So, Catalyst 2009 in Atlanta came to a close today. The Catalyst site has this to say for itself:

Catalyst was conceived as a Next Generation Leaders Conference in 1999 by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, John Maxwell, Lanny Donoho and several young leaders. Catalyst was created to meet the felt need that existed within the church leader space for a leadership event that was focused on a new generation of church leaders. Everything within this space seemed built around a forty to sixty year old mindset and medium. This team was convinced that this needed to change.

The focus, then, for the Catalyst team, was to create a leadership conference specifically for church leaders (ordained, laity, and everything in between) under 40 years of age. What a wonderful opportunity for young church leaders to gather and seek and learn from others. This year the list of speakers read like a who’s who of modern churchdom:  Andy Stanley, Rob Bell, Chuck Swindoll, Louie Giglio… the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t there. You know who else wasn’t there? Pretty much every Lutheran I know.

Lutherans, on the whole, seemed to be woefully missing at the event. Twitter was a decent indication of this. For the duration of the conference, I followed the #cat09 hashtag on Twitter, a hashtag established to track posts related to the Catalyst 2009 conference. Throughout the day, the #cat09 hashtag bloomed into a fully trending topic on Twitter, meaning that it gained such popularity and momentum on Twitter that it became a featured topic. It generated buzz, even among people who had no idea what Catalyst was all about. I noticed many tweets in the #cat09 stream from people that were just trying to figure out what Catalyst even was. (As a side note, it was awesome to imagine people clicking on the trending topic just to get a face-full of Jesus for their trouble!)

In addition to following the trending #cat09 hashtag, I also currently follow hundreds of people directly through Twitter. Most are Lutheran. Most are leaders. Many are young. Of the people I follow directly through Twitter, only a handful were attending or talking about the conference. Of those, only one was a Lutheran.

12,000 in attendance, yet finding a Lutheran was like finding a needle in a haystack.

I tweeted to this young Lutheran to ask if she knew of any other Lutherans in attendance. She replied that she’d only seen one:  the person she had come with.

So I ask:  are we missing out? There seems to be a nation-wide movement to empower young leaders within the church, yet Lutherans seem to be on the outside looking in. The site soulmunchies.com is maintained by the one Lutheran I managed to track down at Catalyst. Her Catalyst-related blog posts are representative of the types of experiences I’ve had at similar events:  moving worship, challenging scriptures, energized young people, and the clear presence of the Holy Spirit. Why are we not flocking to events like this?

The author of soulmunchies.com summed my feelings up best:  “if we combined this creativity with Lutheran theology we could rock the world”. I couldn’t agree more.

I can only think of a few reasons why the Lutheran church is largely missing from events like this. And sadly, none of them are good.

It’s possible that we, the Lutheran church, are simply unaware. It’s possible that we just don’t know about events like this. It’s possible that somehow we’ve just missed the boat and that, given the opportunity, Lutherans would jump right into an event like this. Yes… it’s possible.

But it’s also possible that we’re purposefully isolating ourselves. Lutherans like to stick together and don’t often cross-pollinate with other denominations (unless our synods are forming “full communion” partnerships of course). We have our own Lutheran conferences and assemblies right? What could some non-Lutheran conference possibly teach us? What if their theology is lacking? What if they lead our young people astray? Valid concerns I suppose, but false prophets can be found everywhere and we must trust in the Holy Spirit to help us discern truth from lie. Do we have so little faith in your young people (or in the Holy Spirit) that we want to shield ourselves from “non-Lutheran teachings”?

I believe it’s also possible that we’re scared of this new generation of leaders. I mean come on, they’re loud, right? They’re full of energy. They play the drums. They have tattoos. They’re blogging and tweeting. They lol and brb and ftw. They don’t even know all the lyrics to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God! They’re everything Lutherans usually pride themselves on not being. Is it possible that we don’t even want to be a part of something like this because it doesn’t look like the Lutheran church that we’ve come to know and love?

Are we missing out?

Worse still, are we missing out on purpose?