You wrote:
How do we maintain the richness of our Lutheran heritage and the power of God’s Word in a society where people are “paralyzed by choice?”

The choices available today are nothing compared to the choices that existed in the Roman Empire in the first century AD. Having just finished writing a novel about that period, I can tell you that if you think things are bad now, you should do a bit of research on the world that Jesus entered. At least our culture is nominally Christian. Polytheism was so prevalent in the ancient world that the few monotheists who existed (such as the Jews) were suspected by many of being crypto-atheists. Religion was thought to be a quid pro quo relationship with the deity (I sacrifice to Thou; Thou gives me what I ask for); there was no concept of grace, and morality was not central to religion: worship and sacrifice were. It was left to philosophies such as Stoicism (which was extremely popular) and Epicureanism to provided moral guidelines. While men and women were often intensely devoted to their favorite gods and goddeses (somewhat similar to the way some Catholics are dedicated to their favorite saints), this devotion expressed itself more in good habits of sacrifice and participation in the god’s rituals than in strict adherence to any moral principles. Every pagan city in the first century had its own gods and temples, and pagan altars were everywhere: in the marketplace, the woods, by streams, in open fields. Every household and tavern had small altars dedicated to the various pagan gods. The biggest religious sanctuary in the world was in Ephesus and was dedicated to a goddess: Diana. Tradition states that Timothy was murdered by pagans because of hsi objections to their worship of the goddess Diana. And yet, in this overwhelmingly pagan world, within a few short centuries, a very small sect devoted to Jesus was to grow into the official religion of the Roman empire. Paganism would become almost nonexistent in Europe by the first millennium except for a few hard-to-reach outposts in Scandinavian countries (there was still human sacrifice being offered there to pagan gods until the late middle ages).

As far as marketing goes – well, for one thing, I am still waiting for the Lutheran Confessions to appear as an ipod app- and the hymnal, and the works of Luther, and the prayers, and the catechism, TLSB, and the– well, you get the idea. Everyone under the age of thirty relies on their ipod and cellphone the way older generations rely on their daily newspaper, radio, and tv. A quick search on itunes reveals that even the Mormons have a “one app does it all” item for sale: scriptures, calendars, hymnbooks, commentaries, talks, manuals, etc. I wonder when we will catch up.

Looking at all the post and the replies is very eye opening to what the evangelism field faces. I see there are a lot of struggling Ethiopian Eunuchs. They are all seeking (even if they wouldn’t admit it) and some may even have the scriptures under their noses, but they don’t get it because they haven’t had the law and gospel really explained to them, one on one. We like to think a big marketing scheme is the way to go, because it is easier on us. But it’s just going to get lost in the clammor of the market place. Rather, we ought to be praying for and encouraging a lot more faithful Phillips/Phillipas to get the message out. How many of us have friends just like those posters and never share with them, one on one, because we’d rather just have a big marketing scheme?

I know that my Christian faith is not the result of a choice that I made. I was made a Christian in baptism when I was a week or two old. I suppose I could choose to leave the faith, but Christ, in his great mercy, holds us close through word and sacrament.

I think Adam does a good job of spelling out the “comparative religion” path to agnosticism; and I think he speaks for many. My approach in conversation with someone like this is ask “but what if it is true?” What if Christ really rose from the dead? What if he is who he said he is? What if he confirmed himself as the Son of God and confirmed the scriptures that were written before and after his birth as true?

If these claims are true, then we need to deal with the implications. Our faith is not the result of “believing what you know ain’t true” (pace Twain). It is, at least in part, our reaction to events that we know are true. This is the faith that St. Thomas clearly confesses based on the evidence before him.

This is the problem of modernity in general: choice. In a pre-modern society there may have been “choices” but individuals weren’t really confronted with the burden of choice, in part because the “individual” was not yet the primary locus of identity. That doesn’t happen until the modern period. Identity in terms of home, occupation, family decisions, and religion were all largely pre-determined by the community from birth for pre-modern people. The rise of the subjective individual in the modern era, and the consequent added burden of individual choice, have made anxiety and a sense of dislocation a hallmark of modernity. The burden of creating your own identity – even existence – is enormous (especially on my college students!). My theologian husband would probably talk about this as the idolatry of autopoesis. As Oswald Bayer notes, the need to create your identity through conscious individual choice means the individual is constantly bombarded with the necessity of self-justification against the world. To such individuals drowning in the sea of choice and crushed under self-justification, the Good News that God has justified us without any choice on our part can be quite freeing, I believe – perhaps even in a way it was not to those in the pre-modern world.
Bethany Kilcrease

It may be true that there were a lot of religious “options” in Jesus’ day, too, but I suspect that these things still ran in families. You didn’t just shop for a new deity for fun the way that we do in today’s consumerist, detached-from-the-past society.

Maybe we just need to abandon the language of “choice” altogether, popular as it is. People don’t really choose convictions of any sort; they are convicted by what they are convicted of. For people to speak of looking for a religion to choose misses the point, as though faith were all about picking vanilla vs. chocolate.

I agree with Jonathan that we need to stop assuming that marketing schemes and technology will do all our work for us. People don’t *just* want a website telling them what to believe (useful as that can be)– they have that in spades. They want a person to look at who cares what they’re going through, and cares enough about what they themselves believe to want to share it.

The stories on that post also reinforce the importance of families teaching their own children well. Families of mixed religions are naturally going to give younger people the impression that religion is a choice, and a not-too-important one at that.

Jmark, your post was very enlightening. Thank you.

The mark of an effective church/sect/religion/philosophy has less to do with how it makes a person feel or how effectively it is marketed and more to do with how people perceive truth. No matter how happy a fairy-tale is, people don’t form religions around them if they think that the story is merely a fairy-tale. Likewise, truth that hurts is believed, not because it makes the believer happier, but because truth has its own quiet power. The challenge facing Christians as pilgrim missionaries is that of showing what they believe in word and deed, and in showing the essential truth of their beliefs. For if our beliefs are not true, we may as well free ourselves to search for a truer or more liberating view of things.

Evidently the Holy Spirit brings people to faith in different ways. A friend of mine was driven by compelling philosophical questions that only the Christian faith provided answers for. Some people have been influenced by that “something different” they see in a particular believer and want whatever that is. Others are drawn by the warmth and authenticity they find in a Christian community. Still others experience an explicable spiritual hunger that only Jesus satisfies.

One might characterize the answer to the question about what ultimately causes us to believe as descriptive. The answer to the question of how best to reach out might be characterized, on the other hand, as prescriptive. Dwelling on the descriptive side of conversion seems to invite passivity, whereas dwelling on the prescriptive side seems to invite misguided reliance on technique. But God choses to work through us.

It has been said that “people don’t care about how much you know until they know about how much you care”. I am inclined to agree that an effective witness is about caring, about being prepared to explain why you care, and about recognizing opportunities to help others connect with the ultimate answer to what ails us. It might start with simply picking up the phone.