Look for the Union Label

Norm Teigen

"The gathering was at the the Swedish church. It was very well received by all who were in attendance. The presiding minister was Jerry Lanes, the pastor of Scandian Grove.

I wish that I had been able to attend. I am happy to report that the Norselanders, both Swedish and Norwegian, both ELCA and ELS, joined together in singing praises to God on the occasion of their anniversary."

***

GJ - I could never sing with an ELCA congregation. When I was at a Concordia, Ft. Wayne worship service, George Orvick and W. Peterson were singing with the Missouri Synod. They said to me afterwards, "Don't tell. We couldn't help singing."

The Wisconsin Synod works with ELCA and Missouri on a wide variety of religious projects, including joint worship and evangelism efforts. Clucketh not thy tongue at the Little Sect on the Prairie.

The conservative Episcopalians are doing the opposite, showing their disgust toward their leadership, which happens to work hoof-and-claw with ELCA.

One Small Step for a Woman, One Giant Leap for Apostasy

Presiding Bishop and Bishop

WELS Women Ministers

The Episcopalians started the same way, with baby steps.


The WELS women staff ministers' list can be found here.

Staff ministry began as a project of Larry Olson (DMin, Fuller Seminary) at Martin Luther College. Fuller ordains women and has a special committee to beat up men who have problems with women being ministers. They must have thumped Larry pretty thoroughly.

Many WELS pastors say, "Larry Olson is no problem. Everyone knows he's a false teacher."

That is why he is teaching at Martin Luther College.

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Bruce Church has left a new comment on your post "WELS Women Ministers":

Hi Dr. Jackson,

How women take over the seminaries and clergy is mostly by feminizing the churches and seminaries. Boys flee feminine environments. Now the Reformed Jewish seminaries are two-thirds female.

Colleges are the same way. They are 60% female and becoming more female all the time. Universities are allowed to have Black clubs and women's clubs, but men's clubs are strictly verboten. More importantly, in the formative years of grade school and junior high school, most of the teachers are women. Boys get the idea that academics is for girls and women.

One could say that families were feminized by the courts and laws, so that women alone could decide whether to have a child or not, and whether the man would live at home or live somewhere else and have a portion of his pay sent to the family by court order. Anyway, men have been running from families, too.

The Reformed are one of the liberal Jewish denominations, and now two-thirds of their seminarians are women:

Study: Non-Orthodox men less connected than women to Judaism
Jun. 18, 2008, by Matthew Wagner, THE JERUSALEM POST


The study, entitled "Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent: Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life" and released by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, found that women have been taking an increasingly more dominant role in Jewish rites. As a result, the phenomenon of "Ima on the bima" (mom on the podium) has become the rule rather than the exception in liberal Jewish settings.

"When it comes to gender equality or gender balance, contemporary American Jewish life is caught between a rock and a hard place," said co-author Daniel Parmer, a Brandeis graduate student. "Boys and men as a group are not attracted to feminized Jewish activities and environments."

In contrast, Orthodox Judaism, which has not integrated women into traditionally male roles such as rabbinical ordination and leading prayers, has managed to maintain the masculine connection to religious devotion.

In their conclusion, Fishman and Parmer suggested that the increasingly dominant role played by women in Jewish activities might be turning boys and men off. The authors suggested that initiatives more geared toward Jewish men and boys could help strengthen the frayed masculine Judaic connection.

"Excellent coed and single sex programs and activities may be particularly important in the middle school and teen years, when boys in liberal Jewish settings often grow most impatient with female religious and educational leadership," they went on. "Ironically the women's movement - responding to great gaps in Jewish life - has often created successful materials and programming for female teens, while teenage boys have often been left behind."

Fishman and Parmer noted in their introduction to the study, which was based on 300 interviews, that outside the Orthodox world men are becoming less and less engaged in every aspect of Jewish life, from the home to the synagogue to communal organizations.

"In Fall 2005, women outnumbered men two to one in the entering rabbinical class in the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). Nationally, girls and women outnumber men in weekly non-Orthodox worship services, in adult education classes, in volunteer leadership positions, and in Jewish cultural events," they said.

***

GJ - Yes, Bruce Church is right. Higher education is now 60-40 women, reversing the old ratio. Women are the high achievers in academics (another reversal). Women are easing out men in most leadership positions in higher education, too. Half of my bosses at one school have been women. In religious studies, women are going to have the advantage in hiring at most schools because men held most of the posts before. Society must favor certain quotas in order to maintain social justice, we are told. At Intel in Phoenix, the best student interns and the best computer people are not hired because they do not fit into the 40 diversity categories.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "WELS Women Ministers":

Those female staff minister positions are ridiculous and so are some of the male staff minister positions. I have a difficult time comprehending how they can say these are "Divine Calls".

What is interesting is that the synod yearbook separates male and female teachers (both active and retired) but classifies both male and female "staff ministers" together.

I'm sorry; I just cannot buy into the staff ministry "Calls"...especially the female ones. What a mislabeling...
sorry.... perhaps they should be labeled "pastor wannabee".
no disrespect intended but this really bothers me.

"Minister of Administration"?????

A "Divine Call" to be a "Minister of Administration"??????
Think about it.

Ichabodians Can Track Their Favorite BlogWith Technorati

Higher Things

One reader told me about Technorati, which tracks how blogs are mentioned and quoted.

Click here for the Ichabod link.

I have noticed instant responses to Ichabod posts. The Leonard Sweet fan in Corona, California removed his gushing review of Sweet overnight when I mentioned the WELS connection to the heresiarch. The Life Coach on the the staff of the Kelm-Parlow beehive had her job changed just as swiftly. The Moose Report snorted and pawed the ground repeatedly, after being quoted. How unfair, to quote someone verbatim!

