. The contact page is the place to start. 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]  I came home from a retreat at Mustang Island Conference Center with a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals—and a theological problem I had not expected. The problem was simple: what, exactly, is a Lutheran pastor supposed to do with them? Let me tell you how I got into this strange position. The Anglican Order of Preachers—the Dominican community to which I belong as a life-professed friar—is, as the name suggests, a preaching order. Like many mainline religious communities, we are strongest in prophetic witness and social justice. What we are less practiced at is the simple, one-on-one conversation with people who have never heard the Gospel and have no particular reason to listen. So we decided to address that gap. We invited a deacon from the Archdiocese of Galveston–Houston who practices street evangelism—not the aggressive, confrontational variety, but the kind that begins with genuine human contact and grows from there. He spent a day training us: classroom instruction, some role-playing, and then an hour on the streets of Port Aransas speaking with strangers about things that matter. Afterward we gathered for dinner and a long conversation about what we had experienced. During the training, the deacon explained how his team uses sacramentals—rosaries, medals, prayer cards—as conversation starters and simple gifts. Not as magic. Not as luck. Rather, as physical anchors for a spiritual reality the Church has always insisted upon. He brought samples, and we took them with us onto the street. At the end of the evening there were leftovers. The deacon did not want to haul them home, but since the group was mostly Episcopalians, he correctly assumed we were unlikely to make much use of them. I, however, grabbed a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals and brought them back to La Porte, TX where I live and serve the TX LA Gulf Coast Synod (ELCA) as an intentional interim pastor. My first thought was to give them to my Thursday night Bible study group at Light of Christ—a scrappy, lean, no-frills, refreshingly honest crew made up mostly of recovery alumni and people who know the margins of life firsthand. They are exactly the kind of people for whom a physical object that says you are not alone in this fight might matter. In a moment of craving or despair—when faith feels abstract and distant—the cold weight of a medal in the palm can provide a kind of sensory grounding. Then it occurred to me that they would have no framework for what they were holding. The medal bears Latin inscriptions on both sides, including the potent Vade Retro Satana (“Begone, Satan”). It carries a theological tradition stretching back fifteen centuries. At its core, the medal is a scriptural invocation in metal—the Name of Jesus set against the dark. So I wrote a teaching document—but before I could teach it, I had to work something out for myself: what does a Lutheran do with this? Lutherans are not sacramental in quite the same way Roman Catholics are. We have a more narrowly defined set of Sacraments and a less developed theology of sacramentals. We reject any notion that an object works “by the mere performance of the ritual” (ex opere operato) as a mechanism of automatic grace apart from faith and the Word. We are often suspicious—sometimes rightly—of anything that appears to locate spiritual power in a thing rather than in the Word and the Name. Martin Luther himself was emphatic: it is the Word that makes the Sacrament. Without the Word, the element is simply matter. Yet Luther also blessed things. He retained the renunciations, the exorcism, and the exsufflation in the baptismal rite—a reminder that the early church never imagined the Christian life as spiritually neutral terrain. He wrote and sang about spiritual warfare as a present and serious reality. More to the point, Luther understood that God uses material means—water, bread, wine, spoken words—to deliver real promises. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted that the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is far more porous than Western modernity is willing to admit. Given that background, there is a precedent, if not a full theological system, for the careful, non-superstitious use of physical signs, properly understood. The St. Benedict medal is not a lucky charm. It promises nothing automatically. It is best understood as a material confession of Jesus’s victory. Its power is entirely His—invoked through faith and prayer, and grounded in the scriptural commands inscribed on its surface. The medal is not a battery of power; it is a sign that points the Christian back to their Baptismal identity. What the medal does is give the person holding it something to hold: a physical anchor in a moment of spiritual pressure. A reminder, pressed into the palm, that the Name of Jesus has already won the ground being contested—not by residing in the object, but by being confessed and trusted in faith. For someone in recovery—someone who knows in their bones what it means to be pulled toward destruction by something that sounds almost reasonable—that is no small thing. People who have lived close to darkness do not need to be convinced that darkness is real. What they need is a theological framework for what they have already experienced—and clarity about what to do when the pressure returns. The full teaching document--The Warfare of Things: A Guide to the Sacred and the Profane—is available as a free download here. It explores the theology of blessed and cursed objects through a Lutheran lens, explains how the St. Benedict medal may be used as a prayer aid, discusses how to identify and remove spiritual footholds in a living space, and argues—concretely and pastorally—that the Church’s tradition of blessing and consecration is not superstition, but pastoral common sense. If you are working with people in recovery—or serving a congregation that has never been given a framework for this territory—the guide was written for precisely that situation. Because sometimes the most pastoral thing the Church can offer is not a new theory, but an old tool placed back into the hands of people who need it. Image: https://www.freepik.com/ 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] |
