Re-Gentrifying Our Lady of Sorrows (Concordia, St. Louis)

bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Bloated Hours, Bloated Costs at Lutheran Seminarie...":

At Concordia St. Louis they now have a food services infrastructure upgrade that started on 18 March. They are also turning the lower floor of a dormitory into a food bank and resell it shop.

Let me translate that for you. The seminary is admitting that they have so few residential 4-year M Div students left that they now convert dormitory space for other purposes. They are also saying that their students are so poor due to high tuition costs that they need a first class food pantry and Good Will-type donation center/resell it shop. Another point is that their M Div program is so bloated that many take 5 years to complete it, and in order to wile away that amount of time and pay for it all, most students are now married, and dormitories are not suitable for couples and families.

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GJ - The students fund the seminary costs with their student loans and high tuition because the synod offerings give almost nothing to the seminaries.

St. Louis and Mequon both spent millions on their campus facilities to make them more attractive to the people studying there. Both schools have declined in enrollment since then.

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LPC has left a new comment on your post "Re-Gentrifying Our Lady of Sorrows (Concordia, St....":

Bruce,

Don't these Sin-nods have money? Why do not they just fund these students specially the deserving ones? Why does it always have to be that you pay up or else, no education?

LPC

Another Hilarious Post from Paul McCain's Theological Guru

Jack Kilcrease could not admit to reading Ichabod, but he found out about Michelle Bachmann no longer being WELS.

I love the way he unburdens himself about the Antichrist, as a Missouri Synod layman who teaches for the Antichrist:

About Me

Dr. Jack Kilcrease

Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

I am a layperson in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and an adjunct professor of Theology and Humanities at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. I grew up in Oregon and attended Luther College in Iowa (B.A. History and Religion) and Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN (M.A. Doctrine and Theology). I graduated in 2009 from Marquette University with a Ph.D in Systematic Theology.

He is another fan of UOJ.

Ben Wink on the KJV and TLH

Ben Wink


Ben Wink has left a new comment on your post "WELS Playing Hamlet on Their Next Bible Blunder":

You'd think that a translation that has proved itself over the course of 400 years would be a clear winner, but apparently not.

Or a hymnal (TLH) that has been around for 70 years (another anniversary this year!)

There's got to be someone getting a piece of the action in switching translations like this right? I mean going from the NIV to the NIV2: The Sequel or the ESV is just adding more water to weak tea already isn't it?

I remember a shut-in that I had on my internship that refused to listen to any Scripture that I had in my devotions unless it came from the KJV. She was from Italy and when she came over to the US after WWII, she learned how to speak and read English from the KJV and it always remained a crucial part of her faith.

So I picked up a KJV for doing those devotions. Got a nice red-letter one from a local Christian bookstore and it was the original KJV translation. I am certainly glad that the Lord used this shut-in believer as the reason why I now have my KJV.

There is something to be said about being connected to other believers who have read these same words for centuries. I feel the same way whenever I get a chance to use TLH or a TLH version of a traditional hymn or even just saying the traditional version of The Lord's Prayer or Nicene Creed.

Fixing something that isn't broken just for the sake of fixing it is pointless and redundant. Sure it will increase book sales, like a new not-needed hymnal would, but that's about it.

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GJ - A steady seller is a flow of money in book publishing. The NIV publisher (Murdoch) will not allow the old NIV to be used in the present and future WELS/LCMS textbooks. Poor them - they are forced to print everything new again. No recycling allowed.

For WELS and Missouri, it is like having a big taxation passed, without any votes.

Page Views on Ichabod - The Data

For Lord of the Rings fans only.

Recently there were 5,000 page views over a space of 48 hours.

The normal day's viewing is counted new at 6 PM. By morning, about 900 page-views have been logged. By supper time, another 900 page views are the typical amount. I usually see 1800 page-views a day now.

If someone has a good story to share, the page-views go up and stay above normal for a time. The increase of the average page-views has been steady. When I began, 200 per day was typical, and that software showed about 100 returning readers for 200 page-views. I am not sure how many individual readers there are now. Installing software slows down the blog, so I avoid that.

