Preaching the Gospel in a Secular Land

Welcome to the third episode of Mockingbird’s preacher interview series. (See Eps. 1 and 2.) With so many debates around Christianity focused on high-level theological, political, and moral topics, we thought we would zoom in a little bit and discuss some of the more nitty gritty issues involved in being the church in specific contexts. To that end, we are interviewing some of our favorite ministers from around the country about what they’ve learned in the course of their careers as to what is really working in Christianity today and how to do church well. Our third interview is with longtime Mockingbird contributor, author, Lutheran pastor, and garlic-butter enthusiast, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson.

MB: Hey Sarah! So good to have you on. I know you recently moved back to the U.S. after pastoring a church in Japan. Where are you based these days?

SHW: I am in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where my in-laws live. My husband, Andrew, and I have been camping out here for a while, as we work on whatever the next thing is. I’m hoping I’ll actually have a job again sometime before the end of 2025.

MB: So, to begin, why don’t you give me an overview of the churches you’ve served?

SHW: Well, a lot of women have very atypical pastor/preacher experiences. I got ordained and started serving a church when I was doing my PhD at Princeton Seminary. It was a half-time call at a very dying Slovak American Church in Trenton, New Jersey. On a good day, we had like fourteen people, including me, my husband, my son, and the organist.

MB: Wow!

SHW: It was a very hard call. I was in over my head. It’s my own fault. I insisted that I was up to it, and I wasn’t. But that’s okay. The Lord does the alien work of teaching us our pride in painful ways. There were a lot of things going on there beyond my capacity to understand, much less fix. Anyway, I was there for just shy of two years. It did not end happily, and after that I thought I would never serve in a congregation again. I was so done with parish ministry.

Then speed forward to 2018. My husband was offered a position as Professor of Church History at Japan Lutheran College and Theological Seminary in Tokyo, Japan. And so we’re getting ready to move there as a missionary family, and then, my church body (ELCA) says, “Hey, Sarah, you’re ordained, and there’s an English-language ministry at Tokyo Lutheran Church that needs a pastor. Would you be open to serving?” And you can’t exactly say no as a missionary, much less an ordained one. So I was like, all right … I didn’t want to. I was not excited.

Strangely enough, the Lord knew what he was about. The next six and a half years that I served at Tokyo Lutheran Church were amazing, blessed, and very healing for me after the rough first call and my long absence from parish ministry. In that period of time, as a parish pastor in this English ministry in Tokyo, in one of the least Christian countries on earth, I would say I finally found my pastoral calling, and because it was just me — there are not many English speakers who can preach on a Sunday morning in Japan — I preached basically every Sunday for the whole time I was there.

MB: So what was the makeup of your congregation in Tokyo? How big was it?

SHW: There’s really a story arc over the six and a half years. When I got there, there had not been a native English-speaking pastor there for over a year. The senior pastor was Japanese, but it’s a lot. By Japan’s standards it is a large congregation. It absorbed more time and energy than he had, so he didn’t really have anything left over for the English ministry, just basically kept it going. The English congregation is a ministry of the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church. So when I got there it was pretty small and demoralized. We had maybe twenty people on a Sunday. And most of the people were Japanese Christians, who, for a variety of reasons, preferred to worship in English.

For my first year and a half there, it was really pretty small, and that was good because I was relearning how to be a pastor. And it gave me a lot of time with those people, to get to know them well and form a good bond of trust as I relearned my job. Then COVID hit. But we were only shut down entirely for three months, and then we started having in-person worship again. And over the year that followed, what happened is a lot of people started coming to church who had not been there before. Some of them were members of other English congregations in Tokyo that stayed shut a lot longer. They were looking for in-person worship, and within Japan, things were not nearly as locked down as they were in other parts of the world.

