ICHABOD, THE GLORY HAS DEPARTED - explores the Age of Apostasy, predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, to attack Objective Faithless Justification, Church Growth Clowns, and their ringmasters. The antidote to these poisons is trusting the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Isaiah 55:8ff. Romans 10. Most readers are WELS, LCMS, ELS, or ELCA. This blog also covers the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Left-wing, National Council of Churches denominations.
http://pastorrickjohnson.blogspot.com/2007/08/wels-convention.html
From a WELS pastor's blog site, recent books read, the first two are:
Just Walk Across the Room by Bill Hybels (Church Growth hero - Willow Creek Community Church, where WELS pastors are trained)
The Gospel According to Starbucks by Leonard Sweet/done (Church and Change apostates love Sweet).
Oh, Luther was not on the list.
Special Report
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11885
The Race and the Not-So-Swift
By Lars Walker (AFLC)
Published 8/17/2007 12:07:54 AM
Like all conservatives, I've been called a Nazi more than once. But only once in my life did I feel like a Nazi.
I had a job as a church secretary in a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, this country's largest Lutheran body. One of the annual duties we all hated was completing the mandatory statistical reports. This was unpleasant partly because it involved going over a lot of records (total membership, number of communion acts, number of baptisms, etc.). But it was also morally noxious.
Because one section of the forms dealt with ethnicity. It required us to go through the entire congregational roll, name by name, and determine to what ethnic group we would assign each member.
Our senior pastor, a splendid old saint (now gone to his reward) without a corpuscle of bigotry in his body, nevertheless saw no problem in applying the old Jim Crow rule to the problem: "One touch of the tar-brush makes you colored." Thus, if someone casually mentioned to him that one of their great-great-grandmothers had been a Cherokee, the pastor would have us mark them down as "Native American." This looked good on the forms, since the ELCA was then -- and remains today -- desperate to be "diverse."
I CAME ACROSS A news item from the Christian Post Reporter the other day, concerning diversity efforts in the ELCA. It says that the denomination's constituting convention (1987) adopted the goal "that within ten years of its establishment its membership shall include at least 10 percent people of color and/or primary language other than English."
At that time their minority membership stood at 2 percent. By 1997, when the 10 years had passed, that percentage had skyrocketed to 2.13 percent. By December 2005 they were able to boast a whopping 3 percent membership of pretty-much-anything-except-Germans-or-Scandinavians.
Someone anonymous posted that the Wisconsin Synod worships Luther (as I supposedly do). Now that is truly funny on both counts. First of all, I do not worship Luther. He is the finest Christian theologian of all time. I have read enough theologians - from Augustine and Aquinas (both in Latin) to the modernists like Rahner, Tillich, Barth, and Olson - to say that with confidence and credibility.
I agree with Walther - the closer to Luther, the better the theologian.
One ELS pastor was sounding off about Luther, so I asked, "How much Luther have you read?" The answer was - not much at all. He was simply repeating what he remembered others had said.
I wonder about the number of Lutheran pastors who seem to avoid reading Luther at all. I check the footnotes and endnotes of books and papers I read. Seldom is there a serious grappling with Luther's work.
I published something about studying footnotes in Christian News. An ELS professor came into the Little Library on the Prairie and began quoting me out loud. He died soon after. That just shows how dangerous it is to read my publications.
I never saw anyone in WELS show the slightest knowledge of Luther's doctrine. Just the opposite was true. The heritage of Wauwatosa seems to be a self-inflated ego that declares the truth of a small sect to be something marvelous to behold. Wauwatosites do not need commentaries, Luther, or even the Book of Concord. They are so expert that they can extract pure gold from the Scriptures. Just ask them. Don't even bother - they will say so.
No wonder they fell for Fuller's fatuous fables. They were Biblical and conservative (antinomian Universalists, in reality) so they would grow faster than the national debt if they just got the marketing going.
In the Collected Heresies of WELS (Wauwatosa, 3 vol., Our Great Heritage [sic], 3 vol.) is the opinion that they do not really have a quia subscription to the Book of Concord. Those same great minds expect their memos and letters to be norma normans (the ruling norm). That is no hyperbole. One WELS pastor was excommunicated by a letter because he insisted on the efficacy of the Word alone (apart from the personality of the pastor). An administrative drone sent the letter, ex cathedra, I imagine.
The two Kokomo families were kicked out of WELS the same way. They would not pledge fidelity to the Kokomo Statements, authored by the Holy Spirit Himself at WELS headquarters, so they were outsted. WELS then denied their own statements. Sorry, buddies, I held the originals in my hand and got Xerox copies of them. The letter is copied verbatim in Thy Strong Word.
New President Now CLU-less
Here is a puzzler from the ELCA news blog - The president of California Lutheran University resigned after a whole year on the job. No explanation was given.
No News Is Bad News
Another enigma - Now that ELCA's bishop has almost his entire agenda in place, no news is posted at ELCA news archives. They put in links for the boring, daily trivia of the Chicago convention. Afterwards I expected some kind of chest-thumping from another triumphalist synod. But no.
My intuition - The "Do not discipline gay couples in the parsonage" resolution hit the congregations hard. One hint is that a number of ELCA clergy on the ALPB (liberal) chat website claimed no one asked about it at church on Sunday. I thought, "Whistling past the graveyard?" More likely the rage is so great that people took other routes to vent. Why not phone the bishop, the archbishop, or go straight to the top - Paul McCain?
The Chicago Sun-Times headlined the news as "Huge Victory for Gay Clergy."
http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/religion/507255,CST-NWS-luth12.article
More will happen after this, but the resolution is the turning point where ELCA members found out what a swindle their denomination is. WELS and LCMS leaders will continue to work with ELCA, but be even more secretive and deceptive about their plans.
According to one of the activist blogs, Archbishop Hanson (ELCA) has always been in favor of ordaining homosexuals and performing gay marriages in the church. He was coy about his agenda before. Now it is mostly in place. Herb Chilstrom had a similar platform during his sad, sick regime.
Watch for these news releases from WELS-LCMS-ELS:
1. Plenty of pseudo-sorrow over the degenerate ELCA convention.
2. Nothing about WELS-LCMS-ELS working with ELCA. Nothing. Not a word.
Ichabod does not sleep: he waits. Another blog has appeared, Wauwatosa Vivit.
http://wauwatosagospel.blogspot.com/2007/08/attempting-definition.html
Peter Prange is the author. He loves Bach's music. I am not sure why he quotes Mark Jeske, whose name makes Lutherans shriek with pain.
The site is well designed with excellent photographs of Wisconsin Synod heroes. If someone wants to understand the Wisconsin Synod, this site is a good way to start.