Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Mark and Avoid Jeske Admires Mark and Avoid Drisco...":
"Nowhere is the connection between Driscoll’s hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Hill...Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a 'mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy' who attends Mars Hill. 'His answer was brilliant,' Driscoll reported. 'He said, ‘'I break their nose.'’ When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. 'They are sinning through questioning,' Driscoll preached." -- New York Times, "Who Would Jesus Smackdown?", 01/06/2009
More:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ReallySad1
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Time To Tell the Truth at St. Peter, Freedom, Wisc...":
As a member of St. Peter, I have every confidence in the ministries of Pastor Glende and Pastor Ski. I would go to war for them, and trust that they have hearts for God and for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ and him crucified. I have been a faithful, active member there for many years, and would hold their ministry up to any kind of examination. If there is false doctrine there, let us examine it - all we get here is guilt by association, smears, leering comments and condemnation.
To see the scurilous (sic) things posted on your site, to see that you allow people to say things like "I heard..." and have very little attribution, and try to condemn men who are trying to lead the lost to eternal life, is shameful, but then you need to decide how you want to conduct yourself.
If you want to continue in believing that salvation and eternal life can only be achieved by worship circa 1970 or before, and that all things God breathed can only be found on pages 5 or 15 of the Lutheran Hymnal, so be it.
Pastor Christenson left because he wanted to become the lead pastor, and also because he was not comfortable in a setting with a 1,000 members as St. Peter currently is. You may want to cast aspersions and try to make more of this then there is, if so, have at it. The truth does not live on this website, so you probably won't want to start now.
Maybe if you tried to enrich and engage the loveliness of the saving message of the gospel, instead of acting like wannabe Pharisees, you might have some positive effect on the kingdom. But that is not who you are - you will probably not even have the courage or intellectual guts to allow a comment like this here for others to consider.
No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices, and our Thursday evening and early Sunday morning service are tradional (sic). It just is so curious to me why so many who hold to the tradiotional (sic) methods of worship find the need to criticize other forms of worship.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Seattle's Mark Driscoll":
"No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices"
Baloney! Every church growther I have heard from says that the traditional worshiping/practicing Lutherans are the reason for the demise of the WELS and are getting in the way of saving souls. Open your eyes! None of this happens in a vacuum.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Seattle's Mark Driscoll":
"No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices"
Baloney! Every church growther I have heard from says that the traditional worshiping/practicing Lutherans are the reason for the demise of the WELS and are getting in the way of saving souls. Open your eyes! None of this happens in a vacuum.
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GJ - A constant in all Church Growth/Emerging Church presentations is the mockery of real worship as boring, ineffective, and standing in the way of real progress. I will dust off my Rick Miller (WELS) quotes to show how hoary with age those claims are.
Beside - Ski, Glende, Katie, Buske, Parlow, Patterson, and many others have a need to renew their Enthusiasm constantly through Schwaermer training. How telling it is that Ski flew down to Atlanta for Babtist Andy Stanley, only to run into Dan Deutschlander, who thought Ski was going to hear him speak. That gives new meaning to "mark and avoid" in WELS. Mark and avoid a Lutheran while posing giddily with a Babtist.
Glende got his initial training or influence from Floyd Luther Stolzenburg, who was kicked out of the LCMS ministry and hired to be a Church Growth consultant for WELS in Columbus, Ohio. Stolzenburg landed at St. Paul, German Village, where Glende's parents worked.
12 comments:
Anonymous St. Peter member, are you going on record (as much as any anonymous person can) that you spoke directly to Pastor Christenson and he told you that his leaving was in no way connected to contentions over doctrine and practice at St. Peter and The Core?
"No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices"
Baloney! Every church growther I have heard from says that the traditional worshiping/practicing Lutherans are the reason for the demise of the WELS and are getting in the way of saving souls. Open your eyes! None of this happens in a vacuum.
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The church growthers like to switch their mantras a lot: 1) "traditional service is boring, turns off the youth, etc," then it's 2) "traditional pastors are lazy and don't care about the lost" mantra, then it's 3) etc.
