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The church is not renewed when one pastor tries to do the work of the whole body. The church is renewed when Christ’s body begins to act like a body again.
I received a phone call from my brother. I could tell he was exhausted. It sounded like he had been crying. Instinctively, I asked if everyone was okay. He responded, “I need your help.” This was not what I was expecting, especially from my brother who is a house contractor. I responded, “What’s going on?”
He proceeded to tell me that the retirement house he was building for my parents had hit a snag because my dad’s body was giving out after a lifetime of work. My dad’s knees had no cartilage left. His hip barely held in place. As the project wore on, so too did his body. He came to the place where he was building while walking with a cane. At that point, my brother had to carry most of the load. Unfortunately, they got to a place where they could not go forward with just the two of them. They needed another person. They needed me to fly to them and help finish the job.
When Mark Mattes and I wrote that the future of Lutheranism belongs to builders, the article received more attention than we expected. Much of the attention was encouraging. Some of it was critical. And many needed us to explain the metaphor further, especially because people interpreted the metaphor as a call for a new generation of heroic, lone-ranger pastors who will rescue Lutheranism through force of personality, programming, or entrepreneurial charisma.
It is the opposite. No one can build alone. That’s what my brother instinctively knew when he called me on the phone. Unfortunately, that is what many churches have forgotten.
To be a pastor is to have a real and necessary calling to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, forgive sins, and care for the flock. That calling is not optional nor replaceable. A church without the word and sacraments is not a church.
Somewhere along the way, we have convinced ourselves that the pastors are the only ones who build. That is fatal because the church is not a one-person construction job. It is not a private workshop where the pastor disappears into the garage and emerges with a finished congregation. It is more like a job site. There is a foundation, materials, a plan, purpose, and a crew. There are people with different gifts, different tools, different strengths, different experiences, and different responsibilities. The work requires coordination, collaboration, and a common vision. In other words, the church needs a community of people who are dedicated to the life and formation of the congregation.
That is the part we need to explain further. To say that Lutheranism needs builders is not to turn pastors into CEOs or to baptize corporate strategy and call it mission. The gospel does not depend on our capacity to innovate. Christ builds his church (Matt. 16:18). The Word does what the Word promises to do.
But because Christ gives his church real gifts, he also calls real people into participation. The body of Christ is not a metaphor for spectatorship. Eyes see, hands serve, mouths confess. The whole body is involved.
St. Paul understood this when he wrote, “For the body does not consist of one member but of many… The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor. 12:12-27). The body is not strengthened when one member tries to become the whole body. The body is strengthened when each member receives its place from Christ and works for the good of the whole.
That is why the builder metaphor must not be heard as a call for heroic pastors to save the church. That would miss the point entirely. A pastor is not the whole body. The body has many members.
Luther saw this clearly in his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility. Here, he appeals to Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 to say that Christians are “all one body of Christ, the Head, all members one of another.” Then he makes the crucial distinction: there is no higher spiritual class of Christians, only different offices and different work. Laypeople and pastors are not different kinds of Christians. They are members of one body, under one Head.
The church is not renewed when one pastor tries to do the work of the whole body. The church is renewed when Christ’s body begins to act like a body again. Pastors preach. Parents teach their children. Musicians carry the faith in song. Members visit and encourage one another. Teachers catechize. People use their many gifts to support the community. And when this happens, the grieving are consoled, the young are formed, the weary are strengthened, and the gospel is spoken from pulpit to pew, table to bedside, and the sanctuary to the workplace.
I learned from my dad that to build a house, you cannot simply admire a blueprint and call it a home. You cannot preach a foundation into place or wish walls to stand upright. Someone must measure, cut, carry, frame, clean up the mess, and know what comes next. My dad did not build alone. He always had a crew.
A pastor may preach faithfully, but if no one helps create a culture where the preached Word is discussed, remembered, prayed, and carried into homes, then the work is weakened. A pastor may teach confirmation, but if parents, sponsors, grandparents, and mentors do not also help young people inhabit the faith, then catechesis becomes a class rather than a way of life. A pastor may call the church to hospitality, but if no one opens a table, or befriends the lonely, then hospitality remains an idea. The church needs pastors who are part of a crew.
That means the builder metaphor is not mainly about personality, but stewardship, community, and even strategy. This is where Lutherans get nervous because strategy can become a substitute for theology. Metrics can become idols. The church can begin to measure itself by social media likes instead of by changed lives. When that happens, strategy is not helping the church, it is deforming it.
