If you’re tired of reading about Salem Lutherans this year, I’m not surprised. With 2017 marking the 500th Anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation and the denominational school, Salem’s own Roanoke College, marking its 175th, events celebrating this heritage have been frequent, so you’ll have to pardon this lover of church history.
In addition, a new bishop, Robert Humphrey of Harrisonburg, will succeed retiring Jim Mauney next month. Offices of the synod are in Salem.
Tradition has it that Dr. Martin Luther, a monk in the Order of St. Augustine in the Roman Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages in Germany, started the revolt against his own church. Supposedly Luther nailed a paper with 95 disputed statements of faith on the church door in the town of Wittenburg. Since the Catholic church of the time was closely tied to the government, this caused more than academic disagreements. The times and places were right for major change. Bloody wars resulted in some places. America 200 years later wanted no part of a government church.
Many of us have accepted this as fact. But like Scripture with its many interpretations, modern science has changed some of our assumptions. Attending part of the annual Power in the Spirit conference the Virginia Synod sponsors each July at the college, I enlarged my knowledge, especially on the great reformer – who never intended to be one.
Several hundred members of parishes affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) – not all local Lutheran congregations are part of this group, but that’s another story – drive to Salem for a 48-hour period of fellowship, worship and learning. They come from throughout much of the commonwealth. A few changes were evident this year with a young pastor, David Drebes, having taken over as coordinator. With children in his family, he and others wishing to draw younger people to a graying denomination scheduled some informal events and those in which little ones and their elders could join.
The older ones could join their parents in helping with a Habitat for Humanity house under construction while the other service project was packing personal toiletry kits for the homeless. Youth in the synod had their own projects.
The conference included two leaders from the national level. I was privileged, because of cancellation of another appointment, to hear the keynote address by the Rev. Dr. Timothy Wengert who had visited Virginia churches previously. A speaker with remarkable wit, it was he who told us at the opening session in Olin Hall that Luther couldn’t have nailed his questions for debate on the church door because nails were not available in 1517. Nor was there paper as we know it.
Documents intended for the public were affixed to the church door with wax, Wengert said among many other facts that have come to light in recent years. The invention of a primitive printing press by another German, Johannes Gutenberg, is often cited as a major reason the ideas of Luther and others spread fairly quickly within the nations of Northern Europe. Various expressions of Christian belief followed including the Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist and several Brethren “peace” churches.
Wengert taught at the Lutheran seminary in Philadelphia for nearly 25 years and said he knew some of the Virginia pastors as students. In his retirement years he travels widely interpreting Lutheran theology which he told his audience must always be seen as grounded in Jesus’ death on the cross. “Prosperity Gospel” in which some kind of riches are promised to believers is not the way of closeness to God, he asserted. Human beings are always in need of reforming. “On Our Way Reforming“ for another 500 years was the conference theme.
The second day of the conference I learned more about the development of the churches in Virginia. “Reformed and Reforming: 300 Years of Lutherans in Virginia” was led by the authors of a history covering the past 30 years. The Rev. Dr. James Utt, a Floyd county native who served a large Winchester parish for many years, and George Kegley, who, like me once was on the staff of the daily Roanoke newspaper, surveyed church growth from the first congregation, Hebron, at Madison County in the Blue Ridge Mountains to the present ELCA. Utt clearly described how many regional expressions of the denomination were merged in 1988 and have flourished as many programs were established to serve groups such as children from broken homes, the active and declining elderly, collegians and refugees.
That many in this group were senior adults like the two historians made for many interesting family connections, stories and recollections. Kegley, 89, with roots deep in the Wytheville area, and Utt associated with the strong Lutheran presence in the Shenandoah Valley reminded me of my own German ancestors there in Colonial times.