Ashley is quintessential LCMS lol

 

 

Lefty ELCA Lutheran Tim Walz in 2018 promised a moderate "One Minnesota" governorship, instead gave them a culture war good and hard

 

 Walz won the governor’s mansion in 2018. But rather than sticking to the moderate “One Minnesota” approach that he promised on the campaign trail and that characterized his time in the House of Representatives, Walz’s priority has been “more of a war on our culture,” Johnson said.

Johnson, an advocate for a Christian nonprofit, pointed to a host of progressive policies his administration enacted: signing a law that makes abortion a right in the state at any point in a pregnancy, legalizing marijuana, giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and making the state a “refuge” for those seeking gender transitions.

His COVID-19 era policies also earned chagrin from conservatives as he restricted church gatherings and set up a hotline for people to report those who breached social distancing policies. ...

While the denomination is progressive, the politics in the pews of ECLA churches present a more mixed picture. In 2020, a slight majority of ECLA Lutherans voted for Trump, noted researcher Ryan Burge.

Among the ECLA, around 43 percent identified as or leaned Republican, and 47 percent identified as or leaned Democrat, Pew found. Around 24 percent identified as liberal, 41 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative. 

The LCMS, meanwhile, identified as or leaned Republican by nearly 60 percent, with 27 percent identifying as or leaning Democrat. A much higher percentage (52%) identified as conservative, compared to only 33 percent as moderate and 10 percent as liberal. ...

“The whole way he’s being presented to us is that he’s just a moderate country boy from Minnesota,” Seltz said. “He’s a very, very progressive, very, very left-wing governor.”

-- From Christianity Today, "Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Lutheran Among Minnesota Evangelicals"

Gene Veith surprisingly misses what early radio preachers like Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour were really up to in helping to reverse "America's Religious Depression"

 

At one point in his excellent review of Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier, Gene Veith makes passing reference to their opposition to the atomic bombings of Japan, which for the time seems like a pretty conventional position for churchmen to take who were already grappling with the profoundly demoralizing effects of the atrocities of the World Wars.

Veith, however, might have better considered this larger theme of American demoralization and how preachers such as these rose to address it. In a word, they did it first, by reasserting the primacy of God's law, calling a spade a spade. The two broadcasting luminaries were, as he says, "robustly orthodox", and frequently "began with a searing condemnation of sin, often occasioned by a current issue or event".

Veith, a Lutheran, oddly misses that the phenomenal recovery of the churches in the post-war from the malaise of the period 1930-1950, "America's Religious Depression", stems precisely from preaching what Lutherans call Law and Gospel. First, they called the wars' sins actual sin, something most men and women who lived that hell needed and wanted to hear, something which made sense of the senseless maelstrom into which the whole world had been plunged, not once but twice. Second, they proclaimed the gospel's antidote to that sin in the form of Christ's gracious act of redemptive death on the cross. We had blood on our hands, but Christ's blood washed it away.

People forget how amazingly popular The Decalogue, The Ten Commandments, became during the 1950s. Preachers preached it, film makers dramatized it, President Eisenhower himself promoted it, monuments to it went up everywhere. It was what war weary souls most needed to hear. Love for God's law reoriented the entire country.

We were a victorious nation, but a nation literally sick of the immorality of war and desperate for forgiveness. The Law, and then the Gospel, together answered this situation. The churches boomed, the population boomed, the economy boomed.

 

Going to the Lord's Supper in any American church involves the high likelihood of dining with demons, including in the LCMS

 Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils. 

-- I Corinthians 10:21

 

At least Rome tried to stop the barbarian invasions from the north, the LCMS' Matt Harrison has welcomed the hordes from the global south for a decade

 Here.

You will be replaced by better Christians, he says. It is God's will, he says.

Except you won't be. You aren't being. The future is oblivion for the LCMS, not replacement.

This has only been the LCMS' latest gimmick in a long line of gimmicks to stem the tide of decline.

The first, minor dip in the numbers for the LCMS was from 1974. Seminex. It amounted only to a pruning of the tree. The second, steeper dip from the late 1990s was purely demographic, and cut to the root. Peak Baby Boom in 1957 reached age 40 in 1997, after which it is difficult for a woman to have children.

It was already then too late.

The LCMS was always an improbable enterprise to begin with, suffering from multiple personality disorder, just like the religion itself. Simul justus et peccator. The members were at once disloyal to the homeland as immigrants to America, yet here they were, still strangely German proud. It worked for quite a long while out in farm country, where animal husbandry kept the prime directive always in mind, but the forces of anti-German discrimination started to take their toll during the Great War, and finished off the German-lovers in the Second.

