Thursday, August 11, 2011

Seminaries Are Dying from Lack of Students:
Buying a Pinto for Lincoln Continental Prices



In the previous comment I said that between the two LCMS seminaries, they had 120 M. Div students, but would eventually go down to 60 for both due to the sky-high tuition. Evidently I was making a vaticinium ex eventu (prophecy after the fact) since the seminaries are already there!

Looking at the pictures of the 2010 matriculating class, St. Louis had 65 men in the pastor track, and one could guess about half of those are in the M. Div. track, the rest going for alternative tracks and master of arts. Ft. Wayne only had 38 men in the pastor track, so maybe half of those are M. Div. That's 103 in the pastor track altogether, so are we ALREADY down to 52 M. Div. students between the two seminaries?

I'm sending a screen shot to Dr. Jackson in case he wants to post it. The picture was here:

Pastoral Education, LCMS, Jan 2011, p. 3:


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GJ - I was discussing this with a Lutheran student today - about the inevitable closing of WELS schools. The insane, anti-Lutheran pursuit of "youth" has been a dismal failure in all synods.

Long-time WELS Layman Reacts to Joe and Lisa Krohn's Excommunication


Bwana Patterson drops another dangerous vegetarian in darkest Africa, 
while WELS foots the bill for his vicars, year after year.


Caleb on WELS:

Here they can beat the hell out of two Christian people who in faith bring up a theological issue and use them as an object lesson for others to view who might want to think for themselves and question doctrine and practice.   Yet they will not adjudicate or refract Mark Jeske’s apostacy thru the reverse side of that theologically pharisaical prism and drag him through the same scrutiny as Joe and Lisa.

So at the end of Mark Jeske’s life, I was musing to myself, when he has to meet his maker and is convicted of his abject and arbitrary apostasy;  by his own theology he can say “Hey Lord”  you know already  I was forgiven for the sins I was convicted before I was born, and you being all knowing and all; --surely new “I was just kidding.”  

Hey everybody gets a pass, and besides you just were not around during my lifetime and because of my aura, I just had to take the big “G” on and have it monogramed on my sweatshirt.  People just kept throwing theological spit balls at me like “efficacy of the Word of God” ; they just did not know what they were talking about.  They were all leaving the church but I came to their rescue; not any efficacy of the Word, but “me” and my peeps and Thrivent and Church and Change and popcorn and pop singers in short skirts.  So what if we became sinners to get sinners in our temple of sin, we packed them in didn’t we?  Hey!! ask the Holy Spirit if He didn’t know me;---Hey !!!! keep those flames off me!!!! Hey isn”t that Schliermacher, Bultman, Heideigger and Barth, what in tarnation are they doing here?

All we had was the Bible which we (along with my buddies Schaller, Koehler, and Pieper) could twist and bend like a Philadelphia Lawyer.  Thank God we tossed the confessions aside as they were so tedious and obstructive—got in the way really as my head hurt every time some layman spouted them out or some other relic of a pastor had this permanent wedgy in his shorts and made us read them;--yuk gag me with a spoon.   

The Wawautosian way was much better than what the paper popes threw at us in seminary—albeit they didn’t bother us too much with that stuff.    It was so much easier this way;  speaking to the “corporate Christian population” every Sunday spewing slogans like a totem pole at a liquor store selling cheap liquor with its soporific potions on of how to deal with life’;s little coughs and calamities from week to week.

Yes kind of like Time of Grace (Wrath) which was the only elixir that soothed the down trodden’s soul from week to week.   Yet I didn’t let things like visitations, administering the means of grace; such as individual confession and absolution,  slow me down as we had to many fish to fry in communicating to the masses.    Oh wait a minute;  confession and absolution was instructive if I needed to get something on somebody;  then I would make an exception. 

It was the “Efficacy of Mark Jeske’s elixir which funneled true Christianity to the visible church every week, now this was a Ponzi scheme that actually worked.  There was always an unlimited supply of people whose brains you can twist like a pretzel.  In other words, we didn’t worry about who went out the back  door because there is always a reservoir of people you could entice through the front door.  It was easy, all you had to do when people left thru the back door is lower the tolerance level of sin to get them running thru the front door.  Hey I wonder if those slot machines were installed in the Narthex of the church before I left!!!!  Darn it all I bet Pastor Heubner got them at Grace.   Oh so much work to do and so little time on this earth to do it. Lord just did not have enough time  

Front door evangelism was always the best.  You could always speak in positive and glittering generalities and you really did not have to get real deep in biblical scholarship in preaching and teaching as long as you hung on to the “culture”s apron strings.  You didn’t have to bother with the folks going out the back door as they were a waste of time anyway; all that visiting, having to pull out that dusty old bible and try to administer the law and the Gospel to one individual sinner---yuk not cost effective at all.  Too much time spent when there were other opportunities (souls) to save.

We did all this effectively and efficiently.  I even administered business concepts like goals and objectives to achieve the greater goal in God’s (my) Kingdom. We even had it down to a “unit cost analysis” determining how much it cost to get a soul in the barn so if our unit cost went  up we could always smooze the people at thrivent;--in a Christian sense of course, and they would always pony up with some manna.  I even got on the board of control;---talk about real efficacy.  What really started to piss me off however is when someone  suggested to implement those concepts to evaluate me personally.  Of course I would have not of that.  After all Jesus was beyond scrutiny.            

And then there were all the criticisms from the so-called orthodox side of the Church. This is where St. Machiavelli was most instructive.  It was so easy to keep the sheep in line with just a modicum of theological thuggery, extortion, back biting and slander;  all in the name of the Lord of course.  You see we have socialized the people in the WELS with regard to the law—10 commandments if you will , that they must actually accept a second set of books, one for the Priesthood; and one for the membership.  Kind of puts the scrutiny on them and off us;-so to speak—tee hee just a little priestly humor Forgive my impertinence.

Your eminence after all these wonderful works I have performed in my life as your vicar on earth how can you judge me as nothing other than one of your saints.  All the downtrodden we reached, drug addicts, pimps, whores homosexuals, divorced, weak in spirit, (ex Lutheran ministers);  all those classes of unbelievers who would not have come to their Lord except thru me and my peeps.   All were told they were forgiven before they were born so whatever they are,  or did (or will do in the future?) is past, just make a decision to come to Christ and all is forgiven.  Now once you accept this we will go to the sanctification side of the coin (church work, giving money ect) and you will be on your way.  Your eminence,  what could be better than that?  My Gosh this is better than the Roman Church could have concocted.—Hey what are all these popes doing here anyway? 

Hey !!!,  where are Joe and Lisa, why aren’t they down here.  Hey!!! open the door its getting hot down here.

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Baazboy wrote: Caleb, Welcome to the WELS. Now, leave an offering so we can get matching Thrivent funds.