Day 1 – Seven Marks Society Convocation

It is 11:55pm, and I am just getting back to my hotel room from the “meeting after the meeting.” As Bp. Paull Spring noted in his greeting from Lutheran CORE, it was good tonight to be part of a worship service in the broader church in which you could engage wholeheartedly, where you could pray with the assurance that the worship leader (Rev. Cathy Ammlung, STS) would use hymns and liturgy rooted in the plain meaning of Scripture interpreted as the Apostles had taught the Church to do so. Though we met in a conference room, gathered around tables rather than in a sanctuary designed for the celebration of liturgy, I had the impression that Peter, James, Paul, and John would have been perfectly at home amidst the singing and prayers of our opening worship service.

Tonight’s business was primarily debating the language of the Constitution on which we will vote tomorrow. As always when your are constituting an organization, words are important, for the documents we adopt tomorrow will have the potential to both guide or limit, empower or hamstring us in the years to come. The discussion was substantive, and I look forward to seeing what kind of fruit it will bear tomorrow.

I think the most exciting part about tonight’s meeting for me personally was the greetings we received. Because of the Archbishop was out of the country, another bishop of the Anglican Church of North America brought us an extended greeting, pointing out the close ties between Lutherans and Anglicans, saying “If ever there was an ecumenical relationship made in heaven, it is ours.” This assured me that whatever the future holds, we will not be going it alone, and that taking the stand we are taking on the issue of faithfulness to the Bible aligns us more, not less, closely with the vast majority of the world's Christians. Also Bp. Bogonza, head of 5+ million member Lutheran Church of Tanzania, was with us, which I found very humbling. If I was tempted to think what we were doing here was insignificant simply because the initial number of participants tonight was so few, his presence disabused me of that notion. God is doing something profound, something that other Christians around the world are paying attention to, and it is a humbling (but thrilling) experience to be part of it.

Have to be up in a little less than six hours, so time for bed. I look forward to having more meat for you to chew on tomorrow.