My grandfather, a graduate of Springfield who had been a missionary and church planter in places such as Oregon and Wisconsin, introduced English services once a month during The War To End All Wars. The anger over that expressed by church members caused him a massive heart attack which killed him suddenly in 1919 the day after an ugly voters meeting. He was only 52. His last of nine children ended up volunteering to fight Hitler in 1943, to the quiet consternation of the extended family, some of whom had retreated to the safety of the Wisconsin Synod. The LCMS continued to grow only because its loyal sons like my father survived the war and continued to have relatively big families of four.  I happily grew up taking German from the 7th Grade onward in the public school. In college I read Faust and the Lutherbibel.

But we were too few.

Some of the people running the show then weren't stupid. They knew what was coming if they didn't DO SOMETHING. And so there were desperate attempts pushing evangelization programs on the youth in the 1970s, many of them non-Lutheran in inspiration.  There was the Ongoing Ambassadors for Christ. The group would descend on a town for a weekend and cold-call at front doors, doing a survey, presenting the Gospel, inviting them to church. There was the Jesus Movement, then the Charismatic Renewal, The Purpose Driven Life, and the Church Growth gimmickry.

They all came to nothing, except to infect the LCMS' church life and worship with the same laxity infecting the wider culture. Die, Der, und Das was too hard! back then, but now we must learn over 100 gender identities. 

What they should have done is make babies. That is how one honors father and mother.

And so it is not well with the LCMS. And it will not live long on the earth.

The soul of the LCMS was required of it a long time ago. The only question now is whose things shall these be which remain?

Down he points.

 

The Lutherans LCMS are having themselves a war over Black with a capital B and white in all lower case

 A Mighty Controversy Is This Lutheran Catechism -- Megan Fowler, Christianity Today

COVID-19 picked-off two already ailing Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod institutions of higher learning in New York and Oregon in 2020-2021

The Concordia University system must brace for yet another closure. Concordia College New York, a small, Lutheran liberal arts college in Bronxville, N.Y., will close this summer, it announced Thursday. ...

Concordia’s closure announcement leaves only six institutions in the Concordia University system. It began to shrink eight years ago, when Concordia University Ann Arbor was annexed by Concordia University Wisconsin in 2013. Five years later, Concordia College in Alabama, a historically Black college, closed due to falling enrollments and mounting debt. Concordia University in Portland, Ore., announced in February that it would close, citing a challenging and changing higher education landscape.

-- Inside Higher Ed, January 29, 2021 

For other college closings across the country since 2016, see here.

Rachel Held Evans, 37-year old mother of two, died yesterday; I prefer to remember Aaron D. Wolf, 45-year old father of six, who died on Easter

The LCMS Calls a Post a Post:

Liberal onlookers will never understand or accept the public and decisive condemnation of [same sex] heresy, because they hate Christian doctrine with the zeal of a fundamentalist.  It is not enough for them to mock the Bible and its teachings; they cannot fathom the continued existence of a millennia-old religion that, when pressed, refuses to embrace everything it has always opposed.  They clutch their pearls and express surprised horror whenever a conservative church body like the Missouri Synod expels someone for repeatedly and openly violating its clearly stated beliefs. ... [T]he liberals are winning in the public square.  But they can never win in our churches, so long as faithful clergy and laity stand up to them boldly, decisively—and swiftly, before damage is done.

 

Aquí Me Coloco: President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod adopts the euphemism "undocumented immigrant" for "illegal alien"

Here:

The LCMS, he writes, “is doing everything possible within its capacities to assist you in compassionate action” toward immigrants. “We have and will continue to stand with Jesus’ mandate to ‘love your neighbor’ in the case of immigrants, documented or not, even as we provide assistance within the bounds of the law.”

Well, without Hispanics, the LCMS in North America is probably dead, so it's understandable.

And yeah, he's the leader of the conservatives. Think what the liberals want.

Why "Roman Catholic" is an oxymoron

There is no such thing as a "Roman" universal church.

There is a Roman church. There is a church of Jerusalem, of Alexandria, of Damascus and Antioch on the Orontes. There is a Constantinopolitan church. There is a Church of the Augsburg Confession in Slovakia, another in Poland. There is a Church of England. There is a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Church, a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, an Episcopal Church United States, a First Baptist Church of Dallas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Matthew Harrison, LCMS President, accurately diagnoses what ails the church abroad

The only problem is his own synod generally and leadership in particular in the United States are variously infected with the theological pathologies he cites.