But then a number of people came to church who, I think, had not ever made a connection to church since they’d been living in Japan, and a lot of those were English-speaking foreigners, often married to Japanese — so they were long-term committed to Japan but had not yet found their church home or had not felt an urgent reason to “get right with their God.” Then, from that point onward, oddly enough, our congregation really took off. So, again by Japanese standards, when I left it was really a pretty good size, averaging maybe 50 people on a Sunday and sometimes quite a bit more. The average congregation size in Japan is 30, so that’s not bad. And we continued to have basically one third English-speaking Japanese Christians, one third native English speakers who are long-term in Japan — usually married to a Japanese spouse — and then maybe one third people more typical of an international congregation, transient students or workers on contract who would be in Japan for two to four years. Usually Lutheran, but not necessarily. Some just looking for an English-language worship home.

MB: Sounds like a fascinating place to work. I’m jumping ahead here, but what made you leave?

SHW: Well, Sunday mornings were the best part of the whole entire week, because I actually got to talk to other human beings.

Tokyo is an incredibly isolating and alienating city. It’s not just me. It’s not just foreigners. The level of loneliness in Japan is epic. High suicide rates. They have a phenomenon in Japan called Hikikomori, which is adults who just shut themselves in and do not come out again. They’re usually provided for by their parents. There are maybe between one or two million of them in Japan, which is staggering. But those are the people who actually go to the trouble of fully cutting themselves off from society. There are a lot of people who do some less extreme version of that. Japan has a very low marriage rate, very low birth rates. College students don’t have roommates, etc. All of which is to say that it’s a really hard place to live.

It doesn’t seem that way at first. Tourists love Japan because it’s super safe, super clean. Everything is labeled in English. It’s very easy to get around. But to live in Tokyo — I think the rest of Japan is somewhat different, though maybe not as far behind as one would like — it’s just really lonely. So that was kind of the internal reason we left. The external reason is that, due to the aforementioned demographic collapse, there are literally not enough eighteen-year-olds to go around anymore, and so the colleges are beginning to fold. Japan Lutheran College was one of the smaller ones to begin with, and it just literally could not recruit enough students, and so it had to shutter.

MB: That’s tough. So there were two different services at the church each Sunday?

SHW: Yeah, an English service at 10 a.m. and a Japanese service at 11 a.m., which also meant we had exactly 50 minutes for worship.

MB: Yikes!

SHW: Tokyo is a city that values efficiency; you got it even in the worship.

MB: So what did you fit into the service? What were the decisions you made about what was most important and how long to spend on each component? Did you do a Eucharist every Sunday?

SHW: Yes, I was happy about that. I inherited a weekly Communion service. Throughout the Lutheran world, you’ll find a range between weekly to monthly Communion. There are some places that are still quarterly, but with liturgical renewal, there’s definitely a trend toward more frequent Communion. It also depends on how big your congregation is. If you have 4,000 people every Sunday — like some church in Ethiopia — it’s kind of difficult to do weekly Communion.

Anyway, being Lutherans, we also always sang three hymns. We love hymns, and we have good hymns. The only request the congregation ever made of me liturgically was to choose singable hymns, and that was fine by me.

And then of course we would always have Prayers of the Church, a Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the usual Confession every Sunday, except for Easter season. I usually left out the Kyrie and the Gloria. We managed over time to fit a little bit more liturgical music back in. It would not be quite as full a liturgical service as you’d expect in a normal Lutheran, Episcopal, or Catholic Church, but pretty close. And then, I always gave myself ten to twelve minutes to preach.

MB: Ten minutes! That’s got to be tough, especially for you. Being a highly educated person who’s been in academia, I’m sure you love to explain things, get into the weeds, give your congregation a narrative that has time to unfold. And you really don’t have time to do that.

SHW: Well, you do, though. It’s always a matter of the decisions you make about preaching. We would always have the classic four scriptural lessons, but I would usually just focus on one. And not infrequently, I departed from the lectionary and had a preaching series through a book of the Bible. I did one series that I probably loved more than any other, which was putting the story of King Saul and the Apostle Saul/Paul in parallel with each other. So, if you’re thinking not just about a weekly sermon, but sermons, week after week after week, then it becomes much easier to preach shorter and more focused sermons each week.

