Lutherans - Always on the Cutting Edge

Heard an interesting story on MPR this morning, about the changing face of Lutheranism. The story is about an exhibit at the U of M's Immigration History Research Center, that looks into how Lutheran churches are reaching out to the immigrant communities around them - and some are offering services in different languages.

According to curator Allison Adrian:

"My world really does not look like Lake Wobegon," she says, so she wondered, "Why is the stereotype still out there? So I decided to investigate Lutheranism and drove around looking for Lutheran churches that did not fit that Scandinavian, white mold and they were surprisingly easy to find."

Amen to that - the older I get the more tired I am of Lake Wobegone. It's charming, but - - enough already.

One big change - besides services in different languages - involves the music:

"The immigrant congregations have services that run from two to three hours," she says. "They actually want to sing for a much longer period of time than the older Lutheran congregations want to. So music is really at the heart of the tensions that exist around these cultural changes in the church."

This reminds me of my father's stories of having to attend services almost that long - conducted in Norwegian. The problem with those services, according to my Dad, wasn't the singing (wasn't much of that), but the incredibly long prayers, and fire-and-brimstone services.

It's not just Lutherans though, several churches around here (one Baptist, and the other non-denominational) hold services in different languages, in this case Korean and Japanese. I believe some of these instances are actually other congregations using the space of the larger, more established church.

Another link here.