Nominated for Worst Sermon Ever. Worse Than Ski and Glende Copies?Worse Than Parlow/Kelm Xeroxes?

Hi Professor,

I've been trying to get my folks to leave their WELS church for some time now.  Last Sunday's sermon, I think, was enough to push them over the edge.  The sermon is not that surprising (typical crap-ola), but for some reason it made it into the Top-Ten-Worst-Sermons-I've-Ever-Heard list.  The absence of the Holy Spirit and the Means of Grace from evangelism is Epic.  Totally Anthropocentric.  Anyhoo, the pastor doesn't publish text versions of his sermons, so I took pains to write accurate notes while listening to the audio file.  The link to the audio file is below if you care to totally waste 20 minutes of your life.  But I figured your readers might want to read a random example of WELS rottenness.

http://www.myfaithlutheran.com/site/audiodownloads.asp?sec_id=180001587

Now Hiring, by Pastor William Monday

Starts with token story about farmers.

Hard work is the only way to get treasure

What does it take for the Church to bring in the harvest?  How much responsibility should we have (how much work ethic) do we individually need to put forth to save souls?

Do we see things like Jesus does, that hard work is necessary, or do we not yet see that it our responsibility to work hard to save souls?

Why is Jesus spending all his time preaching and talking to people?  Why doesn't he spend his leisure time on himself?  His motivation was that he had compassion on them.  His heart broke for them.  When he saw everybody without goals and without God and his heart broke for them.   So, Jesus spent all his time telling everyone that "God Loves You".

Jesus looked at all these believers (OT and NT) who are struggling be passionate about the lost, struggling to harvest souls....so what words does he have for us:  (Quote:  And I can imagine Jesus' voice cracking when he says this)  The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.  So pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send worker

Can't you see the desperation in his eyes?  Yes, Jesus paid the price for everyone by dying on the cross but they won't all be saved because there aren't enough workers in the field to tell them of the great work already been done!

[insert cute non sequitur story about farmers and puppies:   4 healthy puppies.  1 puppy with deformed leg.  Little boy with prosthetic leg decides he wants the deformed puppy.  Boy says:  That puppy is going to need someone who understand him.  The farmer promises to give the lame puppy to the lame boy for free.]

The Moral of the Story?  The Love of the Lord--it is so important to sympathize with others...to understand people.  to be compassionate.  Jesus is unique because he came to earth to understand us.  To sympathize with us.  In fact, he came to take our place.  He sees our failure.  We're all cripples.  Everyone needs something.  Jesus sees that and becomes that except without sin.   And then goes to the cross and becomes crippled for us.

Doesn't that change us?  Doesn't seeing Jesus do this for us change us?  Change how we see other people?  Don't we begin to look through our Savior's eyes?  Don't we also have compassion for one another?  Doesn't that inspire us to go from town to town and be witnesses for Jesus?  Doesn't that give us the motivation we're looking for to call out to our Savoir who is Now Hiring?

Jesus thought so.  He went and called 12 disciples and gave them authority to heal people and preach the good news.  [Insert Great Commission.]  And this applies to all of us.

Let me sum up by asking a better question:  How many of you have been assigned to a task where you needed other people?  Can you lift a couch up the stairs by yourself?  I wouldn't advice doing it by yourself.  Can you play with a teeter totter by yourself?  Nope.  If you've experienced this then you can relate to Jesus in this text.  With desperation and a choked up voice  (verbatim quote)  Jesus says to us:  "There are souls that keep dying and there aren't enough people to go out and rescue them!!!"

How wonderful things are when people volunteer and bring donuts and clean up!  How wonderful things are when we have volunteers  for money counting and ushering!  How wonderful when people sign up for VBS and all the other things that are required (quote) to further the gospel ministry along for ourselves and the Lost!

But how tough ministry becomes when nobody signs up for anything.   How tough it becomes to make the place look good for visitors.  You know, when nobody signs up to pull the weeds around the front entry, those jobs still get done.  You know who does them?  The leaders who have been charged with preaching the gospel and reaching the lost.  They pick weeds and shovel snow instead of saving people.

I've come to find this out in ministry.  That the most pressing needs are the ones that get fulfilled...but not the most important.  In order for outreach to happen, in order for us to be able to till the soil and plant the crop and bring the harvest home we need all those other things to get done. (shoveling snow, picking weeds, making coffee, serving donuts)  We need all of us together to work.  We need all of these things to happen so that outreach, which always happens last, can take place.  So take a look at Jesus.  He's standing there.  The Kingdom is Now Hiring.  Let us be people of prayer.  Let us be the ones who are willing to do the work.  Let us be willing to go out into that field and dig up that treasure.  The treasure of lost souls.

