are feminist theologians of the LCMS.
In WELS, Kathie Wendland
is filling the same role.
Necessary Roughness
Pray for a Synod United with the Word
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod will hold its triennial convention July 10-17. It will take up initiatives that would, without exaggeration, significantly alter the ways that the LCMS conducts business and reflect a theology of how our churches work that is different than what the LCMS has confessed in the past. Consolidated power, proportional representation for larger congregations, less lay representation, and hiding debt through board restructuring are all in play.
Such things will be decided by people smarter than I am. Pray for them.
The current Synodical President, who is seeking reelection, asks in his June 2010 (PDF) issue of “President’s Leadership News” that the delegates in Houston meet with Ephesians 4:1-6 in mind, “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (verse 3). This is a good goal.
We must acknowledge that any such unity of the church and with the church must be maintained by submitting our reason and judgments to the Word of God, and in our case, the Lutheran Confessions. A group of people can be united in confession yet confess something other than what the Holy Spirit has intended for us to know. The ELCA becomes more and more united as those who protest the actions last August in Minneapolis leave. Unity is no virtue unless it is united with the Word of God.
In my short stint as an LCMS layman who travels on behalf of his employer, I have seen things firsthand that would indicate we in the LCMS are not united with each other and with the Word of God. Some of these been blogged about:
- Removal of basic teachings such as the Creeds and the Lord’s Prayer from the worship service without comparable replacements, most often during “contemporary worship”,
- A lay minister who did not vest while officiating a service of Holy Communion and preached on the parable of the Ten Virgins without delivering the Gospel,
- A vicar who preached on Jonah 3 without mentioning baptism or the Gospel,
- A pastor whose sermon topic was a Mardi Gras parade,
- A pastor who had no theoretical qualms with using elements other than bread and wine for Holy Communion,
- A church that separated kids from the Divine Service,
- Sermons where the only identifiable sin was not telling others about Jesus,
- And others.
Other bloggers have reported on other and greater divergences from the Word and the Confessions, most notably lately Frank Gillespie’s detailed report on a Prayer and Spiritual Formation Workshop that not only plagiarized a good article by Pr. Bill Cwirla on Confession and Absolution but then went on to teach outright mysticism in the name of the Southeast District of the LCMS.
The LCMS is not simply arguing among itself in matters of women’s ordination, open communion, worship forms, administrative structure, and how we represent the Biblical faith to our Christian brothers of differing theological opinions. We are divided in our ability to preach Christ crucified for sinners. We are divided in our ability to confess the faith. We are divided in our fealty to Holy Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.
As the convention begins in a few days, pray for our delegates, that they may hear the Word of God and the Lutheran Confessions and that they may employ the whole counsel of God to confess the faith and to administrate the Synod in accordance with that faith. These are wounds which cannot continue to be healed lightly.
