WELS AnswerMan Leaves Them Laughing Again

Q: Having been in fellowship with LCMS for decades prior to splitting in early 1960, does WELS accept the 3 volume book of Francis Pieper "Christian Dogmatics" along with the Book of Concord as being consistent with their confessional teachings?

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A: No dogmatics texts including our own are placed on the level of the confessions. Neither are the writings of Luther. The confessions are the collective statements of the church. Pieper's dogmatics set is his private writing. The LCMS has never adopted it, as they did the Brief Statement.

We use Pieper's dogmatics and it is doctrinally sound, but there are some very poorly-worded statements in the section on church and ministry which are very difficult to understand in an acceptable sense. Pieper himself contradicts these statements in other writings of his.

End of AnswerMan Quotation

Sigh. Whenever I need something good to write about, WELS AnswerMan delivers a soft pitch across the plate.

The Wisconsin Synod is very much like the Latter-day Saints. People think the Mormon Bible is the Book of Mormon, but Mormons ignore that for Doctrine and Covenants and other strange writings.

A Wisconsin Synod pastor will claim they have a quia subscription to the Book of Concord, but that is another deception. Their own publications set the standards for many different Wisconsin Synod declarations, all in error. There is an essay claiming WELS is not bound by the Book of Concord, either in Our Great Heritage or the Wauwatosa set. Note that both sets are pure self-glorification. They cannot get Hoenecke published slow enough, but they have six thick volumes of their worst effluent bound and sold as confessional treasures. I owned both sets earlier, but I used them for kindling. They were so dry.

Their real position is that WELS alone determines the meaning of Scripture, apart from any other authority, statement, or book. Their fanaticism for the NIV, UOJ, the Church Growth Movement, and marketing the Gospel reveals their devotion to Lutheran orthodoxy.

No, Pieper's Dogmatics is not the last word in Lutheran orthodoxy. (Could AnswerMan observe the rules of journalism, capitalize the book title and use italics?) I would not call the set an official document of Missouri, unlike OGH and Wauwatosa for WELS, but it is hardly "private." CPH published Pieper, translated it, and still makes money from it. I had a German set that was built to last for centuries, like the Walther sermon books in German.

Pieper is way cool for Bronze Age Missourians and some ELS people today. I fear WELS has not forgiven Francis for leaving the synod and joining Missouri. His brother August stayed in the sect and apparently disagreed with Francis on church and ministry issues. I find these repristination people mega-boring, so I am not about to unravel the history of all this.

I do not mean to pick on these sincere men. I do find it disgusting that so many leaders today are willing to trace their doctrine all the way back - one generation earlier and stop there, ignoring Luther, Chemnitz, and the giants of the Lutheran Reformation. That is precisely why the so-called conservative Lutheran bodies are following ELCA around with their tongues hanging out.

Missouri, the ELS, WELS, and the mini-micros have their machine gunners ready for anyone who questions forgiveness without faith (Universal Objective Justification). They cannot defend their false doctrine. They are like Keystone Kops running around whenever they try. But they are still ready at the trigger, to fire away and make people fear their wrath. That is an tragic inheritance from Walther/Pieper worship.

Brug Action Confirms Ichabod Predictions

Seminary professor John Brug's material, posted at the Michigan Lutheran Seminary website, confirms an earlier Ichabodian prediction.

The traditionalists are lining up against the proposal to close Sem. The odd name (Sem, or Michigan Lutheran Seminary) reflects its origin as the pastoral training school for the Michigan Synod that eventually joined the Joint Synod of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Other States (Nebraska).

There has been talk about the Michigan District, WELS, taking over MLS and funding the school. That was supposed to be an action blessed by The Love Shack, 2929 N. Mayfield Road. MLS recognizes that this action would be doomed to failure. Far fewer people would support an aging campus during a time when the auto industry in Michigan is in worse shape than WELS.

Millions have been spent on three campuses (MLS, Luther Prep, MLC) and all are destined to close, due to the leadership genius of President-in-Waiting Wayne Mueller. The answer so far has been - Have Another Fund-Raising Campaign!

