Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Worship and Lectionaries - Also Worth a Post on Lu...":
Luther sagt:
"Let everyone, therefore, who knows himself to be a Christian, be assured of this, that we are all equally priests, that is to say, we have the same power in respect to the Word and the sacraments. However, no one may make use of this power except by the consent of the community or by the call of a superior. (For what is the common property of all, no individual may arrogate to himself, unless he is called.) And therefore this “sacrament” of ordination, if it is anything at all, is nothing else than a certain rite whereby one is called to the ministry of the church. Furthermore, the priesthood is properly nothing but the ministry of the Word—the Word, I say; not the law, but the gospel. And the diaconate is the ministry, not of reading the Gospel or the Epistle, as is the present practice, but of distributing the church’s aid to the poor, so that the priests may be relieved of the burden of temporal matters and may give themselves more freely to prayer and the Word. For this was the purpose of the institution of the diaconate, as we read in Acts 5 [6:1–6]."
Note also AC XIV: Ordination maketh not the pastor. The divine call maketh the pastor.
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GJ - I wonder why some want to insist "ordination is not a sacrament." The Book of Concord disagrees with that claim. I find Lutherans staking a claim on one little part of the plant and calling it the entire Church, something Krauth observed about the sectarians.
If "the call makes the pastor," then almost everyone in WELS is a pastor. Everyone gets a call, even the kindergarten teacher.
WELS and the ELS enablers did their best to enforce a Reformed view of the pastoral ministry. The worst Shrinkers are the ones who are quick to correct anyone who fails to use their terms their way, but they are happy to dream away in Fuller Fantasy land.
The WELS view of the ministry can be called Papo-Babtist. They are eager to be little popes in their parish, but their doctrine is Babtist lite.
