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Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Weekly sermons from our Central Lutheran Church preaching team plus quick reflections from Pastor Ryan Braley.
Real talk, ancient wisdom, and honest questions — all designed to help you learn, grow, and find encouragement when you need it most.
At Central, our mission is simple: FOLLOW Jesus together, be a community where you BELONG, and LOVE our neighbors across the street and around the world.
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Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
#105 - Should I Go to Church (Part 2) {Reflections}
Ever wondered why rituals matter? In this thought-provoking exploration, Ryan dives into the transformative power of church community and how it fundamentally shapes who we become.
Drawing from Aristotle's wisdom that "we are what we repeatedly do," they unpack how our regular practices—whether exercise, complaining, gratitude, or worship—slowly mold us into particular kinds of people. The episode reveals the anthropological truth that humans across all cultures have always been ritual-creating beings, not by coincidence but because rituals serve a profound psychological and spiritual purpose.
Through compelling examples like the disruption of funeral rituals during COVID and the importance of marriage ceremonies, Ryan illustrates how rituals take abstract ideals like love and forgiveness and give them concrete, embodied expression. He introduces the fascinating concept of church as a "Jesus Dojo"—a practice ground where we rehearse resurrection living and experiment with countercultural values like forgiveness, patience, and sacrificial love.
Perhaps most powerfully, Ryan explains how worship gently decenters our egos, positioning us within a larger narrative and creating healthier patterns of relating to others and the world. By participating in these ancient rhythms, we're making intentional choices about who we want to become.
Whether you're a regular churchgoer, spiritually curious, or skeptical about organized religion, this episode offers a fresh perspective on why communal rituals matter for human flourishing. What rituals are shaping your life right now? Join the conversation and share your thoughts!
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What is up everybody? Hey, welcome to Reflections. My name is Ryan, I'm your host, along with my good friend Olivia. What's up? Olivia Doing good? All right, I put her on the spot there.
Speaker 1:Hey, we are in a three-part series, a short one on why I think you should go to church, or, you might say, be a part of a church community, and I mentioned if you haven't heard episode one, go back and listen to that. But the first one was that church provides a sort of a larger story for us to be a part of. And there's this. We all have this deep human longing for meaning and connection and direction for our lives, and, beyond the shallow sort of, you know, things that we need and want and desire, we long for meaning and also human connection. Community, real flesh and blood community it's just good for our souls and our lives, and so I would love to invite you to be a part of a church community. It's just good for our souls and our lives, and so I would love to invite you to be a part of a church community. Okay, number two, then. Here's what I would say I love church because church shapes the kind of people that we are.
Speaker 1:So rhythm, the rhythm of worship shapes who we are. So Aristotle believed that what we repeatedly do is what shapes the kind of people that we are. You could also say it this way that we are what we repeatedly do. So rituals, rhythms, these are powerful things when we do things over and over again, because it slowly shapes who we are in every way. So things like exercise if you do it with regularity, or things like complaining if you complain all the time and we all know folks who do this, don't point anybody out right now, but it shapes who you are. Gratitude, if you're a person who's consistently grateful, or doom scrolling before bed these are all rhythms and habits and rituals that shape who we are over the long term. So church is no different, and it's no wonder that people have for centuries had these rhythms of worship gathering, sort of honoring the divine, practicing rituals in these worship gatherings, because rituals, I would argue, are things that shape us. In fact, I would argue in a deeper way.
Speaker 1:Anthropologically is the fancy word that we are people of rituals. We need rituals. We've always had these, as far back as like historians and sociologists can look and anthropologists. Rituals have always been present in our communities and so we need them. We're people of ritual, so weekly practices that are communal, they shape our identity. So singing together, confessing our sins, listening to music, praying, singing, breathing in unison, these embody truths that we just can't think our way into. So here's what I mean we need rituals.
Speaker 1:Rituals are like a concrete example, or one scholar says, the concretization of the ideal. So you have these ideals like love, like love is this ideal, and we're like great. But what does love actually mean? Or look like, I don't know. Or forgiveness, or hope, hope or the neighbor, these are all ideal things that seem a bit ambiguous, maybe nebulous. What does it mean to love? Well, a ritual can take those ideals and these principles out of the ethereal and put them in a concrete manner, like an actual embodied experience. Like this is what it looks like, and we're going to do this thing together. And so you know, jung and Jungian psychologists talk about how rituals can take principles from the unconscious, like the unknown part of ourselves, and bring them and impress them vividly on the conscious mind. So, like it brings it out of the unconscious into the conscious mind, so it gives an embodied expression to an idea. So what does it mean to love somebody? Let me show you. Here's an embodied way. The cross is a wonderful example of this. I love the cross story. Here's what love looks like to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the other. It's beautiful, and so this is how we live out a faith. If you have a faith, rituals and rhythms are how you live it out.