It would have been better to take all the Schwan money and name the school system after his business, with various buildings having his name or his relatives' names on them. A marketing theme could have tied the frozen food business with the Wisconsin Synod:
The Marvin Schwan Frozen Food Schools. Many are cold, but few are frozen.

Means of Grace, Si! Church Growth Movement, No!

Ichabod will become bi-lingual, to comply with the rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Someone asked why I was against the church growing? I have to commend the late, liberal Donald McGavran. He was able to change church language so that people could make his pompous declarations beyond criticism.

McGavran solemnly declared, "God wants His church to grow."

This particular sentiment is nowhere in the Scriptures, but the slogan has much in common with Pentecostal language. For instance, the Holy Spirit had a conversation with John Lawrenz, published on the Internet. John recited it for an interview. John wanted to stay in the Ukraine, but the Holy Spirit told him, "John, I want you in Asia." They went back and forth a little, as good friends should and do, but the Holy Spirit won. After all, how can anyone argue with God?

Pentecostals have that advantage. They walk up to someone and say, "The Holy Spirit told me you should leave the ministry." More likely, they tell everyone but the victim. Doubtless, the Holy Spirit told him to be discreet.

McGavran got everyone to think that anyone against his thriving business was against God. He and his apostle C. Peter Wagner (a Pentecostal) recruited all the world mission executives first, then the American mission executives, so all the denomination bosses went to Fuller Seminary. That is why the Mission/Vision statements of LCMS, WELS, and the Assemblies of God all sounded exactly alike. The statements came from the same source, Fuller Seminary.

I have a high regard for the Holy Spirit, but I am not God's counselor (Romans 8). According to the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit works only through the Word and never apart from the Word. That Word is found in two basic forms: the invisible Word of teaching and preaching; the visible Word of Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, and Absolution. We also list ordination as a sacrament in the Book of Concord. Chemnitz has a fine discussion about sacraments in his Examination.

If people want to be Spirit-filled, they should remain close to the Means of Grace (John 15). Then they will see the fruits of the Gospel. They will never receive or experience forgiveness apart from God's appointed Means of Grace. Despising the Means of Grace, a convenient term for the Gospel in its various forms, is opposition to God's Word.

God's will is accomplished only through His Word. People should let go of their slogans and marketing theories (all of which have failed) and listen to the Word, then apply it.

 Pete Wagner, mentor to Otten's favorite WELS pastor,
anticipated the dawn of the expert who is wrong about everything
and remains in a highly paid business, like
Karl Rove, Paul McCain, and Larry Olson.

Gay Schmeling? Luther Would Have Approved!

No, that is not my opinion.

A professor of women's studies has solemnly declared that Luther would have approved of gay Schmeling, the ELCA pastor disciplined for having a male partner.

An article about this can be found at

The American Spectator

Could this be another reason why LCMS and WELS members, peeking in the window at various pan-Lutheran conferences, no longer want to fund the ELCA disciples? Sure, gay Schmeling is being mildly disciplined, but various overlapping networks will protect and defend him. Nothing has really happened.

WELS Votes via the Offering Plate

Today, the WELS News bulletin insert gave the bar charts through June.

Michigan District: $890,289 down $99,681 from 2006 which is a $20,601 greater deficit from May ($79,080). So Michigan continues to fade.

Synod: $8,880,447 down $175,660 from 2006 but which is $121,920 more positive than the May deficit ($297,580). The synod appeal seems to be working a little bit in somewhere.

Only January and April (Easter) were on a par with 2006 with April somewhat greater (not in Michigan) for the synod totals...

Come on, Wayne, poke Michigan in the eye again. That really motivates giving.

Martin Luther Nursing Home and Live Bait Shop

Someone is sure that Martin Luther College (WELS) will continue forever, even without the preps feeding students into the school.

With both preps still in operation, MLC is already in desperate shape. The school has dropped below survival levels in its student population. Tuition = income = salaries. The synod has deliberately cut the subsidy, has no real endowment for the school, and is eliminating the feeder system for the school. Long ago, Fuller alumnus Norm Berg cut out the need for MLC by eliminating the parochial school from mission church budgets.