Like all Church Growth Enthusiasts, they want to chatter without pause about their favorite heresies and curse the conservatives who know better.

Meanwhile, people are using all kinds of combinations of Ichabod and something else to access this blog through Google and AOL.

L P Cruz - Guest Writer

Ft. Wayne graduates, Eldonites. Do we look Eastern Orthodox?

L P Cruz

"Pr. GJ,

Thanks for blogging you keep many of us sane.

I linked to your post on the EO migration from a certain seminary here

Why I Prefer Uni Education

LPC"


Thursday, June 26, 2008
See why I prefer uni education?

[Updated]

Ichabod blogged a couple of months on how a seminary can have grave influence on its graduates for good or ill. It all depends on who is teaching.

In one of his posts, he blogged about a recent graduate from a "confessing" seminary here; the gentleman is said to be just one of the many who have either journeyed to Rome or Constantinople. The thought is this - it alleges that the said seminary produces graduates who eventually abandon the "confession". Ironic, if it were true, then this suggests that it seems to produce more defectors than defenders of the "confession".

A few months ago, I said why I prefer university education over seminary when it comes to ministerial training here. Did you get my point why I prefer university education?

You see in a university education - when it comes to theology at least there you recognize right away your "enemy". In the university, the liberals let you know right away that they do not believe the Bible is revelation, they tell you it is a work of myth etc. etc. In that respect the liberals are more ethical compared to Christian professors in seminaries. Liberals show their colors right away. In seminaries you do not know the "moles" or the "in-plants", it is so easy to hide behind the smoke and jargon.
Posted by L P Cruz at 9:01 PM Labels: education
9 Dialogs:

William Weedon said...
I'd be curious if you could substantiate that it produces "more defectors than defenders." I suspect that's a gross overstatement. If two or three left from every class over the last 10 years, how would that amount to more than the numerous pastors who remain in the Lutheran Church's ministerium?

1:39 AM

***

GJ - Go to Extra Nos for all the comments. The claim is easy to substantiate. In the LCMS, no one is defending Lutheran Orthodoxy and refuting Rome/Constantinople or Church Growth. If one pastor is, then the outflow is already larger than the defenders. Someone refuted the Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox position. Concordia Publishing House refused to print the book. NPH (WELS) refused to print it. Otten barely mentioned it during the pope's visit, but Otten is very good at promoting Baptist books.

Prancing around the doctrinal issues has become the Merry Widows Walz of the 21st Centry. "Those who marry the spirit of this age will find themselves widows in the Age to Come."

Larry Olson (DMin, Fuller Seminary) bragged that more LCMS men went to Fuller Seminary for graduate education than went to the two seminaries for advanced work. Missouri is doing a great job recruiting for Fuller, but WELS is too. Larry teaches Enthusiasm at Martin Luther College in New Ulm. Like his mentor, David Valleskey, he has made a career out of shrinking the synod through Church Growth methods.

Pietism - The Rosetta Stone of the Lutheran Church

Pietistic Lutherans Are Symbolized by a Two-Headed Calf:
One Head Points Toward Rome and Constantinople;
The Other Head Cranes Toward Fuller Seminary and Willow Creek.

The adult study last Sunday was about Pietism, a movement started by Jakob Spener and continued by Franke at Halle University. The Muhlenberg Lutherans (LCA branch of ELCA) came from Pietism. Walther was converted by Pietism. The Swedish Augustana Synod was honestly Pietistic. The Norwegians (ALC and ELS) were Pietistic. Spener could not be criticized by Lutherans, even when they critiqued Pietism, as Walther did.

Some attributes of Pietism are:

1. An urge to work with the Reformed.
2. A willingness to jettison the Means of Grace.
3. An emphasis on works and love - sanctification being the cause of justification rather than the result of justification, as Hoenecke observed.
4. An anti-Confessional spirit.
5. Anti-intellectualism, smugly claiming their heart religion is better than the orthodox head religion (a false and ridiculous claim).
6. Missions should take away school funding because missions are for them, while schools are for us. Anti-intellectualism is the fuel for this folly.
7. Contempt toward all traditional worship as worship when the time could be used for evangelizing the unchurched.
8. Conventicles: cell, share, care, koinonia, Bible study, soul, groups (lay led, often by women) are the real church. When cell groups worship on Sunday, they give the service integrity because the conventicles are colleges of piety within the visible organization.

Pietism is the Rosetta Stone of Lutherans today because the movement explains why one head is aimed at Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, the other at Fuller and Willow Creek.

Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy teach works as a pre-requisite for justification, in harmony with the Pietists. Officially, Rome has a library full of confessions and canonical law, but Rome is essentially anti-confessional because the one unifying issue is membership in Holy Mother Church.

Eastern Orthodoxy has most of the trappings and errors of Rome plus several advantages. Clergy can be married before ordination (not after). Eastern Orthodoxy is officially non-confessional.

All the synods train their workers in Pietism, so their turn to Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy, Willow Creek, and Fuller Seminary is logical and fore-ordained.

The attributes of Pietism fit Fuller and Willow Creek perfectly. Both places are also inordinately proud of their proofs of sanctification.

The two heads of the calf (a real photo, by the way) are the two versions of Pietism. One is high church, smells and bells, lavender shirts with red buttons, loud resounding titles for their mini-bishops and mini-deans. The other is low church, just as haughty about their Hawaiian shirts, pit bands, prayer and praise services, and Pastors Bob and Ruth titles.