I get the impression that a lot of preachers — okay, here’s my first bout of pontification — tend to think of each Sunday in isolation from all the others, which means it’s like driving a car by slamming on the brakes every 100 feet … Stop! Start! Stop! Start! You don’t get any momentum. So one of the things I did was to think in terms of the entire season — all of Advent, all of Lent, for example. During Lent, I realized we only ever preach on the Passion on maybe Palm Sunday, if you rename it Passion Sunday, and Maundy Thursday / Good Friday. That’s not nearly enough time to spend with the Passion of our Lord! So instead, every Lent I would start at basically the beginning of the Passion Week action in whichever Gospel — we did all four in the time I was there — so I could really spend a lot of time. And that, I felt, was much better preparation to bringing people finally into Holy Week. Of course, it’s very good to read the stories on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, but that doesn’t leave you much time to preach carefully through the story.

So thinking in terms of my preaching as not just this isolated sermon this Sunday for this amount of time, but part of a weekly rhythm that builds over time, that’s a big difference in being able to say what you need to say in ten to twelve minutes.

MB: We’re interested, obviously, in why churches grow, and while your church in Tokyo represents an unusual situation compared to a lot of the churches Mockingbird readers might be attending, I assume there’s some overlap. So what were some of the reasons you found for why new people would show up and then stick around?

SHW: There are a number of different points to tackle. One is, in terms of just going to church at all … basically, what happened in Tokyo is Jesus started whispering into people’s ear, “Go to church and read the Bible.” So they looked online for a church, found ours, and came to it. I know that sounds ridiculous and it’s clearly not actionable, because it’s up to Jesus. But, in as non-Christian a context as Japan is — where missions have worked so hard for so long with so little return on investment — my joke is that Jesus finally realized missions in Japan don’t work so he has to do it himself. So, all I can say is, pray for Jesus to speak to people who would never otherwise come to church and give them the boot through the door. Then be prepared to receive them properly when they get there.

But also, and this may be different in the U.S. where people think they know what Christianity is, don’t assume people actually know. The U.S. may be still-Christendom, may be post-Christendom — I’m not entirely convinced. If you live in a place as non-Christian as Japan, you’re struck by how incredibly Christian America is, even if they don’t know it. But on one level, people are Christian and think they’re Christian, but they actually have no idea what Christianity is. That has been my overwhelming insight. And coming back to the U.S. too, when you hear what people dismiss or disbelieve, I’m like “Cool, I dismiss and disbelieve that, too. But that isn’t actually what Christianity is or teaches.” So, coming into evangelistic conversations — which, earlier in life, made me super uncomfortable because everyone I knew was spoken for; I just assumed any evangelism was sheep stealing — now I realize that, first of all, people are less likely to belong to a church, but also they just don’t know what Christianity really is. So finding some way to speak what the faith is, just finding that voice again has been a big thing for me.

That in turn translated to how I thought about preaching, like, Oh, I should not assume that everyone in my congregation is Christian, so speak as if there are people listening who aren’t and who, even if only on the audio version on YouTube, are just trying to figure out What is it you guys think and believe and teach here? And then don’t assume that your Christians know either. I mean, people come to church and they believe for all sorts of reasons, and that is the Spirit’s business to bring people in for good or bad reasons. The Spirit is shameless. If someone has a bad motivation for becoming Christian, the Holy Spirit can work with that!

MB: Haha. What’s an example?

SHW: Well, I had people come to church in Tokyo because they were scared about COVID, just naked fear for your own survival. That’s a classic way of getting people in touch with God! So it’s self-centered. So what? We all are self-centered. Again, the Spirit can work with that. Or, less jokingly, people’s marriages are falling apart or they wonder if life is worth living. That is not the same as proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected Lord, but we can take people’s inevitably self-centered needs and do something with them. I mean, it is us who get saved, not some idealized version thereof.

So, why else do people come to church? People are lonely. That was another big thing. And one of the reasons why we had such an incredibly healthy and vibrant congregational life is because the rest of life sucked so bad. Again, this is not an evangelism strategy I can commend — don’t make life bad so people come back to church. However, if life is bad and lonely, and church can be a place where you have real fellowship with other human beings as well as with your God, that’s great!

