In his book, A New and Right Spirit , Tom Barger tells the story of Abiding Hope Lutheran Church in Littleton, Colorado. This congregation shapes its life by the basic premise that "the church is the community formed out of what God did on Easter morning." They believe the main task before the church in this time of cultural transition, confusion and opportunity is to recover its authentic story.

So, they are a community that is learning to hear everything that happens through the story of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. They are learning to let their life together be governed by that story. Each decision is filtered through the question: "What does this have to do with God raising Jesus Christ from the dead?" If it has nothing to do with God raising Jesus from the dead, they do not fool with it.

They had been operating that way for a few years when, one day, two boys walked into Columbine High School in their community and went on a shooting rampage. The congregation was what disaster response experts called a "ground-zero congregation." Their people were deeply affected by the deaths and by the shock that gripped the community.

Some time after the shootings, those disaster response experts told them that, according to their experience with such events, the congregation could expect that all of the pastors and key caregivers in "ground-zero congregations" would have moved on from the community within two years after the shootings.

Almost all the mainline ground-zero congregations in the community fulfilled those expectations. This congregation did not. Five years after the shootings, someone came to them and tried to find out why they did not fit the pattern. The difference was attributed to the congregation's "spiritual authenticity." They were deeply anchored in the story of Jesus Christ crucified and risen. They believed it to be true. They were using the core texts of the Bible richly. They were enacting the ancient rituals of the church in ways that dealt authentically with the reality of the shootings. Those texts and rituals enabled the people to live out the unshakable hope and promise of the Christian gospel.

In the worship service which was held in the wake of the shootings, the congregation didn't offer any quick-fix for the pain. They didn't try to fill the "huge aching holes" in people's hearts. They left all the self-help and grief process techniques to others. All they had to offer was the story of Jesus who had also died an awful death and yet was now present with them, raised from the dead. Through prayers, hymns and reflections, they looked death in the face, named the reality for what it was and offered it to God. Afterwards, Pastor Barger remarked that, on the surface, nothing had changed. The dead were still dead; the community was still grieving; they were still facing the long road toward healing and new hope. Nevertheless, they knew that they had been met by God in the midst of all that. This God was forming a new creation among them and within them. That gave them strength and courage and grace to go on.

We may never have to minister in the midst of the kind of horrific event that Barger's congregation faced. However, it is the work of the church to witness to the hope of the Gospel in situations of despair. In worship, we learn to see the events of our world through the lens of God's grace that brings life out of death. Sunday by Sunday God gathers us into worship and the Spirit shapes us by stories of God acting in situations that look hopeless, redeeming evil and creating new life. Those stories become our story through the words and symbols and actions of the liturgy.

Recovering the centrality of the sacraments

Many of us were raised in a time when words, in the form of sermons, hymns and prayers were expected to do most of the work of drawing us into the redeeming work of God in our own time and place. However, coincident with the prominence postmodernism gives to experience and symbols, many congregations have begun to recover the centrality of the sacraments in worship. The celebration of communion, especially, has undergone changes that make the symbols stronger. Congregations are including communion in their regular worship services more frequently, with little white cubes of bread giving way to large loaves made of whole grains (sometimes baked by someone in the congregation) and the wine or juice poured more visibly into the chalice. The aim is to draw us more fully into the grace and hope that God offers us through Jesus' death and resurrection.

Time to reconsider baptism

The time has come to reconsider our practice of baptism as well. Through baptism, we are engrafted into the community that lives by Christ's dying and being raised. We become part of a baptized people who have promised to practice dying to self and to our own agenda so that we may be raised to new life in Christ and to God's agenda for the world. Through that discipline, or practice, the Holy Spirit forms and transforms us into a people who can speak hope to the world's pain and despair. Vitality and authenticity in the church's mission is rooted in its recovery of the radical claims of baptism and its call to discipleship.

Arlo Duba has encouraged congregations to recover baptism's missional focus by making the baptismal font more visible in their worship services. In the December 2001 issue of Reformed Worship magazine (http://www.reformedworship.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=1099), he makes a number of suggestions for doing so:

• Have the worship leader lead the prayer of confession from the font. Have water in the font and, while the assurance of pardon is being said, lift the water and let if fall back visibly and audibly.
• Lead the recitation of the Apostles' Creed from the font. This was the historic baptismal creed of the church.
• Issue calls to commitment, service or stewardship from the font, connecting these calls with the calling given to us in baptism
• Include renewal of baptism vows for the whole congregation when new members are received, at confirmation services and with installation of leaders.
• Include in funeral services some reference to the promises and actions of baptism.

As our congregations navigate their way through our culture's chaotic and confusing transition from one age to the next, it becomes critically important that we remember whose we are, who we are and what we are called to do. The recovery of our baptismal identity will keep us rooted in God who claims us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and who calls and forms us to be hope in our world.