“To see the scurilous (sic) things posted on your site, to see that you allow people to say things like "I heard..." and have very little attribution, and try to condemn men who are trying to lead the lost to eternal life, is shameful, but then you need to decide how you want to conduct yourself.”
Whom are you kidding? We have photographic evidence, and Ski’s own words that he is crazy about women. Your pastors specialize in reaching out to hot, young women. Ski has given new meaning to ‘laying on of hands.’ Who is being disingenuous and deceitful?
Anonymous St. Peter member,
Would you not call opening a mission one block from an established, traditional WELS congregation an insult to their practices? How dense are you? Would you not call Ski openly mocking traditional preaching on his website (until he was forced to take it down) an attack on traditional worship?
Also, you are not the only one who has spoken to Pastor Christensen since he left. I did too. He did NOT leave because he wanted to be lead pastor or was uncomfortable in a large congregation (if he'd wanted to be lead pastor, or if he thought he would be uncomfortable, why would he have taken an associate call to a large congregation in the first place?). He left because of a lack of law and gospel preaching, which has been supplanted in your church and Ski's entertainment theater with church growth principles and by preaching dominated by 3rd use of the law instead of law and gospel. You are simply brainwashed by a couple of charlatans, and nothing else. People in your congregation can't even get straight answers about why their pastor left. What does that say? You are being led by men who believe that they and their methods are more important than God's Word, so they copy sermons from Baptists and non-denominationals who they think have the right stuff.
"I have been a faithful, active member there for many years, and would hold their ministry up to any kind of examination."
If I recall correctly, your Ski and Glende had a problem with telling the truth as to what conference they were attending. Apparently, you have no concerns about such behavior. I am not sure that your reference means very much.
Dear Anonymous Member of St. Peter's,
I read with interest your letter to Dr. Jackson, and took particularly interest in two points that you made. Others picked up on these points, as well. I'll add my thoughts.
You state: No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices, and our Thursday evening and early Sunday morning service are tradional (sic).
This is not true. Fundamental to a move away from any given practice is to express a need to do so. For decades, the prevailing concern was the need to be relevant to a changing society, to young people in particular, by catering to their entertainment dependencies. To express such need is to be critical of current practice, as insufficient or "ineffective" by some measure. Until only recently, this was the primary reason given for any move away from traditional practices: “We need to for the survival of the Church” or “We need to for the sake of evangelism.” Questionable even when these claims were made, today, these reasons are manifestly farcical.
Under the earnest appeals of evangelists trained in the methods of the Church Growth Movement – by far the prevailing methodology taught in American Christianity over the past generation – nearly all of pop-church Evangelicalism adopted these supposedly necessary anthropocentric changes in Worship practice. The case that was made for the necessity of anthropocentrism was theoretical. That case can no longer be made with any credibility. The last five years have seen the manifest implosion of Evangelicalism – as a direct result of CGM theories put into practice, as a result of divorcing practice from doctrine, of becoming doctrinally ambivalent, and of using practice, not as an outworking of doctrine, not as definite public Confession, but as a means of building organizations, the vacuum created by CGM finally shattered Evangelicalism. It has seen dramatically precipitous decline in the past five years. As general proof, ask yourself what happened to the Evangelical voice during the last two election seasons – especially the last season. It was entirely absent. The reason? No money, no leadership, no people. They are leaving in droves. And they are heading two directions: the liturgical church and the emergent church -- and of great surprise to everyone has been the strong representation of young people, searching for depth, among those heading to churches with strong liturgical practice. It is so bad, that last year the Southern Baptists began producing materials for the celebration of Advent and Lent, to keep from losing members to churches that celebrate these seasons of the traditional church calendar. This is notable, given that Baptists are sectarian, not catholic, striving to avoid in their doctrine and practice all elements suggestive of catholicity. They do not have a history of observing the traditional church calendar. The fact is, Barna Research – the primary clearinghouse of Church Growth related “market research” and support materials over the past generation – officially declared Church Growth a statistical failure. These practices do not produce growth as theorized, but quite the opposite, they produce shrinkage. The so-called need to be supposedly relevant to a changing society, by directly importing secular cultural elements and adopting them as church practice, while never standing on firm theoretical ground, is now a demonstrably false need. To repeat, argument can no longer be made with any credibility.