Almost 6,000 posts have been published. The total page-views in year seems to be 500,000 at this time.

Lutherans Will Recognize 2017 and 2030, But Not Themselves

Martin Chemnitz, senior editor of the Book of Concord

The Past
I objected to the ELCA merger and outlined the future actions of the synod. I left the LCA before the merger took place and published my research in Christian News. That embarrassed WELS no end, because they were busy working with ELCA and have been ever since. I was 25 years ahead of my time, but no one listened. Now ELCA is shattering faster than a bar-room mirror in a cheap Western movie.

The Present
Missouri, WELS, and the Little Sect like to look down their snouts at ELCA, but they also like working with them and grabbing all the Thrivent loot they can.

The Future, 2017
ELCA will apologize to the Church of Rome for being so nasty during the Reformation.

By 2017, WELS will have no parochial school system left. The last two preps will be gone. MLC will be owned by a for-profit corporation, doing well. Mequon will be working on plans to sell the property.

Missouri tongue-clucking will be loud, but the flopsweat will be flowing as Ft. Wayne is consolidated with St. Louis. The catastrophic decline of St. Louis will make the location of the merged seminary a hot topic.

Pope John the Unmerciful will still be in charge of the Little Sect on the Prairie, but everyone will realize the end is near.

2030
The NALC will re-unite with ELCA and apologize for being so nasty during the 2010 split.

A few will remember the Little Sect on the Prairie, but a wiseacre blogger will predict that the ELS will soon be as forgotten as the Olive Branch Synod.

WELS will work out legal arrangements for consolidation with Missouri, which will remind everyone of the KMart-Sears merger: two dying entities embracing each other.

Katy Perry, the new Synod President of WELS, will renounce her husband and out herself. Her cover of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" will keep the synod solvent another year, so no one will object.

Missouri will work on a lengthy apology, to allow them to exist as a non-geographical synod of ELCA-Episcopal. Remaining clergy, men and women alike, will proudly point to the Missouri circuit as the "Confessional Lutherans."

How Badly is WELS Collapsing in Milwaukee?

A few years ago, DP Seifert told the pastors that they would soon no longer recognized their synod. He failed to say he was one of the architects of the surrender to Church and Change.

Reality is hitting hard now. One source told me last night that most of the WELS parochial schools are closing or merging. There will be just a handful of schools left, all of them dependent on the Milwaukee taxpayer choice program, the deceptive charter school concept. Following Jeske's example, WELS will run a few schools, but they will be fueled by taxpayer checks. They are not private schools and are definitely not church schools. They are employment opportunities.

In the good old days, WELS refused government support and avoided being entangled in government regulation. Now WELS is just another cog in the public school system. For the clergy with their trotters in the trough, life is good for the moment. This set-up strikes me like junk food, appealing for a short time but disappointing soon after.

James Huebner, a fan of Rob Bell, is such an expert in evangelism that he once loaned himself out to other congregations (for a fat fee)  - to share  the wisdom he gleaned from Fuller Seminary. Now he moonlights as the First Veep of WELS. His parish gets a $10,000 kickback for this!

Check out his Grace Place Coffee Shoppe, formerly the Soul Cafe.

He claims Grace in downtown Milwaukee has tripled since his gracious visitation, but where is the school? The Milwaukee insider says that Grace has no school and must export the kiddies to another location.

Lutheran elementary schools in Milwaukee - wave goodbye. Going, going, gone.

The same trend is also obvious in Appleton, Wisconsin, where WELS members are just as dense as they are in Milwaukee. WELS congregations are closing/merging the schools there too, in spite of three decades of Church Growth in Fox Valley.

Following Jeske's lead, the Fox Valley churches are also going non-Lutheran. Naturally, they are intimately connected with his Church and Change operation, which still has its websty up and running.

Mary Lou College no longer has a role. The school was once a prep, college, and seminary for the Minnesota Lutherans. MLC became the teachers' college for WELS and later jettisoned the prep because it needed the space. They do not need a teachers' college when schools are rapidly closing and merging.

Nor does MLC need to remain open for dozen guys to get prepped for seminary. WLC could handle that, or they could lease a portable classroom at Watertown.