Future LCMS Synod President Harrison tried to make a rather stiff C.F.W. Walther look cool.
I have a much bigger audience now, apparently from posting gay videos and those photos of sultry young female entertainers. To take advantage of the surge in readership, here are some modest proposals for Lutherans:
- Each congregation will define its work in three categories only: liturgical worship, education, and visitation. Social activities will be allowed, but only as matters of supreme unimportance and indifference (as doctrinal issues were before the change).
- Liturgical worship will allow for absolutely no experiments aping the Pentecostal and Babtist Immersing Churches, because a confessional crisis does not allow the least compromise--even in matters of indifference--with false teachers.
- No discussions about "what we can get away with" will be allowed because the issue will shift from how many bongo drums drumming and fat cousins singing to the Book of Concord being violated. Book of Concord violations will be treated as questioning the Church Growth leaders used to be, subject to extending the Left Foot of Fellowship.
- Educational efforts will cease using modern, relevant, and edgy methods and focus on such irrelevant and antique notions as: Latin and Greek in the school, classical subjects (math, geography, history), a reliable Bible (KJV family of translations), the Book of Concord (no ELCA editions), and thoroughly dead authors and composers.
- Visitation will be the normal daily routine of the pastoral staff, with the senior pastor leading by example. Meetings will be called off with the explanation, "Sorry, I have visitations to do. A home-going pastor makes a church-going membership, you know." Shut-ins will be visited often, and hospital patients will always be visited at once.
- Sermons will be written out in advance and posted on the congregation's website or blog.
- The congregational library will include a fabulous selection of Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, Chytraeus, the Book of Concord, Loy, Reu, Jacobs, Krauth, and Schmauk material, with extra copies of Luther and the Book of Concord. Real cool, useful Church Growth books will be used as kindling under the next CG consultant sent to the parish.
- Lutheran hymns will be taught to the children and adults, their use dominating all worship services.
- District and synodical positions will be avoided and shunned as energetically as parish calls once were. Pastors will say, "My heart is really in the synodical office building, but I felt compelled to accept this call." Listeners will think, "He can't stand the synodical headquarters, but he will never admit it."
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Modest Proposal for Lutherans": I wish this stuff was in our Parish Planning plan. For $15,000, this is simpler and easier than their book of 100 pages! GJ- Parish Assistance Consultant - nice sound to it! PW
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GJ - Paul Kelm, izzat you?
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Modest Proposal for Lutherans":
More Amish, head in the sand, denial of the realities of living in the modern world. Oh yes, to ignore the realities of where Christians are in their daily lives and in their thirst to explore different methods of expression would escape you. You really do have nothing relevant to offer anyone, other than your continued anger at not having lived in the 19th century.