So, this may be jumping a little too far afield and into more of the whole pastoral approach or congregational approach, but I am in favor of much stricter triage for churches. Churches are full of responsible, compassionate people who want to do everything, and they use Paul’s line — “I am all things to all people” — to justify that, but I really feel more convicted than ever that churches need to continually prune and cut away at anything that is not focused on the ministry of the gospel. And certainly fellowship and service are part of that, but I often find in practice, fellowship and service are ends in their own right that take over the gospel stuff. And then, if the gospel seems to get in the way of fellowship, because it’s awkward to impose belief in Jesus on people, or you want to do service projects with others who are not like us, I think we need to be less frightened of that. The church is the only organization in the world that cares first of all about proclaiming Jesus risen from the dead.

MB: Okay, so what in your mind is the single most important thing that happens on a Sunday?

SHW: Well, I’m going to give the most boringly typical Lutheran answer, but it’s “word-and-sacrament.” We’ll pretend that’s just one phrase linked with hyphens. I mean, you have to hear scripture, and I don’t know how to say this more strongly, but this is it! This is where we find out everything else. Jesus reaches us in all sorts of ways, but if you really want to know him and his Father and the Spirit, you have to know the scripture. So actually modeling in your service that attending to scripture is the highest priority thing we do when we gather as a community, and that the reason why we have preaching is because it’s so valuable to understand it.

I know preaching can do lots of different things in lots of different circumstances, but preaching at least has to be helping people understand the scripture. Yes, scripture can be understood by anyone and can be self-interpreting, but not just by picking it up with no background. That is why our traditions also value education and theological training. To me, the priority in preaching is not to tell people their politics, tell people their ethics, give them a list of things to do or to not do, or how to be a better Christian. I’m not in charge of that. I’m not the boss of you. My number one job as a preacher is to help you understand the Word of God as it is kept for us in scripture, and then I can trust the Holy Spirit to take that and do what needs to happen inside your soul over however long a time span. That’s another thing: preachers get so impatient that people aren’t coming along, or the congregation is not achieving some predetermined demographic or status or something. That is just not our job.

And then, directly out of that — the Word of God, Jesus Christ — is also present to us in the sacrament. That’s why, for me, having weekly Communion is so important, which is also Word, because it is always the Words of Institution. It’s the words given for you, shed for you. But in that particular physicality of bread and wine, God is present to us.

So, those things have to be the center of our life together. I adopted the habit of saying our “worship,” which isn’t wrong, but worship is our direction toward God. And I think, rightly understood, one of the reasons you come to a service on a Sunday, whatever happens, is so God can speak to us. It’s not just our movement towards him, but his movement toward us. I think that’s why preaching on the scripture and the sacraments are so important, because actually, those are God himself giving to us. And the songs and the prayers and the liturgy, those are our responses.

MB: I totally agree. My only question about that would be — okay, so a big part of your preaching is to help people understand the scripture, to kind of crack it open and allow it to speak to people — but how do you not make that boring? Because I feel like it can be boring, especially for people who don’t know anything about scripture. So what kinds of preaching strategies do you use to engage them and just hold their attention?

SHW: If a preacher makes the Bible boring, the preacher is doing it wrong and does not understand the Bible. I mean, this is the one book that has gripped the attention of Western civilization for thousands of years. If you can make it boring, it is your problem, not the Bible’s problem.

I don’t know. This is almost flummoxing to me. Maybe it’s an educational problem. I think there is some of that. There has been so much theological training to cause people to distrust the scripture, to go to it with this hermeneutic of suspicion or disdain, or not think it’s just a worthy end in itself. It is, as they used to say, the Good Book. Just being in it is an end in itself that is valuable!

Part of the problem is if your preaching is too explain-y, telling people “Here’s what this word means” in a very tedious sort of way. But if you assume that the Bible is the living Word of God, that is of immense interest and value, and everything in there is existentially relevant. To me, there’s nothing in the scripture that cannot be narrated or brought to life.

Maybe one example is I did a series in Epiphany one year that was going through various parts of Jesus’ ministry. And I almost never title sermons, but these I called “Jesus Forgives,” “Jesus Heals,” “Jesus Liberates.” They were all different stories of demoniacs and people who were ill and people who were confused or lost in their minds, and if you bring the story to life, then people put themselves in there, or they recognize the situation, or they suddenly understand someone in their life who’s driving them nuts. It’s all so profoundly human. But it’s human cast in the light of the divine.

