Law and Gospel

We are certainly at a point in the history of this country where things are rapidly changing.  Many now say we are in this so called "post modern" era.  Movements that have come about on account of this era as far as the church is concerned include the emergent and missional movements.  Both movements are something that make the stomachs of most Lutherans churn, and a part from a Lutheran concept of these movements, it should make Lutherans stomachs churn.  But what about when we apply our understanding of what it means to be Lutheran, in the larger church catholic, to these ideas of being emergent and missional.  For me, I am more concerned and interested in the Missional aspect.  Why I believe the missional movement does not work, at least faithfully, is because it embraces the anything goes notion of post modernism and waters down the church to obtain the objective of bringing people "back" to the church.  

I feel as though it ought to be the responsibility of Lutherans to embrace the missional aspect and apply our being Lutheran to it.  Being Lutheran, the problems with these anything goes movements is we identify our leaders/elders/pastors as those rightly called to faithfully administer the sacraments and preach the Word.  Our understanding of preaching the Word and seeing scripture in the Law/Gospel dichotomy is exactly what evangelicalism and the missional movement need.  Even non Lutherans such as Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, authors of the book unChristian recognize the need for such a balance, they just didn't know to call it Law/Gospel.  Recently reading the book on a plane I picked up on this, "The real problem comes when we recognize God's holiness but fail to articulate the other side of his character: grace.  Jesus represents truth plus grace (see John 1:14).  Embracing truth, without holding grace in tension leads to harsh legalism, just as grace without truth devolves into compromise" (Kinnaman, 36).  How profound for non Lutherans!  They recognize the failings of the evangelical community has been a law based Gospel and not a beautiful truth/grace or Law/Gospel dichotomy like Lutherans understand.  

At the very same time however, I feel it has been the failings of the Lutheran church to not be missional.  Overly defensive of our traditions we let the hairs on our backs stand straight up as though we are being cornered.  How do people come to faith?  We cannot go into the streets and offer the sacraments to unbelievers, so saying that as long as we just faithfully administer the sacraments we are doing our job is not entirely accurate.  Administering the sacraments is a very important aspect of the job of the rightfully called and ordained, but the world, the lost, cannot hear us from behind closed doors.  The sacraments are to bring faith, that is already there, and sustain it because they are God's means of grace.  A missional Lutheran can drive evangelicalism out of business by faithfully proclaiming Law/Gospel and explaining what grace actually means and having been brought into the church by God Himself, we faithfully preach and administer the sacraments.  I guess what I'm trying to say is we should embrace this movement and tackle its failings with being Lutheran instead of allowing our own queezyness with vocabulary to highlight our own failings of not going out into the four corners of the world and proclaiming the message of Christ.  That is what being Ablaze! is about.