Interview: Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Lutheran Forum interviewed our former editor, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, in a wide ranging conversation that covers Sarah’s work in pastoring, writing, publishing, podcasting, and ecumenical research. The body of the interview text includes web links so you may learn more about Sarah’s work.
LUTHERAN FORUM: Sarah, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Let’s start here: where are you? And what are you doing there?
SARAH HINLICKY WILSON: I’m in Tokyo! Honestly, one of the last places on earth I expected to end up. My husband Andrew and I discerned after almost eight years in Strasbourg, France—where I was working at the Institute for Ecumenical Research—that it was time to move on, but not quite where to move on to. We returned to the U.S. in 2016 and expected to stay there. But the one door that opened and propelled us through was to Japan. Andrew is now Professor of Church History at Japan Lutheran College and Theological Seminary, and I’m Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church, working primarily with the English-language congregation, though I have stumbled my way through the Japanese liturgy a few times!
LF: What, if anything, have you found to be most similar about serving in ministry in Japan compared to the United States? And what makes Japan and the United States most different for pastoral ministry?
SHW: No war is pretty, nor subsequent occupation, but the U.S. occupation of Japan was, historically speaking, one of the least terrible and most constructive (which, frankly, was the least we owed them after two nuclear bombs). The Japanese could hardly believe that their conquerors rebuilt their economy and helped them write a modern democratic constitution. As a result, postwar Japan is strikingly like the U.S. in many ways, though it’s a mixed bag. It’s consumerist and media-saturated, but by world standards incredibly safe… not a bad place to raise a teenage boy.
On the other hand, the one thing that the Japanese really didn’t accept from their American conquerors was their religion. Japan is the only country in Asia whose Christian population (already tiny at 1%) is declining instead of growing. The church is doing better in China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh than in Japan, despite the guaranteed political freedom of religion. It’s really a puzzle. Generations of foreign missionaries and indigenous Japanese Christians alike have tried to crack the resistance to the gospel here, but have arrived at no conclusive explanation or strategy to overcome it.
That sounds bleak, but it has an upside. I’ve never been in a place where people were happier to go to church. No one here is in a Sunday service by accident. They want God in their lives badly and are starving for a good word in their lives. I had a pretty rough first call in an “old Christendom” setting in the U.S. I can’t believe how different my current call is. It’s become, against all my expectation, a source of incredible joy and delight.
LF: Leaving Lutheran Forum did not slow down your creative output at all—it seems to have accelerated it. You’ve started a quarterly newsletter and you’ve founded an independent publishing venture. Tell us how that came about for you.
SHW: Editing a magazine is hard work, as you well know! I thought I’d be glad to be done with the quarterly obligation to produce, but I guess LF hard-wired it into my brain.
I did pivot a little, though. I’m an avid, not to say compulsive cook. I believe it’s connected to my theological and pastoral call: one way or another, I want to feed people, either with the bread of life, or just plain old bread! So I put the two passions together to create Theology & a Recipe, which pairs a theological exploration with an “edible analogy.” Among my favorites so far are an essay on Revelation paired with Seven Bowls of Snacks; Latkes for Jesus; a short story about St. Augustine late in life meeting his former concubine, with a recipe for Pear Tart; and The Trinity Is Not an Egg, with Basil-the-Great Pesto and three heretical egg recipes. (It’s free, so please sign up for it on my website!)
The publishing venture was initially born of frustration with the traditional publishing industry. What I’ve discovered is that both technology and media for marketing have undergone such transformations in the past decade that it’s possible now to launch a very small-scale press without huge capital investment in a physical printing press or a New York firm buying billboards to advertise. Once I realized that, I also realized that I had a lot of books in me that were probably never going to work for any kind of mainstream publisher—secular, church, or academic—but might be of interest to the kind of people who like the work I do anyway. Hence, Thornbush Press.
So in the past two years I’ve put out six books already! Sermon on the Mount: A Poetic Paraphrase is exactly what it sounds like, my effort to render the overfamiliar startling and moving once again. Small Catechism: Memorizing Edition came out of our difficulty trying to (re)commit the SC to memory with our son, on account of little inconsistencies in Luther’s text, like “our Father in heaven” vs. “our heavenly Father” or the list in the First Article as compared to the Fourth Petition. Pearly Gates: Parables from the Final Threshold is a marginal theological genre: tiny tales of different people approaching the New Jerusalem and what they learn about themselves in the process. This, too, was inspired by frustration at how little “afterlife fiction” has anything at all to do with the gospel of Christ. To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy articulates the Lutheran theology of baptism, makes a plea for mutual reform to end rebaptism, and then works through almost fifty case studies on baptism, based on real-life examples discussed with pastors from around the world. I’ve also published a memoir about the year my family moved to Slovakia to be post-communist missionaries, I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl’s Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia. I’m not the author of Thornbush Press’s sixth book! That’s by Katie Langston, a Mormon convert to Christianity, and her Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace illustrates beautifully what is at stake in knowing Christ as gracious savior rather than relentless judge.
More coming soon, so stay tuned!
LF: Why is writing an important vocation in the church? Or, why is writing an important vocation for Sarah Hinlicky Wilson?
SHW: I’m not sure I have much choice in the matter! I’ve wanted to be a writer since as long as I can remember, and theology was the first domain that welcomed my writing.
Christianity, like its parent Judaism, is very much bound to the written word. Of course, we preach, too, but the written word exists, at least in part, to prevent the core message from drifting too far from its origins. It’s intrinsic to our faith that the mighty works of God were written down and passed on through the generations, but also that in turn those written records inspired more speech and more writing. I’m often frustrated that secularists as much as fundamentalists fail to notice that there has never been a time when the written Scripture has not been actively interpreted by a living faith community, and the records of those communities’ struggles to believe and understand and proclaim have been written down and passed on through the generations for us to read and study—and indeed to preach and write on, too.