I deeply distrust — all right, I’m laying my cards on the table — I deeply distrust theme-based preaching, like when you take some commonly understood phenomenon in the world and then say, “Oh, that’s like this thing in the Bible.” Because then the theme you’ve developed has priority of interpretation instead of the other way around. That reflects a preacher’s distrust of the ability of the Word to communicate and commend itself, and I think it really does make a difference in the preacher’s own soul to come to the Word assuming that it can make its own case. Obviously you’re interpreting, you’re bringing your learning to it, you’re giving words to it, something for people to grab on with, those are all okay. But fundamentally, there is a difference in content whether you trust the Word to commend itself or whether you’re selling a religious package to people.

With evangelism, it can be very tempting to market and sell for your religious team, especially when your salary depends on it — your status, your ego, your sense that you’re doing something worthwhile in your life. I am very susceptible to all those temptations. There was one particular case in Tokyo — I’m going to be very vague about it — it was someone I had known a long time who’d been coming to church regularly, who I cared very much about, and who I really, really, really wanted to decide to get baptized. I remember this particular point when we’d gone through a long catechetical process together of discussion, and this person was still keeping their cards hidden. I didn’t know where they were going to go. I remember this moment of feeling so tempted to cheat, to use just a little bit of emotional pressure, and I knew the person well enough to know where I could push. It was weird. I think it’s the worst temptation I faced in my entire ministry because I wanted so badly for this person to know the love of God in Christ, and what could possibly be wrong with that?

I remember thinking, if you cheat, if you pressure this person, you betray everything you have done in your ministry here, which has been trusting the Holy Spirit to call people when and where the Spirit wills. That’s Augsburg Confession Article V: the ministry brings forth word and sacrament, but the Holy Spirit does the work of bringing people to faith.

I came that close to cheating, and I didn’t. I held myself back, and I thought at the end of that session that the person was going to decide against baptism, and I went home kind of depressed. Later, at work, that person sent me a message and said, “My faith has led me to asking for baptism. Yes, I want to get baptized.” Which was amazing. But if I had cheated, I would never have known if the person wanted baptism for real and out of faith or because I had turned the screws.

So, bring everything you’ve got to it, and at the same time back off and let the Holy Spirit do the job.

MB: So when the Holy Spirit gives somebody a kick in the butt and they end up in church, how do you make them feel welcome?

SHW: First of all, you have to say “Hello.” Haha. Unless they sneak in late and sneak out early, in which case they’re not ready to talk, leave them alone. But if they’re lingering, you’ve got to say hello to them. This is the case where the congregation matters more than the pastor. A good pastor notices people who are not being noticed — I think that is an important social skill for pastors to acquire. But fundamentally, you cannot be everything to everyone on a Sunday morning. In that respect, my congregation in Tokyo was a wonderful congregation, because they actually wanted and received new people who came. And there are a lot of churches that claim they want to grow, but don’t really.

So that, I think, is a longer term conversation and cultivation between pastor and congregation: how do you actually become a church that genuinely receives whoever God sends you?

I think it also matters to receive whoever God sends you, and not who you think God ought to send to you in order to improve whatever self-image you have, and I will not elaborate. “Let the reader understand,” to quote the Gospel of Mark. They can fill in those blanks. And also don’t scare people off by giving them jobs too soon. Yes, people need to be needed. But they don’t need to be put on a committee within their first month of showing up.

Also, this is something I find churches, especially more liberal churches, don’t talk about with their welcome ideology, but not everyone is welcome. Churches attract predators of all kinds. They might be just leeches who just suck attention to themselves, they might be actually looking for victims, and everything in between. But exercise some discernment, for heaven’s sake. Don’t make yourselves easy prey for the wolves. And I’m not going to go into any detail, but there were a few experiences I had in Tokyo that forced me to grow up really fast and realize you are not just a loving zookeeper of all these sweet little zoo animals. You are actually there to be a sheepdog to bark away the wolves so that the flock does not get devoured. So don’t put someone on the Church Council within the first year. Let them be around for a while, find out what they’re really like before you give them any access to power or money or more vulnerable people.

