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.

 

Maybe Sister Cindy should try preaching repentance as liquidation of assets and a life of poverty if she's to become edgy again

What Can Fascination With ‘Sister Cindy’ Teach Us About the ‘None’ Generation?  :

I do think thoughtful conservative religious people would likely be concerned to discover—to use Christian language—that the scandal of the gospel has largely lost the power to scandalize (an enervation for which they themselves are, in my view, largely responsible). And if religion indeed no longer has this power, then we may perhaps imagine that religion of the kind that made real claims on and demands of people is heading, like that elderly aunt, rather headlong into oblivion. It may be that the world will be a better place when it’s gone, but it may also be that we come to miss it deeply. 

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:33

“I abhor his doctrines. Christianity is truly a religion for the expropriated.” 

-- Russell Kirk in 1942

Knowledge is made by oblivion

 

 

 

Knowledge is made by oblivion, and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, we must forget and part with much we know.

-- Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

Civilizational collapse: Neither Baby Boomers nor Millennials have been fruitful and multiplied

Near the peak of the Baby Boom births per 1000 hit 25.0 in 1955, and over the next 22 years collapsed to 15.1 per 1000 women by 1977, a traditional demarcation year for the beginning of the Millennials. No cohort since 1993 has hit or surpassed the 15.1 level, and Millennials since turning 22 in 1999 haven't done any better. Births to Millennials since 2007 have fallen 12% from 14.3 per 1000 to just 12.6 per 1000, the lowest level in the post-war period. Even during the abortion mania between 1973 and 1976 births per 1000 remained higher than they are under the Millennials.

In shouting No! to reproduction is to be found all our other shouts of No!: to economic growth, to educational advancement, to national greatness, to civility and to religion. In the great cultural handoff after the Second World War, we have fumbled the ball and wandered off the field.

If we believed in the future, we would be creating it.

Next stop, oblivion.