Going Over the Rhine

An admirer of C.S. Lewis once remarked to him, “The world needs more Christian writers like yourself.” The Oxford don replied something to the effect of, “With all due respect, madam, the world doesn’t need more Christian writers. What the world needs are more writers who are Christians.”

Lewis’ statement pretty much sums up my attitude toward Contemporary Christian Music. While I recognize the need for (and I certainly enjoy) Praise Music, I’m one of those who doesn’t really want to spend much time listening to Contemporary Christian Music (the Christian music I listen to on the stereo tends to have been written by dead white men prior to the 18th century).

But what gets me excited is hearing Christian influence in contemporary music, usually (but not always) by a contemporary artist who happens to be a Christian. At their best, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Flannery O’Conner were writers whose Christian themes were nearly invisible to the wonderful stories they told.

In contemporary music, I have long been a fan of Bono and U2, John Fahey, T. Bone Burnet, Bruce Cockburn, Bob Dylan, Maria Muldaur, Michelle Shocked, Gillian Welch, and Johnny Cash for their constant references to the Good News (both subtle and not so) in contemporary music. Their lives as Christians infuse their work, indwell it even, but in a way that can be absorbed by non-believers. That may be the only way many will ever hear the Gospel.

I also find the best Christian news reporting not on FOX News, or CBN, but on what must seem like a very unlikely place: National Public Radio. Again, much of the news reporting on All Things Considered and Morning Edition is the result of news producers whose worldview is profoundly Christian, that can be delivered to a non-Christian audience in a way that they can hear, and perhaps can even be touched through. As I write this, NPR is doing a long story on a revival of roots gospel music. The name of Jesus, and the story of his Grace, is filling the cabins of Volvos across America! It was on NPR that I first heard of Over the Rhine, Moby, Innocence Mission, and Gillian Welch, as well as the powerfully Christian contemporary classical compositions of Arvo Part, and the avant-garde composer Gavin Bryars’s stunning “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet”.

A contemporary band that I have been listening to a lot lately is one that falls into this category. Clearly Christian thematically, their records were released at first on the alternative IRS label, and now on Virgin Records, where they are securely placed in the Alt Rock bins at record stores. The band is called “Over the Rhine,” named for an old German immigrant area of Cincinnati that is now a typically mid-west inner city neighborhood. Good stuff, check ‘em out. I heartily recommend their latest album, “Ohio”.

Perhaps one of the reasons I like Over the Rhine is because their name sort of describes where I find myself now…I have sailed down the Thames and gone over the Rhine. In an odd sort of double homecoming, I have left Anglicanism for Lutheranism.

This world is not my home.
It’s a double homecoming in that there is an element of a return to my family’s German heritage, although we weren’t Lutheran. The best I can tell from my limited genealogical research, my paternal forebears were Bavarian Anabaptists who were persecuted by the Roman Church there and driven to northern Germany, where the Lutherans happily took up the task of persecuting my people until they fled to America. A journey from 18th Century German Migrant Anabaptists to 19th Century American Frontier Baptists and 20th Century Methodists, eventually led to Anglicanism in the 1940s as my parents became the first Episcopalians in the Summer (formerly Schoemner) Family Tree. But this branch of the Summer family begins the 21st Century looking out from Wittenberg Castle (as opposed to Canterbury Cathedral).

The reasons for the change were many. First and foremost was the Episcopal Church’s attitude toward Holy Scripture. The Faith that led Anglicanism’s founders to burn at the stake, has been forsaken for the Zeitgeist of the culture. Holy Scripture has gone from being a pillar of Anglicanism to being a flexible, plastic, ever-changeable collection of wise sayings, myths, and anachronistic advice. God’s Word has been rejected, and replaced with Man’s Wisdom.