Speaker 1:So during COVID, one of our rituals, in our culture actually it's almost global are things like funerals. When someone dies, we have this moment where we carve out some space, we gather, we weep, we cry, we grieve, we do prayers, whatever, and it's different in every culture, but it's an important ritual. It helps bring closure, it helps you to let go of the grief or express grief. Rather, and during COVID, here in the States anyway, we people didn't do funerals for many months, like we're going to wait until later. What I saw was it was like actually deeply troubling for those families. They couldn't have they didn't, they couldn't have this ritual, this closure, this time of expressing grief, and it sort of it sort of stunted any kind of like progress they could have made in this sort of saying goodbye to their family member, and it was terribly sad.
Speaker 1:I have another friend who, him and his wife, or rather they're married now, but they weren't married. They were living together, they were doing all the things that married couples do. This is a long time ago and I said why don't you guys just get married, like you're already practically married? He's like he goes, I don't know, I'm not going to just do a wedding just for the sake of doing a wedding. I think it's sort of silly, like just getting up there in front of my friends and saying all this stuff, it doesn't really matter. And I was like, dude, it does matter.
Speaker 1:We are people of ritual and ceremony. And you getting up there in front of people, friends, loved ones, and declaring your love for her and her to you and saying vows, and her saying vows, and then exchanging these rings and maybe dancing around the altar three times, whatever your things are, these are incredibly important. It's a fleshing out, it's a concretization of the ideal, it's an expression of faith and love and each other and your vows to what you promise, and everyone's watching and we're all celebrating. It's incredibly important. We are people of ritual and, oddly enough, they did get married just recently, but it took them years because, no, these rituals are super important. They're not nothing.
Speaker 1:So the ritual of worship, then, is when we gather together and we all focus our attention, our actions, our prayers to God. So it's actually kind of a recentering of our lives. Much of our lives is about us and, you know, serving me and taking care of me. But when I go into a place of worship a Sunday morning or whatever day you gather, but a church gathering to worship God, it recenters my life that, hey, life isn't about me, it's about you know, it's about all these people. It's about experiencing Jesus in them and worshiping a thing bigger than me. So it decenters my ego and helps me be more humble. I'm a part of a grander story. You know. I love the Job story. When God comes to Job and tells Job hey, job, where were you when I hung the moon bud, like I love it. He sort of puts Job in his place and many of us I mean to be frank need to be put in our place Like I'm not the center of the universe. I'm not. There's a much bigger thing happening. Worship grounds me in that way and it decenters my ego. So we live in a world that wants to say otherwise, but worship sort of helps us in that regard. And so the last thing I would say is this Rituals are really a practicing of the things that we learn about as well.
Speaker 1:So how can you practice things like love and forgiveness and hope and even resurrection? The church is where you actually practice these things. I love it. In martial arts, they have this place called the dojo. I think it's mostly in karate, but a dojo is a place where you go to learn and you learn by practicing. So you do the stuff, you do the moves and the karate, and that actually is how you learn. And so there's a guy his name is Mark Scandrett wrote a book called the Jesus Dojo, and he and some friends began to gather and practice the teachings of Jesus. I loved it.
Speaker 1:That's what church is. You're practicing the teachings of Jesus, this thing that's deeper and more ancient than you or I or these modern philosophies and these kinds of things, and you're practicing this idea of even resurrection. What would it look like if God was king, if the resurrection was true, if forgiveness and patience and reconciliation were a better way of living life? What if we tried it out and just see what happens? So I love it.
Speaker 1:So it's a place of practicing. It's the Jesus Dojo, and this psychologists have suggested gives us healthier patterns of trust and belonging, and it actually helps us to embody these truths that are really transcendent. And so church is that it's a place to come and experience ritual and to have these things shape your heart and your mind and your way of thinking, and to do it with other people and to sort of embody the ideal and the ethereal and to practice what it means to be a person of faith and to practice love and forgiveness and hope and the resurrection in a community of other people doing the same thing and, of course, as always, to then leave that space, that gathering, and to go out and to do it elsewhere, because the world needs it as well. So there you go. That's number two.
Speaker 1:Number two the reason why I think you should go to church or to be part of a worship gathering, church community, is that our rhythms and our rituals, they shape the kind of people that we are, and so we should be careful. The things that we do repeatedly and going to church, being a part of worship gatherings, being part of a church community, practicing the teachings of Jesus, can help shape us into people who look at least a little bit more like Jesus, I love that. So all right. Love you guys, peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget, you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8.30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering, or you can check us out online at clcelkriverorg Peace.
