My name is Mark, and I’ve been a Christian a lot longer than I’ve been a Lutheran. I was born to Presbyterian parents, I was baptized as an infant, and grew up taking for granted the basic framework of beliefs that confessional Christians believe. My family moved us to a Baptist church for my high school years, and then I went to a Christian liberal arts college that was, once again, pretty much a mainstream evangelical institution.
The trouble for me was twofold: first, I never had the experience that many Christians report of being able to see or feel God’s hand in their lives. Certainly I could never see that I was becoming a better or more faithful Christian; my capacity for sin lived on unabated. Second, I was aware that I was in Christian institutions that excelled at making the lives of fellow Christians miserable for reasons that were not very sound. I did not want to be part of something that was demonstrably ruining people’s lives. So, without necessary losing belief, I came close to it. Certainly I reached a point where I no longer believed there was much reason to associate with other Christians in such institutions.
By the grace of God, however, I had to take a course in Christian doctrine, and that class was taught by Dr. Rod Rosenbladt (now retired from Concordia College Irvine). For me, the introduction to the Lutheran way of understanding Christian faith was life-changing and life-giving. For the first time, I grasped that it really didn’t matter whether I had some sort of life-changing experience or not. What matters is what Christ did on the cross, and then His rising from the dead, defeating sin and death and cloaking me with His righteousness. My own righteousness was then and continues to be simply rotten: I do not love the Lord my God with all my heart, nor love my neighbor as myself. If it were up to me, I would be dead in sin. Being pointed to Christ’s work as what matters, as Luther himself had grasped, changed my understanding of my Christian faith entirely. That is something I have only ever heard consistently from Lutheran pulpits. Since I need it every day of my life, and I need to hear it constantly, that is why I am a Lutheran Christian.