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You go on to state: It just is so curious to me why so many who hold to the tradiotional (sic) methods of worship find the need to criticize other forms of worship.
The case heard more often these days, isn't a need, but a preference for entertainment-grade worship experiences. Again, this notion celebrates the complete divorce of doctrine from practice, and, significantly, the separation of practice from Confession. It also relies on the false notion that all practice is completely free, with no limits or requirement that any factor other than preference be involved. It is also manifestly anthropocentric – as much as any argument from the standpoint of supposed need is. Proceeding according to the idea that "practice is merely preference," those resistant to change are discredited by being labeled spiritual weaklings, and marginalized either by condescending to slowly changing or by having their concerns ignored altogether.
But when one agrees that doctrine is not separate from practice, but that practice descends from doctrine, and, in particular, when it is understood that practice is a critical element of making a common Confession, it is clear that there are many important factors involved, and that preference is, in reality, only a minor factor. The fact is, what we, as WELS Lutherans, confess in common is not generically the Bible, but something specific that we say the Bible says. We make this Confession not because it is a membership requirement that we agree to with the same unceremonious regard we have for signing, say, a non-compete agreement with our employer, but as a matter of Christian conscience. It is a specific Confession that sharply differentiates us from other confessions, such as Roman, Anglican, Reformed, Arminian, etc. Carrying with it the force of conscience, we stand on our Confession with resolute certainty, even as Luther and others, in the face of death. It is not an insignificant thing, but a weighty matter to make a Public Confession – it is tied directly to our identity as individuals, and integral to our entire Worldview.
What's more, we all make this same Confession, together. No Lutheran congregation has the freedom to indicate, either by its words or by its practice, that it confesses anything other than our own confession. To do so makes us all a participant in the false confession of the heterodox, and violates the conscience of every Christian in our Synod. This means that, for the sake of unity (for its continued strength among us, and its credibility before the world), we voluntarily and unanimously avoid practices and phrases that would blur the sharp doctrinal divisions that exist between us and the heterodox. For example, while the practice of immersion is just as efficacious as sprinkling or affusion, for the sake of Confession in the face of the false teachings of immersionists, we forcefully reject this practice as forbidden by God – as we are enjoined in the Formula of Concord, Article X. Baptism isn't the only practice impacted by Public Confession, and for the sake of doctrinal and Confessional unity, we not only have the right, but the obligation to examine one another's practices. We are not free to engage in heterodox practices, as if there is no confessional division between us and the heterodox.
Honestly, this whole issue was dealt with, in depth, over on Bailing Water last year. A good summary of that extended discussion was compiled by a layman, and published on Ichabod and on Bailing Water earlier this year, An Open Letter to WELS - From a Layman. I would recommend that you read every word and follow every link of that letter -- it will explain much regarding these questions that you have.
Freddy Finkelstein
Imagine you googled WELS and St Peter and up pops Ichabod.
Can you understand what someone must think when they start reading and seeing pictures of their pastors plastered all over the screen?
Anger, frustration, denial, defensivness...
Give them a break-- encourage them to critque the sermons (give them tools to test a good sermon), gently explain the problems.
Love your fellow believer/brother/christian and pray for them.
Members also have a responsibility to take their pastors aside when they get out of line. Someone needs to guide and counsel them in a constructive before they hurt other churches.
This goes beyond the feelings of members. Absent correction from members, other churches must step up and drive home the point.
"No one at St. Peter or the CORE is criticizing traditional WELS worship or its practices"
That is news to me. I have worshipped at St Peter's. When I was one of you, or shall I say, taking a wait and see attitude to what is now in full bloom, I heard the following comments throughout WELS, not specifically at St. Peters.
More than once and spoken severely and harshly against confessionalism with words like...."dead orthodoxy", "lazy", "institutionalized", "mind numb", "no zeal for the lost" and a host of others that I have heard from laity and pastors in WELS.
You must be kidding.
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