Mequon graduate DP Wille (LCMS) is hosting another Sweet conference.
Wille is buddies with Jeske, no surprise.
Rogue Lutheran gave me the link to this podcast by Ingrid Schleuter, CrossTalk. Click on the September 9th date and the listen link. I used Windows Media player.
I tried to get more information about Ingrid. She is a conservative Christian, perhaps LCMS. [GJ - Corrections will be made later.] This is the first podcast I have listened to. The program is well done and especially good for people who are more likely to listen than to read a lot of material.
WELS and Missouri have been bowing before Leonard Sweet for some time. When Church and Change was debating the Sweet invitation (and Kelm would not respond), the Chicago stealth mission pastor for WELS had already heard Sweet and loved him.
Once I linked a video that Concordia Seminary, St. Louis posted - featuring Sweet and their seminary president, who almost crawled into Sweet's lap to lick his face. It was disgusting. Strangest of all, Concordia was so proud of this performance that they had to share it with everyone.
While WELS and Missouri are celebrating how conservative they are - an old story with no evidence behind it - Sweet remains their cutting edge theologian. I hate the term cutting edge too, but trite synods love trite labels, and that one fits. Sweet is the ultimate leader of the circumcision party.
Sweet is the litmus test of Christianity. If a synod can sponsor him, welcome him, sit at his feet, promote his loathsome books, that synod is apostate. Has anyone in WELS or Missouri been disciplined for promoting this pagan?
SP Schroeder and SP Harrison will not do the most important part of their jobs - enforce doctrinal discipline with expulsions. Missouri and WELS expel pastors and teachers from time to time, but they will not take on the Sweetarians and their allies.
The SPs see their jobs as essentially political. People want and expect that. No hard choices. No real decisions.
Pause for a moment and imagine that I am invited to speak to an ELS or WELS conference, maybe even LCMS since they invite ELCA speakers without blushing. Of course that will never happen. But if it did, the uproar would be astonishing in its wrath. Why? Because I am against adulterous pastors? They do have a big lobby. Perhaps because I argue for the inerrancy and efficacy of the Scriptures? They tolerate that, except I apply it to too many situations. Or - I actually study the Confessions and teach them as the ruled norm? They claim the same thing, even if they do not know the Formula of Concord from the Book of Concord. The primary reason is that I have identified their opinions as utter rubbish, false doctrine, contrary to all their lofty claims and well-oiled PR campaigns. Not only that, millions of Lutherans have voted with their feet to say the same thing. That grinds away at the shredded remains of their conscience. They cannot argue doctrine with me, so they indulge themselves in back-biting, grape-viney behavior.
I am the enemy of the established synods - not Sweet. That is their conceit and their downfall. Final judgment is only a few years away from many of them. From the look of the waistlines - any minute now. When they die and answer for themselves, what can they say, "Lord, Lord, did we not build many buildings and name them after an adulterer?"
God has taken away from them the one thing they love - material growth. And yet they march like zombies after Sweet and lesser demagogues anyway.