There is, of course, a biblical warning hidden inside the building metaphor. The builders can reject the stone. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Ps. 118:22). That means we are not free to build whatever seems useful, impressive, or successful to us. The church is not built by rejecting Christ in the name of preserving the institution. Nor is it built by making Christ merely a stone in a structure of our own design. Christ is the cornerstone, the foundation, and the Lord of the church. So the question is not whether Christians build. The question is whether we are being built upon Christ, or whether we are trying to build without him.
The abuse of strategy does not eliminate the need for it, though. All builders have plans. They know what they are building and the materials they need. They also know that the foundation is most important because the walls are set by it. Jesus said, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (Luke 14:28). They also know that every project cannot be controlled. Weather changes, materials are delayed, people get sick. Sometimes unexpected things happen. So builders adjust, but they do not stop building.
Congregations need this kind of theological strategy. They don’t need gimmicks or frantic relevance, but a clear understanding of what God is building through us. This forces us to ask the hardest question because if we are honest, our congregations are more organized around maintenance than mission, nostalgia than formation, pastoral performance than the shared life of the baptized.
It is helpful to remember that our faith has always been filled with builders. Think about the Reformation. Luther was indispensable, but he was not alone. His preaching and writing moved through a faculty, students, printers, readers, pastors, princes, households, and congregations. The spread of the early Reformation traveled through letters, visits, students, trade routes, and cities. The Reformation spread not only because Luther spoke, but because a whole ecology of people and practices carried what was spoken.
Luther’s writings did not float through Europe by magic. They were printed, purchased, translated, debated, sung, and shared. The Reformation was theological, but it was also embodied. It had presses and pamphlets, pulpits and tables, schools and households. It required people who carried the gospel into ordinary life. That is what building looks like.
Unfortunately, we too often are curators who retell the Reformation as though it were the story of one brave monk standing alone before the powers of the age. Yes, Luther stood his ground and said, “Here I stand.” Yes, that moment required courage, clarity, and an uncompromising faith. But Luther was not the only one standing. Beside him were coworkers, printers, pastors, princes, scholars, musicians, translators, teachers, mothers, fathers, and congregations. In other words, Luther had a crew.
This is where Paul’s image of the body gives a deeper theological account of what building looks like. The church is not an audience gathered around a religious performer. Nor is it a loose association of spiritual consumers. It is the body of Christ. The members do not have the same function, but they belong to one another. Just as the eye needs the ear, the preacher needs the congregation. The pastor cannot be the whole church. Pastors need a crew.
Even contemporary studies of learning help us see what Paul already knew. People are formed by participation in communities of practice. They learn not only by receiving information, but by joining a people with shared language, habits, stories, rituals, hopes, and loves. That is true in families, trades, and in congregations.
A child does not learn the faith merely because the pastor once explained it correctly. A young adult does not inherit the Lutheran faith merely because the catechism was assigned. A congregation is not renewed merely because a mission statement was drafted. People are formed as they are drawn into a living body that prays, sings, confesses, forgives, teaches, suffers, serves, and hopes together.
The future of Lutheranism belongs to builders because the truth of the gospel is always carried by people. The Word creates faith, and by that Word Christ gathers a body. That body has many members. And those members are given to one another for the sake of the whole.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves inheriting institutions built by people who knew how to work together, and yet we often find ourselves isolated. Pastors feel alone. Parents feel alone. Young adults feel alone. Smaller congregations feel alone. Lay leaders feel under-equipped. Members feel unsure where they fit. Everyone senses that something needs to be built, but too many are standing around wondering who is supposed to pick up the tools.
Part of our task now is to say clearly: you are needed. The future of Lutheranism will not be built by pastors alone. Nor will it be built without pastors. It will be built by churches that recover the courage to become crews again. We need pastors preaching Christ, parents speaking forgiveness in the home, and musicians who understand hymnody as sung theology. We need teachers who love doctrine and young adults who ask hard questions and refuse shallow answers. We need retirees who become mentors. We need artists, cooks, coaches, writers, farmers, nurses, and students who understand that their lives belong to Christ and that their gifts belong to the body.
The church is not renewed when everyone watches the pastor work harder. The church is renewed when the gospel frees people to receive Christ and serve the neighbor. Without this freedom, all the talk of building will collapse into another law. The church does not live because we build. The church lives because Christ is risen. We build because Christ is risen. We build because the gospel is true. We build because Christ, the rejected stone who has become the cornerstone, keeps gathering living stones into his house.
So let’s build. Not as curators of a fading religious past. Not as demolition crews who know only what they oppose. Not as religious contractors trying to improve upon Christ’s foundation. Let’s build as crews gathered by grace, forgiven by Christ, and given to one another.
Because when Christ is the cornerstone, the crew can get to work.
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