MB: I guess we should talk about pastoral care. Presumably that was a part of your job in Tokyo. What did pastoral care look like? Did you get coffee with people? Did you go to people’s houses? And also, as a female pastor, what were the gender dynamics like?

SHW: Yeah. This is probably where my Tokyo ministry was least like an American ministry, because Japanese do not like to be visited in their homes. They are extremely private, to the point that I only made, I believe, two hospital visits in my entire six and a half years. And I think I only visited three people in their homes. Of those, two were Americans and one was Japanese who became Christian in America and so had some context for being visited at home.

As I was getting used to being a pastor again, I had to take a while to figure out: should I be nosy? I know this person’s estranged from their spouse — should I make them talk to me about it? There were some people who came faithfully every Sunday and clearly liked me and trusted me but didn’t want to tell me anything about their lives. Finally, you have to say, “Okay, they know that I’m here when and if they need me.” Some were more forthright, and I’d finally get to do the pastoral care work.

I’m not quite sure how much that is really a cultural difference. Honestly, I don’t know whether a pastor should be nosier, or if it’s more important to give people the dignity of their privacy and find ways to build trust, so that when they decide they need you, you’re there for them. I think in every church there are some people who are going to be more into being close to the pastor than others. And I think you have to both honor that desire and not let them eat up all your time. And at the same time, there are people who will always be on the edge of church. So let them be on the edge of church!

As for the dynamics between men and women as a female pastor, I have been told that Japan rates pretty low among developed nations for treating women with respect and equality, but as an American, I did not experience that directly at all. And so far as I know, I’m the first female pastor ever to serve at Tokyo Lutheran, but it was neither viewed with triumph or suspicion. It was just like I was the next pastor.

MB: Interesting. I think pastors in the U.S. do tend to have more parishioners coming to them and just unloading all kinds of heavy, vulnerable stuff — to the point where it can just be too much, and pastors have to put up boundaries. So I have to think cultural difference plays a big role. Also, I will say, I find the topic of Christianity in Japan and its history to be a very interesting topic, even if it’s not the most uplifting one.

SHW: There’s a lot of nihilism in Japan today. There’s a lot of darkness there. I kind of felt like I was living in a spiritually devastated place. And again, that’s not something you’d see on the surface, but I just kind of felt it.

One more thing about pastoral care: I guess I have a little concern that if the pastor’s main task is to put people in touch with God through word and sacraments, then — while there’s definitely a place for touching them pastorally in places of life’s need, most obviously in big moments like birth and death and marriage — there can be a way that if that doesn’t go so well, they get cut off from the person who’s connecting them to God through word and sacraments. So I don’t know if that means those should be ultimately dissociated tasks. Probably not. Care of souls is a deep thing. But I think there’s also a way in which care of souls — especially if it doesn’t go so well or doesn’t make such good progress, which, let’s face it, most of us just keep revisiting the same issues our whole lives — can end up interfering with this task of being a connector.

MB: I think you’re onto something, and those widely varying responsibilities may be one reason some priests get burnt out. Anyway, let me end with a rather generic question: What aspect of your job when you were a pastor did you love the most? And what aspect did you hate the most?

SHW: Haha. What I hated the most was sitting through Church Council meetings, because they were all in Japanese, they were interminable, and I didn’t understand what was going on. That was easy!

The thing I loved the most? You can probably tell I just enjoy talking to people — catechism, evangelization, worship, preaching. But for sheer unambiguous bliss? It was the Sunday school I started in Tokyo. We never had more than ten to twelve kids, so we just had them all together. And I didn’t use a curriculum, I just chose a Bible story, made up an activity, sang some songs, had them run around, colored pictures, and then I talked to their parents. That was so much fun. Just the enthusiasm children bring to this man [Jesus] they’ve never met in any obvious sort of way, and them just being riveted by these stories, even the super simplified ones in children’s Bibles … Their random questions, their uncontrollable energy. Japan is a place with so few children, and by that time my son was a teenager, so I no longer had little people at home. Just that chance to be with those little kids in all their wildness and affection and savagery, I just loved that. It was great.

MB: Thank you so much, Sarah.