Will the Next Generation of Evangelists Be Laity?

Someone offered this opinion, which I punctured quickly, "We want to discuss theology but we do not have seminary degrees."

I responded, "The Word of God is efficacious, even without a seminary degree." The writer conceded my point.

A Southern Baptist pastor said to me, "Most of the evangelism in the next generation may come from individual laity, not from the church itself." I mentioned his affiliation because he defends his denomination.

I am juxtaposing these comments because I see the established denominations feeding off their own endowments and rapidly dying away.

The SynCons are devoted to keeping 10% of their clergy on the gravy train while the rest are starved, abused, neglected, and misled.

The incoming SynCon seminary students can count on being treated with same suspicion an IDF soldier gets when found with a Koran under his barracks cot. Anyone suspected of departing from group-think will be edged out of studies as soon as they have all his money. Salaries = tuition = students = tuition = faculty salaries. Student wives owe it to Holy Mother Synod to work toward supporting hubbie in seminary. But do the faculty wives work to reduce the cost of seminary? Name it not!

This is what Concordia, St. Louis President John Johnson told the vicarage students:

"If you have Pentecostal cell groups at your assignment, you will say and do nothing. If you have open communion, you will not object. If you have women leading the worship service, you will not raise any questions."

Johnson is a theological Leftist and unrepentant plagiarist. And he is still in business in the LCMS higher education racket. Ask No Call Paul McCain how that happens under the banner of Confessional Lutheran.

Schmauk would have fainted at the deceit of CrossWalk, The CORE, et al.

So I am not so sure that the clergy are going to handle the job anymore. If the seed is sown abundantly, the crop will yield abundantly. But one WELS CP has admitted that half his brethren would be fired if they were expected to work at their jobs. They take it easy. They do not visit their own members, certainly not their shut-ins. They take the week off, every week, work out in the gym, and get their sermons off the Net or from the synod.

The laity are out in the community all the time. I am a hybrid, since much of my time is spent in higher education online. But we run errands, go to doctors' offices, and shop. We keep books in the trunk and give them away all over Northwest Arkansas. Some of our members do the same, in person and on Facebook.

The money-raising racket in WELS is a real Laurel and Hardy adventure. An over-paid consultant shows up and tells them the same thing he tells everyone else - "You need a rock band, contemptuous services, and a remodel of your church building. That will revitalize your dying parish."

Laurel weeps about the future of the parish without such improvements. He sends Hardy to raise the funds, and they are on the same Church and Change team (ditto the CP, DP, SP). Hardy charges huge fees (again!) to extort money from the members to remodel the building.

So congregations all over WELS have taken on debt and given up piles of cash, all in the hope of making their church come alive from the smell of fresh paint and carpet glue. Fellowship Hall! Lookit that - yet the membership falls from alienating members and becoming obsessed with money and bricks.

The snake devours itself. Any layman who objects is beaten like a rented mule and shunned as a leper.

Reu made a name for himself in Europe for his study of the Catechism.
He used his photographic memory to copy vast amounts of German catechisms.