Let's do it together so that we can make sure we can turn over the field so that the people charged with doing the one-on-one soul saving can save the lost.  Maybe we're not all evangelists, but we can all hold up the evangelist's hands can't we?  Let's work while it's still day.

Monday Monday

Syn Conference Hypocrites Pretend To Ignore This:Jimmie James Research

The Rev. Richard Andersen

Rev. Richard Andersen

Rev. Richard Andersen received his Life Coaching training from the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara, California. He is a Certified Life Coach of adults and their organizational systems.  A graduate of Luther Seminary in St. Paul,  Andersen was ordained in 1986.  He was approved for reinstatement to the roster having served a Lutheran parish earlier in his life. His second career as a senior financial consultant at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans allowed him to help clients shape their futures. He draws on these life skills in his passion for coaching people through life-enriching change.

With colleague, Ruth Frost, Richard founded Third Act Life Discovery, a spiritual journey of the heart designed to help people live purposefully and embrace a full life. Andersen is working on a Doctor of Ministry degree at United Theological Seminary.  Richard is currently the Director of Congregational Relations for Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota.  

”My life has revolved around being gay and acknowledging my call to serve the church,” Richard explains.

---

Jimmy James said... 

 

Something hit me after I sent this to you, GJ. Note Andersen's quote at the end:

”My life has revolved around being gay and acknowledging my call to serve the church,” Richard explains.

Note that his life doesn't revolve around Christ. It resolves around bedroom gymnastics.

Also note that his call isn't to serve Christ, but "to serve the church".

Seems this poor fella might have more salvation issues than just his homosexuality....

***
GJ -

I saw that right away. I remember the LCA reversing itself in the last few years before I left. The Lutheran magazine published an article by a seminary professor (Philadelphia) saying that homosexuality was against Creation. I met that professor when I was interviewed at that seminary. His fellow professors were congratulating him about the article. ELCA now teaches the opposite and the seminary faculties are united in supporting that position. The former head of ministry in ELCA (via his wife, also a minister) posted a Yale alumni note about their adult daughter having a Lesbian partner.

That Yale PhD in New Testament studies, Stanley Olson, has been an LCA professor and bishop, one of the four divisional heads, and the chief of vocations in ELCA. He was just installed as the president of the ELCA seminary in Dubuque, Iowa (Wartburg, former ALC), which Loehe started.

Don't blame Loehe - he started the Missouri Synod too, and the seminary at Ft. Wayne.

Jeske-Jungend Rally , July 21

Become a chick magnet. This will be a good way to learn how to goose-step into the secretive and powerful Church and Change group.
Endorsed by DP Buchholz.
Led by Jeff Gunn, who confesses, "Jesus is my rice."

What Is the Difference? Bueller, Bueller, Anyone?

AC V has left a new comment on your post "Time of Grace Supporters Just Happen To Be Church ...":

Bethesda Lutheran Communities - Partner Congregations:

St. John Lutheran Church, Wauwatosa WI - Pastor: Rev. Joel Leyrer, also 2nd vice-president of WELS SE Wisconsin District.

http://bethesdalutherancommunities.org/page.aspx?pid=665

"Bethesda is a Lutheran human care ministry that maintains close and friendly ties with all the Lutheran churches."

"Bethesda is a Recognized Service Organization (RSO) of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod."

"...all joint expressions and demonstrations of a common Christian faith—call them church fellowship or by any other term ("partner congregations"? "close and friendly ties"?)—are essentially one, that they involve a unit concept, and that they are therefore all [also prayer] governed by one set of principles"(Proceedings, 1959, p. 165). - WELS "Unit Concept" of fellowship.

***

GJ - Missouri and WELS have been working with ELCA and its parent bodies for decades. That will not change.

More importantly, the leaders of both sects have shown an inordinate fondness for studying with and adopting the doctrines of the Enthusiasts. Their hand-scooped doctrine from the Great Kidnapper is pure Enthusiasm with Lutheran sprinkles. Look beneath the sprinkles - there it is.

Someone asked me, "Is there a reason not to join one of the LCMC or NALC congregations?"