MLC is two colleges in one, pastoral and teacher training, but the enrollment is dropping from news of its future demise.

MLC may have trouble making it as a nursing home, so I propose selling live bait as well. Southern Minnesota is great for hunting and fishing. The lawns are a natural habitat for night-crawlers.

MLC might have survived by joining the online college revolution. My old community college asked me about my expertise in online teaching and web design. They already have large online classes, modeled after the University of Phoenix, somewhat larger with 300,000 students. UOP had enough cash to buy naming rights for the new stadium in Glendale, $7 million a year for 20 years, a small part of their budget. UOP began in 1976. MLC is older than dirt.

Couldn't the Church Growth Principles of Dr. Lawrence Otto Olson be applied to MLC? He wrote a dissertation on the topic. Sure, his own congregation never grew, but that is no problem for Church Growth fanatics.

Download Google Earth and put in the coordinates for MLC, Bethany Lutheran College, and Wisconsin Lutheran College. All three are close together. Two of them are lavishly funded by Schwan money. MLC is the exception. The college may hobble along from another fund drive and wait for a new synodical president to be their Dr. Kevorkian.

The Betrayers Betrayed - MLS

Closing the schools in WELS is clearly a Church Growth program. Not that the Church Growth leaders cause any real growth in the Kingdom. They just yak about it all the time. Church Growth is an ideology, a set of shallow doctrines, and an agenda.

President-in-waiting Wayne Mueller has always been a Church Growth advocate, even while denying it. How delicious it must be to deny Church Growth in The Northwestern Lutheran while promoting Church Growth in the synod.

I remember John Brug covering for David Valleskey on the subject of Church Growth. Now he wants the preps to stay open.

Paul Kuske started a Church Growth operation in Columbus, Ohio, in his capacity as VP of the district. To run this destructive cause he had Floyd Luther Stolzenburg, recently forced to resign from the LCMS ministerium (and never a member of WELS, by the way).

Now Brug and Kuske want to snatch MLS from the jaws of the Church Growth gurus!

WELS is a genius at management, I must say. They have been Management-By-Objective-zombies for at least 20 years, but Drucker wanted to encourage leadership wisdom, not synodical stupidity. The Brug report listed the large sums of money recently borrowed for MLS and Luther Prep. Wayne Mueller would close both schools, making them worthless, while still owing for such things as new boilers, science rooms, and dorms. The college would close, too, so that would make all the money spent on Martin Luther College another rat-hole. They recently reworked the heating system, perhaps in conjunction with New Ulm's steam tunnel project.

Now everyone is tongue-clucking. WELS wanted to move from small potatoes to the Big Time with Church Growth. All those who studied at Fuller, who bowed their heads at Willow Creek, who agreed by being silent, who shunned pastors that knew better - all those betrayers of the Gospel are being betrayed now. WELS will not be small potatoes. WELS will be tater tots.

The Catholic Momentum

I enjoy the encouraging messages sent. I mean the positive messages from normal people, but also the insanely angry messages sent under various false names. The second group motivates me the most, because, as my Grandpappy used to say, "When the arrow hits the mark, feathers will fly."

Various people pretend to be offended that I had a Catholic education, just like Martin Luther and the faculty of Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne. Look at the faculty list at Ft. Wayne. They live close to Notre Dame so they finished their Ph.D. work there. John Johnson, once the buddy of Herman Otten while serving as president of Concordia, St. Louis, had a doctorate from the Jesuits at St. Louis University. What the complainers miss is my lack of obedience to His Holiness, the Antichrist.

Faithful Lutheran pastors owe it to their congregations to be well read in heterodoxy without falling prey to it. That requires constant study while ignoring Holy Mother Synod most of the time.