While pockets of orthodoxy remain within the Episcopal Church (including our former church home), the denomination as a whole has adopted and tolerated beliefs that have been considered heretical by the Christian Church since its foundation. The “siege mentality” of some orthodox parishes, as well as the leaven of the Pharisees often found in many conservative congregations, proves to be a poor corrective for the leaven of the Sadducees found in the revisionist congregations. Faced with this undeniable abandonment of the Faith Recieved, we found ourselves in the unfortunate position of not being able to invite someone to go to our own church. The blood of fellowship had become poisoned. As a Christian who takes Jesus' Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) seriously, if you can't recommend a church to a seeker, then you can't trust yourself to be in fellowship with that church. After more than a decade of not being able to effectively tell the Good News of Jesus because our time was consumed with fighting the orthodoxy wars inside the Episcopal Church (and trying to reform it), the voice of Jesus in Luke 9:59-60 suddenly rang clear. Faithfulness to our Lord Jesus Christ required us to leave.

Another reason for ending up in the Lutheran Camp was my reading “Thomas Cranmer: A Life”, by Diarmaid MacCulloch. While I had long admired Cranmer’s delicate and diplomatic attempts to bring reform to the Church of England, I was unaware just how close his connections to Lutheranism were, including the new-to-me fact that Cranmer’s wife (married in secret while he was still a Roman Catholic) was the daughter of one of Martin Luther’s close associates. The realization that my beloved Book of Common Prayer owed so much to Luther was very enlightening…and comforting.

So we had to leave the Episcopal Church, but we didn't want to abandon the Incarnational Eucharistic Theology by which I was ushered into Jesus’ arms, and we certainly weren’t going to Rome and its sacerdotal heresy (not to mention its resulting tolerance for clerical pedophilia and homosexual predators). The Orthodox Churches were off our list for being not the least bit evangelical. The obvious choice was Lutheranism.

But having been burned, we knew that it couldn’t just be any kind of Lutheran Church. It was going to have to be the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church that would become our new home, not because it was perfect and without error, but because its errors were if anything, overly conservative by nature. The LC-MS could be a church we could invite anyone to attend anywhere, safe in the knowledge that they would hear the Gospel, even if occasionally in an overly Law-bound environment.

A safe framework to work within.
We began visiting LC-MS churches, sampling their preaching, teaching, liturgy, and fellowship. We also kept attending an inner-city African American church, where we were fed by the preaching and the Spirit-filled worship. Unfortunately, they weren’t a serious candidate for our membership because it was a Methodist church…and Methodism is in a death race with the Episcopal Church…and because, while we were warmly greeted each time we went, they never contacted us, or added us to their mailing list even after repeated requests.

The waitress at the coffee shop where my men’s prayer group meets overheard me talk about our search, and suggested we visit her church. “Which one is that?” I asked. “Bethel Lutheran”, she replied (Bethel was the local LC-MS church, just around the corner from the coffee shop). “Thanks, Jill, but we tried it. It was nice, but it wasn’t what we are looking for. Too locked in to traditional worship”, I replied. We had indeed been there, but it showed no signs of being the kind of church we could invite the unchurched and under-churched to, much less did it appear to be the kind of church that would be interested in running an Alpha Course.

“You didn’t come to our 9:30 service, did you?” she asked. No, we hadn’t. “That’s our contemporary worship service. You ought to give it a try.” I had never been invited to church by a Missouri Synod Lutheran before, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The following Sunday, my wife and I somewhat reluctantly went back up to Bethel for the 9:30 service. The Praise Team was awesome: keyboard, several guitars, drumset, a mandolin, a flute, a clarinet, and amazingly, a Lutheran pastor playing congas. So far, so good, we thought.

The contemporary liturgy was great, with passages taken from Eugene Peterson’s contemporary paraphrase of the bible, “The Message.” The sermon was excellent, and true to Lutheran form, it contained the necessary ingredients of both bad news and Good News (“First the Law, and then the Gospel, that’s how we’re taught.” one of the pastors later explained to me). Then the Praise Team closed with a lively closing hymn. My wife turned and looked at me, and we both smiled and nodded.

We had found our new home, a safe haven from which to tell the world, the nation, the city, and the neighborhood about the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ.

We knew we were home free...Free Grace, that is.

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© 2004 pmsummer