1. Still in demi-semi-fellowship with nasty old ELCA? So are Missouri and WELS.
   
2. Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Communion practice. Ditto WELS and Missouri.
   
3. Ordination of women? WELS and Missouri are eager to embrace it and already have women pastors.*

The LCMC (more like the ALC) and the NALC (the home for elderly ELCA bishops) are engaged in re-studying the Word of God, instead of taking everything for granted. I have no idea what the typical congregation is like, if that can even be determined. I would not be shocked to find both groups siphoning members from Missouri and WELS, simply because the doctrinal differences are slight. Few laity want to circle the wagons around the disputes of the 19th century Pietists.

Walther's approach was to offer his non-biblical theses as revealed truth, then dare anyone to dispute them. He was contentious, divisive, an unrepentant criminal with a lust for power. No wonder Syn Conference hagiographers want to begin with the Altenburg Theses, about Church and Ministry. Oh, Walther rescued the Saxon sheep from the ee-vul Bishop Stephan! Oh, he threaded the needle with his deft move between Romanism and Congregationalism. Oh, he took over the Synod Presidency and seminary presidency at once. Oh, Oh, Oh.

Starting with Altenburg means forgetting the two children kidnapped from their grandparents' home, the young man and woman who died in America. If I were those grandparents, I would not be so proud of that son (CFW) and his brother, both pastors. Starting with Altenburg allows one to forget that Walther willingly followed a known adulterer to America, pledged his lifelong support to the bishop, then organized a mob to rob, depose, and kidnap the bishop - for the crime of adultery.

* LCMS congregations hired ELCA women vicars to preach, consecrate Holy Communion, and baptize, already in the 1980s. I read their accounts in the Trinity (ELCA) Seminary library.
In WELS, the women "Staph Ministers" organized by Larry Oh! (DMin, Fuller Seminary) were consecrating Holy Communion and distributing it. The Revelation of John Brug (Glende's uncle, an Otten fave) was this - "It is not yet the right time." WELS did not condemn the practice but simply imposed a momentary delay. Brug has consistently supported women pastors, and he is the WELS dogmatician, smarter than JP Meyer, but no wiser.

Breaking News - Mark and Avoid Jeske Goes Full-time at Time of Generic Grace

The supernatural glow is Enthusiasm.
DP Rutschow is in charge of Jeske's discipline, i. e., protecting him.


"Not that Word and Sacrament are ineffective in incorporating new souls into our fellowship. Not at all! But according to some serious Church Growth studies, as many as one-third of the people gained for protestant church membership today do not feel they really belong."
David N. Rutschow, The Evangelism Life Line (WELS), Winter, 1985, p. 3. WELS DP for Southwest Wisconsin, perhaps the most loosey-goosey district of all, perhaps even worse than Englebrecht's Anything Goes District.

THIS JUST IN, DATELINE MILWAUKEE:
07/11/11 - WISCONSIN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN SYNOD - 11:53 am

P A S T O R C A L L R E P O R T
07/05/2011 through 07/11/2011


Schaefer, Rev William J I -VSt Marcus - Milwaukee WI - 06/22/2011
Associate Pastor Call

I understand that W. Schaefer is the son of Jeb Schaefer, CG Enthusiast editor of The Northwestern Lutheran. Good Ol' Jeb was Mischke's enabler and PR agent. Jeb bragged about the pan-Lutheran Shrinker conference at the same time that Wayne Mueller denied in print that WELS had any Church Growth at all.

W. Schaefer will be the Executive Pastor of St. Marcus, because Jeske has become full-time at Time of Generic Grace.

How can anyone administer pastoral discipline to someone who is no longer a WELS pastor?

YOU DON'T OWN ME - Apologies to Leslie Gore

You don't own me, I'm not just one of your Luther'an toys,
You don't own me, don't say I can't go with Babtist boys.

And don't tell me what to do,
And don't tell me what to say,
And please, when I raise funds from you
Please put me on display, 'cause

You don't own me, don't try to change me in any way;
You don't own me, don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay.

Oh, I love to tell you what to say,
I love to tell you what to do,
So let me grow the Jeske cult,
That's all I ask of you.

I'm bad and I love to be bad
I'm free and I love being Me,
To live my life the way I want,
To say and do whatever I please

A-a-a-nd don't tell me what to do,
Oh-h-h-h don't tell me what to say,
And please, when I raise funds from you
Always put me on display.