The marginally literate have trouble distinguishing between hearing someone and following someone. Thus it is easy to find out who has studied at Fuller Seminary and Willow Creek because they blab about the same things with the same vocabulary. Waldo Werning had "Church Growth Eyes" in the subtitle of one of his moronic books. Did he study at Fuller? Yes, he admitted it and also denied it. Those who defend Fuller doctrine are predictably alumni (Frosty Bivens, David Valleskey, Lawrence Otto Olson, Wally Oelhaven, Fred Adrian, Kent Hunter). Those who follow have previously heard that new gospel, preached by angels of marketing (Galatians 1:8).

How Roman Catholic are the synods today? The best measure is to look at what they are doing. ELCA and the old Synodical Conference synods (WELS-ELS-LCMS) have:
1. Adopted the three-year lectionary from Rome.
2. Killed the traditional names of Sundays wherever possible.
3. Changed the liturgical colors to be more gay-friendly.
4. Competed to see which Roman Catholic customs they can incorporate.
5. Obsessed over the title bishop and Rome's claim to apostolic succession.
6. Longed for acceptance by Rome, even while called defective and wounded.

Many pastors have followed these trends because their peers were running off the cliff ahead of them. The Gadarene swine episode was not meant to be prescriptive, I might add. One pastor asked me to make my sermons fit the Roman cycle. I said, "Why not switch back to the historic pericopes?" The publishing houses make it easy to follow the worn path.

Lutheran worship can be solemn and liturgical without genuflecting toward Rome.

WELS Seminary Professor John Brug Supports MLS

WELS Seminary Professor John Brug, who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, has published a report in favor of Michigan Lutheran Seminary.

The PDF file can be found here:

Michigan Lutheran Seminary
along with additional material on the topic.

So far the synod's (Wayne Mueller's) answer has been that there is only one solution for the incompentence shown at the leadership levels - close the preps.

Everyone else seems to think otherwise. The district presidents and various assemblies oppose the closing of the preps, which will also close the college.

The booby-hatch pronouncements of the synod leaders have gutted the system, forcing tuition up by 30%, thus reducing the students and the tuition income. Now the whole system is tottering toward collapse while the booby-hatch leaders tell them - Have another Junk for Jesus Rummage Sale. Flogging will continue until morale improves.

ELCA Membership Tanking

ELCA NEWS SERVICE

July 19, 2007

ELCA Membership Drops 1.6 Percent to 4.8 Million in 2006 07-130-FI/LA*

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) had 4,774,203 baptized members in 10,470 congregations at the end of 2006, according to the Rev. Lowell G. Almen, ELCA secretary. Those figures represent decreases of 76,573 baptized members and 79 congregations since 2005.

The secretary's comparison of congregational statistics for 2005 and 2006 noted that confirmed membership in the ELCA declined in 2006 by 56,546 to 3,580,402.

In the past 16 years the ELCA lost approximately 466,000 baptized members from the 5,240,739 members reported in 1990, Almen said. More than two-thirds of the decline occurred between 2002 and 2006, with a combined decrease of 325,674 baptized
members, according to annual reports from congregations compiled by the ELCA Office of the Secretary.

Parochial reports showed the loss was because of a decrease in the number of new members, the disbanding of 40 congregations, and "roll cleaning" in many remaining congregations, Almen said. Roll cleaning resulted in a loss of 202,246 members in 2006 and a loss of 208,436 members in 2005. Those reductions occur when
long-inactive members, who indicate no interest in continued participation, are removed from the rolls of congregations, he explained.

Nineteen congregations with a combined baptized membership of 7,196 withdrew from the ELCA in 2006. One congregation with membership of 104 was removed.

The average number of people in worship on Sundays decreased slightly in 2006. A total 1,408,682 or 29.50 percent of all baptized ELCA members participated in worship each week. That percentage fluctuated in the ELCA between 30 and 31 percent in recent years.

The last time a gain of ELCA membership occurred was in 1991, with a net gain of 4,438 baptized members that year, Almen reported.