You hear a lot now that we’re more a visual than a verbal culture, but I’m not at all convinced that’s true where matters of real substance are concerned. I think the explosion of audio content is proof that people do crave words: extended, detailed, thoughtful explorations of depth and complexity. The written medium is a way of preserving words that started out as oral only, recruiting sight to the service of sound. It brings its own opportunities and necessities—that’s why we need punctuation and fonts and italics, which don’t exist as such when we speak—but they’re fundamentally the same thing. Our world is way too complex now to navigate without these deep explorations. Our faith is way too complex to navigate without these deep explorations! Writing is one way of handing on the conversation from one person to another and one generation to the next.
LF: So much of your work is about communication—and communicating theology clearly. You’re a participant in some ecumenical dialogues between Lutherans and Pentecostals, how did that happen? Most Lutheran ecumenists long to dialogue with Rome or the East, but you’re talking with Pentecostals. Why is this important work?
SHW: I got involved with the Pentecostals purely by accident. When I arrived at the Institute in Strasbourg, all the other dialogues were spoken for, but we were branching out into Pentecostalism—so the role fell to me by lot, almost. I’m not sure it was possible for anyone to be more ignorant than I was going into that dialogue. But I found it fascinating and rewarding. It was uncharted territory, so I was excited to be one of the first explorers to venture forth! I’ve recorded what I’ve learned in my book A Guide to Pentecostal Movements for Lutherans.
There are two main reasons I’d encourage fellow Lutherans to take this Christian family as seriously as Catholics or Orthodox. First, the transformation of the face of global Christianity as a result of Pentecostalism is as dramatic as was the Reformation. There are otherwise few parallels, historically speaking, but the scale is unbelievable. To remain as ignorant as I was of Pentecostalism is like living in the sixteenth century and dismissing that Wittenberg business as a flash in the pan.
The second is that Pentecostalism is not only on the outside—it’s within Lutheranism, too. The East African churches of Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Madagascar are the fastest-growing Lutheran churches in the world and soon to overtake the old European Lutheran churches in size. If you count actual faith and involvement and not just membership, they have already long since been in first place. These churches have, in their own distinctive ways, incorporated Pentecostal/Charismatic elements into their practice, yet they remain committed to the Lutheran theological tradition and are eager for deeper rooting in Lutheran doctrine.
One of the most delightful experiences I ever had in this regard was hearing a Malagasy seminary professor describe the exorcism ministry of his church, and as he concluded, he patted his copy of The Book of Concord and said, “It’s all right in here!” No doubt American Lutherans would be astonished to hear this—yet he saw no contradiction. But isn’t “A Mighty Fortress,” among other things, a battle hymn for exorcists?
LF: You also host a podcast with your dad, Paul R. Hinlicky, who is also well-known to the LF audience. What has it been like to do this show with him?
SHW: Wonderful! We started three years ago, not long after he had a stroke, and I realized that I wanted to create a permanent audio record of our conversations for myself—just in case. Thanks be to God, he recovered marvelously and is in good health, but we continue to do the podcast and are thrilled that others enjoy “eavesdropping” on our conversations. We cover a range of theological topics, from individual books of the Bible to patristic and medieval theologians to contemporary issues to very classic Lutheran themes. Given half a chance, Dad would definitely recite systematic theology straight up, so I also consider it my task and privilege to render him a bit more accessible to a larger audience. Of course, I get my two cents in, too! We’re on all the podcast platforms, so please check out Queen of the Sciences: Conversations between a Theologian and Her Dad.
LF: What are you most hopeful for concerning the present day church? And which aspect of your professional vocation—pastor, podcaster, and publisher—gives you a window into such hope?
SHW: The people of Israel and the church have always been in crisis, because the entire world is in crisis, so one reason to be hopeful is that we’re pretty much in the same boat we’ve always been in. It’s just that the nature of the crisis that has changed. Certainly, to face it, we certainly need all the creativity, insight, and discipline we can muster. But it’s not like we’re living in a worse (or better) time than anyone else.
There are certainly people out there who are turned off by the gospel or won’t even give it a hearing. But I’ve found that few people have really heard the gospel as we Lutherans have learned to treasure it. We’re not very good anymore, at least in North American, at speaking the gospel to the wider world, to our shame.
But there are droves of people out there dying for a good word from God in their lives, just as I’ve found here in Tokyo. When we fulfill our apostolic task of leading with the immense, costly, staggering mercy of the crucified and risen Christ, extraordinary new possibilities open up on our stagnant horizons. I’ve seen this happen enough times now for it to overcome my innate cynicism and doubt. But this requires real faith on our part—that the Holy Spirit does the work, not us. We’re just here to supply the means, the Word and the Sacraments, through which the divine work happens. We do harm when we try to take control or trust in other methods or in our own pet concerns and strategies. But if we get out of the way of Word and Sacrament, then the church does spring to life by God’s power. It’s gorgeous to witness.
My very first LF editorial in 2007 was entitled “Church Breaks Your Heart,” and there was certainly plenty in the next dozen years of my editorship to confirm that judgment. And yet, when it came time to write my last editorial in 2018, I found that what I wanted to talk about was “The Church and Happiness.” It’s not a guarantee or even a possibility within this-worldly parameters. But it does happen. It keeps happening. It’ll happen for you again, whoever you are, however badly sin, death, and the devil have beaten you up. The Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world is risen indeed. That hope sustained the martyrs of the early church, and that hope is still there for us. As the Augsburg Confession likes to say: it is enough.
