The dread LutherQuest [sic] Discussion Group is dissecting the latest loss of LCMS pastors to Rome and Constantinople. The recent Ft. Wayne graduate who was thirsty for Eastern Orthodoxy had a friend equally thirsty for Roman Catholicism. The loss is not in clergy but in the laity damaged. Many Missouri members refuse to acknowledge the current of Roman/EO bewitchment. As one LCMS pastor on my email list wrote, the group email discussions in Missouri are saturated with crypto-Romanism. He used the term sacerdotalism, but I think crypto-Romanism is a better description. Neuhaus said he became the Roman Catholic he always was. Apparently Jaroslav Pelikan said the same thing about Eastern Orthodoxy, after he joined. (We used to see Pelikan every week at Bethesda, New Haven, Connecticut, just down the hill from Yale Divinity School.)
A WELS member just had to weigh in on the LQ [sic] thread and crow about how pure his sect is:
This thread is a powerful reminder of the gem the WELS has in its ministerial education system and the rich blessings God gives to us through it.
Username: Sames
Full Name: Steve Ames
E-mail Address: steve.ames2@verizon.net
Last Logged In: May 26, 2008
Registered: November 27, 2004
Total Posts: 1383
Status: Senior Member
Denomination: WELS
Positions Held (elder, pastor, layman, teacher, etc.): layman
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I noticed that a Gurgel (not the fugitive), on the faculty of the Sausage Factory in Mequon, is earning a D.Min. in preaching. The school is not named in the WELS worship bulletin. I doubt whether Mequon has a D.Min. program. That would be another degree of theological incest. Imagine - graduates of an unaccredited college and seminary, holding unaccredited M.Div.s, conducting a unaccredited D.Min. program. The D.Min. is a recycled S.T.M. degree. The seminaries were no longer attracting post-grad students to S.T.M. programs, so they started D.Min. degrees. Ministers flocked to take these degrees, so they--like Kincaid Smith and Larry Olson--could call themselves doctor. The D.Min. at Fuller Seminary, where Dr. Olson studied, has minimal requirements, as he admitted in his confession published in Christian News.
Smith's D.Min. at Ft. Wayne was in Church Growth. The whole program was Church Growth, as he confessed in a conversation. Under Dr. Robert Preus? Oh yes. His seminary faculty endorsed Church Growth principles - in writing.
The Sausage Factory is taking it to a new level, as the management experts say, if they are admitting that their instructors are studying at other religious institutions. Once that position is taken more publicly and defended by the infallible faculty, the dam will break. WELS pastors will scramble for more D.Min.s from Baptist, Pentecostal, and Unitarian schools. They have been doing this for decades, but the facts will be finally out in the open. Richard Krause was the circuit pastor and getting an ecumenical D.Min. 20 years ago. Dr. Krause's advisor was none other than Dr. Larry Olson, D.Min.
The WELS gems of the ministerial education system are turning out lumps of coal. Anyone can reckon that a system turning out future Baptist and Pentecostal ministers is deeply flawed and doctrinally corrupt. When Paul Kelm (D.Min., Concordia, St. Louis) was an adjunct at Wisconsin Lutheran College, his course promoting Reformed doctrine was required for graduation.