Baptisms, affirmations of faith and transfers from other Lutheran congregations accounted for fewer new members in 2006 than they did in 2005. There were 66,166 baptisms of children in 2006 -- down 1,486 from 67,652 in 2005. There were 52,357
affirmations of faith in 2006, compared to 53,961 in 2005. There were 71,110 transfers from Lutheran congregations in 2006 -- down 5,408 from 76,518 in 2005.

Adult baptisms decreased by 359 -- from 6,764 in 2005 to 6,405 in 2006. accessions from non-Lutheran congregations declined 1,003 -- from 17,794 in 2005 to 16,791 in 2006.

There were 1,513 fewer deaths of ELCA members -- 47,210 in 2005 to 45,697 in 2006. There were 3,176 fewer transfers to other Lutheran congregations -- from 53,429 in 2005 to 50,253 in 2006.

The average number of baptized members per congregation decreased in 2006 by four people to 459, and the average confirmed membership decreased by three people to 345.

For 2006, 3.15 percent of ELCA baptized members were identified as persons of color or persons whose primary language is not English, essentially unchanged from 2005, according to Almen.

-- -- --
A table summarizing annual statistics compiled by the ELCA Office of the Secretary is at http://www.ELCA.org/news/table.html on the Web.

* The Rev. Lowell G. Almen is secretary of the ELCA.

Synod Minders

Every event has synod minders. They are the loyalists who show up uninvited to snoop around whenever Lutherans might think on their own.

I attended a conservative Lutheran meeting with Al Barry shortly after he was elected. He made it sound as if it was a hardship to address the people who worked so hard to get him elected. In the back row were about 10 minders. Synod minders pounce on people for getting to close to the real issues. They report who is at the meeting.

The late Jack Preus said WELS had a regular KGB operation. Missouri was and is no different. The same is true of the smaller sects. Family ties make it easy to meddle with other congregations. The temptation is seldom resisted now.

There are many "secret" email lists. I explored one ELS pastor's website and got into the main directory, with a page not linked on the website. The page gave directions for getting the key to encrypted emails at the next ELS gathering.

If an email list is large enough, synod minders populate it. They pretend to be friendly to the cause so they can forward mail to the bosses at the Love Shack (WELS), the Little Sect on the Prairie (ELS), or Almost-ELCA (Missouri Synod).

Sometimes people cannot figure out whether a minder is deliberately gumming up everything or just felony stupid. Either way, the minder is helping out the synod. He may have to unbutton the last few buttons of his shirt to let his gut precede him into the room, but he is close with the bosses. Abused and neglected children, when they grow up, need that kind of attention.

Why Are Lutherans Poping, Semi-Poping, and Demi-Semi-Poping?

One reader wonders why Catholicism is so attractive to Lutheran pastors?

1. Poping means joining Rome, even becoming a priest, as Richard Neuhaus did.
2. Semi-poping means joining Eastern Orthodoxy: tastes great, less fulfilling.
3. Demi-semi-poping is my term for walking the tightrope between the Lutheran Church and popery.

The cause is three-fold.
A. Lutherans have lost their nerve. The leaders no longer believe in Luther's doctrine and the Book of Concord, the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. Many leaders bow to Fuller Seminary and Willow Creek, leaving others to think the answer is becoming a lapdog for the Antichrist.
B. Seminary faculty members delight in promoting their cause among their students, watching with pride when their students make the switch they are afraid to make.
C. Rome never stops its massive propaganda efforts.

Worship training centers at Notre Dame, so the football school has influenced as many denominations to obey Rome as Fuller has in the opposite direction. This is a real life example of Wayne Mueller's quotation from Luther (which he distorted and abused for his nefarious purpose). The crypto-papists stab their church in the back to save it from the Fuller monster. In fact, Fuller and Rome are two versions of the same false doctrine.

The new fever about Apostolic Succession is a good example of the Roman yeast at work. The crypto-papists can talk about Apostolic Succession and publish their papers without being too obvious about their longing to return to Holy Mother Rome. Some of the other discussions, such as the term bishop, are excellent ways to promote the agenda. They can point members toward Rome without naming the Holy Father, their leader. If everyone can keep yakking about non-essentials, the lack of doctrinal education can do its damage in time.