Quoted here:

Realizing the highest growth potential is abroad, the synod is in fellowship with more than 30 church bodies worldwide, particularly in Latin American and Africa. Harrison says Lutheranism “sputters and fails” anywhere clergy don’t have extensive seminary training. For that reason, he said, church leaders in Ethiopia and other areas have asked the Missouri synod for theological support.

“They know they need pastors against glory theology, against prosperity theology and against all kinds of charismatic nonsense going on in Africa,” Harrison said at the conference. “If we are going to stand tall against the culture, if we are going to be intense about reaching out, church planting among cultures of immigrants, nonwhites, etc., we cannot shirk seminary education. It is our crown jewel because it teaches our men what they need to know and give for the gospel.”

When you take communion with LCMS Lutherans, 44% of them believe homosexuality should be accepted

68% believe there is more than one true interpretation of the religion.

51% believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

39% do not believe in verbal inspiration of Scripture.

Survey says, here.

To prevent losing in court, churches need to remove "standing" by excommunicating the doctrinally unsound

Consider the hypothetical posed here:

"Imagine a same sex couple who consider themselves deeply Catholic want to get married at the Catholic church of their choice. They approach the pastor and he declines to officiate the wedding or be a party to it. The spurned couple might then file a non-discrimination lawsuit against the pastor and his parish making the simple argument that because same-sex marriage is a right protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, a parish cannot discriminate in who it weds and who it doesn't."

-----------------------------

A number of things come to mind, which church leadership throughout the country ought to begin discussing with their legal counsel as soon as possible.

One, couples who want to marry in church should be required as a condition of membership to get married in their own parish. Churches need to state this explicitly in order to have control of their own affairs. Couples should not be free to roam and pick a "patsy" church of their choosing.

Two, all members should be required to sign doctrinal statements which specifically delineate that they agree with the church's teaching about sexuality and marriage as a condition of membership. Members who transfer to new parishes should have to do the same.

Three, churches should state in writing as a matter of principle that the benefits provided by clergy are only for members who have also completed a course of catechesis, affirmed it and have been publicly accepted into membership.

And four, a clear process of excommunication should be in place and followed in order to remove from membership individuals who come to disagree with the church's teaching.

If taken, these steps ought to help protect churches qua religious institutions, and in a court of law make it difficult for plaintiffs to sue because they do not have standing to sue and have executed evidence which contradicts their claims.

Doctrinally rigorous churches such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod already are well prepared in these respects and represent a good resource for clergy and denominations who are not. 

Mollie Hemingway is trying to serve two masters: God and journalism

I understand she's a Lutheran, Missouri Synod. It used to be a very conservative denomination. Predictably one of their members would be upset by the lengths to which liberals will go to outrage the sensibilities of scrupulous religious believers, such as Lutherans. And I think she is one of those.

But what she's calling for here in The Federalist is The New York Times to outrage the sensibilities of Muslims like it does every other scrupulous religious sect. How dare they, The New York Times, stick it to Orthodox Jews but shrink from offending Muslims!

OK, The New York Times is hypocritical, along with a bunch of other news outlets. That's supposed to be news?

In picking this fight Mollie Hemingway has chosen journalism over God. Her journalistic sensibilities are more outraged than are her religious sensibilities.

Religious people should be upset about deliberate attempts by the press to offend all religious people, not just some. This includes Muslims. But so far I don't hear anyone saying this except for Pope Francis, and Bill Donohue of the Catholic League.

All I'm hearing from so-called conservatives in America is the call to jump on the pig pile supporting Charlie Hebdo, the now defacto organ of the secularist dogma in the West.

How come? Have you all lost your minds?

ELCA: Not Evangelical, Not Lutheran, Not A Church

Just "in America".

So says Southern Baptist Al Mohler, noted here 6 June 2013:

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler says the nation’s largest Lutheran body is “not a church.” He says the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America only lives up to a quarter of its name, citing the Southwest California Synod’s election of the first openly gay bishop in the denomination. “It is by this act and by many prior acts distancing itself by light years from the actual faith and conviction of Martin Luther,” Mohler said in a Monday podcast. It has “demonstrated itself to be neither Evangelical nor Lutheran and, as G.K. Chesterton might say, not a church either. That just leaves them in America.”

Mohler contrasted the ELCA with the nation’s second largest Lutheran body, the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, and citing its strict enforcement of historic confessional statements.

Based on the politics of many in the membership, however, even the "in America" is in doubt.

(this post has been updated, repairing a dead link)