WELS GLBTQ and Allies

Hey Greg,

How come I didn’t hear about this on Ichabod?

WELS GLBTQ & Allies 

Found it when I went to Zak’s FB page.

Bizarre! 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/WELS.GLBTQA/

There’s not much on Zak’s page – not that I saw, anyway.

But you should be able to go the WELS GLBTQ&A page as it is “open.”

Some of the last names among the members are quite interesting.

Weird! 

***

GJ - I try not to keep up with these groups. Enough comes over the transom already, without looking for it. Your email is a good example.

Nothing was done about the mattress room incident at Mequon. Nothing was done about Party in the MLC- except to reward all the participating plagiarists.

The train has left the station. Your pal Mark Schroeder makes Obama look strong and decisive.

There are not any hills left to die on - in WELS, LCMS, or the Little Sect on the Prairie. I am just writing the obituaries.

Pipe Organs and Creation

Pastor Jackson,
I really enjoyed the post about the theatre organs. I visited theatreorgans.com where they had a very good explanation of the venerable Hammond B3 organ. When reading about how the draw bars created the many different sounds - flute, oboe, clarinet, etc., it was expressed in terms of the shape of the waveform. Since I know so little about musical instruments, I had always assumed that most instruments produced something close to pure sine waves.

The wind instruments actually generate square waves, triangular waves, sawtooth or any number of other types or possibly, some combinations. The explanation of the tone wheels, draw bars and the generation of odd harmonics struck a chord with me (pardon the bad pun). In engineering parlance, that is called Fourier Analysis. The idea is that any waveform that is not a pure sine wave can be expressed mathematically in terms of a progression of sine waves and their multiples, or harmonics.

I often marvel at this allegedly old technology and the craftsmanship involved in making it. I understand that a harpsichord is more like a guitar where strings are plucked rather than an acoustic piano where the strings are hit with hammers. Yet the sound of the harpsichord is so unique.

I do not often engage in complicated arguments with atheists,  agnostics, and evolutionists. The wonders of creation are so numerous that they cannot be counted. When you post on Ichabod what the soil creatures do to make the soil rich, I cannot help but be awed by this process.

Another part of the creation are the laws of physical science. I have spent my entire working life dealing with this in some way or another. Yet, many do not see our Creator's hand in the numerous physics and engineering books that can only express that which was created in such an orderly and consistent manner.

In Christ,
Randall Schultz

***

In music we try to reproduce the singing of birds - the Goldfinch Concerto for flute is wonderful to hear, over and over.

In architecture we try to copy the grand design of the Creator.

The cooperation of all the elements of nature is an on-going spectacle. Planting 16 roses and covering the ground with mulch seems to have drawn more songbirds to the yard.

The mulch itself is Hungarian goulash for birds. Anything can be moving under the fragments of wood and paper. I was amused to find one patch of newsprint obviously torn up by a beak. Moisture plus rotting organic matter means that something alive will be just under that layer, or just under one fragment of it.

Starlings are known for strolling along the ground and spotting a creature to eat. They also devour weed seeds. Grackles seem to dig deeper for grubs. When I find a fat, white grub while digging, I put it on a stump to be seen and eaten.

A bird-friendly yard attracts an appreciative crowd that coos and twitters when I come out to feed them or work on the plants.

Humans try to keep treasure to themselves, although they do talk loudly about good eating places. Birds tweet to their flocks that they found something. The more food, the louder the chatter, the more that arrive. The social birds - like sparrows, starlings, and doves - will gather in noisy flocks. They do not eat everything, but leave some for others.

This cat found some pollen.

Martin Luther College Students and Bethany Lutheran College Students - A Stern Warning from Mark Schroeder and Joel Hochmuth

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Aug. 21, 2009 Contact: Joel Hochmuth Director of Communications Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod joel.hochmuth@wels.net 

http://ichabodthegloryhasdeparted.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-wels-news-light-sentence-for-joel.html

WELS president expresses regret at ELCA decision on gay clergy
Milwaukee, Wis.—Rev. Mark Schroeder, president of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), is expressing regret at the vote of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) convention regarding homosexual clergy. Friday, delegates approved a resolution committing the church to find a way for “people in such publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships” to serve as professional leaders of the church.

“To view same-sex relationships as acceptable to God is to place cultural viewpoint and human opinions above the clear Word of God,” says Schroeder. “The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, along with The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and other smaller Lutheran synods, maintains and upholds the clear teaching of the Bible that homosexuality is not in keeping with God’s design and is sinful in God’s eyes.” 

At the same time, Schroeder says WELS congregations stand ready to support those struggling with same-sex attractions. “As with any sin, it is the church’s responsibility to show love and compassion to sinners, not by condoning or justifying the sin, but by calling the sinner to repent and by assuring the sinner that there is full forgiveness in Jesus Christ,” Schroeder says.

WELS, with about 390,000 members and nearly 1,300 congregations nationwide, is the third largest Lutheran church body in the United States. In Wisconsin alone, there are more than 201,000 members and 417 congregations. “It’s unfortunate that many headlines have referred to the recent decisions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America as something ‘Lutherans’ have decided,” Schroeder says. “In fact, the ELCA is only one of many Lutheran denominations. We are saddened that a group with the name Lutheran would take another decisive step away from the clear teaching of the Bible, which was the foundation of the Lutheran Reformation.” 

Schroeder says that WELS is firmly committed to upholding God’s design for marriage as outlined in Scripture—a design intended for one man and one woman. “We believe, and the Bible teaches, that God designed this relationship to be a blessing for men and women and for society. Any departure from what God himself has designed does two things: it denies the clear teachings of Scriptures and it undermines God’s desire that the man/woman relationship in marriage be a blessing.”

Not for Little Children - Social Media

Someone observed that students today cannot argue a point - they only quarrel. The main premise seems to be, "You have upset me; now you must make me feel good again - or else."

One cause is the pursuit of the student population. Every school is recruiting to obtain the student loan money to keep the school funded. They fear the loss of income from students, who can easily flit to another school, one where the new recruitment officer will say, "Poor baby. They did that to you? How unfair."

One advantage of Boomers was this - we were surplus, 25% of the population. Schools could be selective. Getting rid of students was an imperative. Illinois trains put extra passenger cars on after mid-terms, to take all the students home after they flunked out. But that was long ago.  Boomers had to spell correctly, use the Queen's English, and form complete sentences. Now all the colleges have remedial classes so the students do not have to flunk out merely because they are illiterate.

Social Media Verities - Not Grasped by Everyone
The social media giants are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Plus, email,  and many more.

The key point is - They all show up when doing a Google search. One cannot use them and remain anonymous. LinkedIn provides an autobiography and photo. YouTube and FB - videos.

The forgotten point - They never go away. They exist on servers. They are copied onto hard drives. They remain in archives.

Still unknown to most - Their security settings mean nothing to big entities. The whole point of big data is to find the market and sell to it. FB is for geezers; Instagram is for youth. The ladies love Pinterest.

Headlines, captions, and photos enter Google and stay there. WELS/ELS complaints come back to me - I seem to own most topics they look up on Google, whether they are posts or photos or both. If someone has 12,000 posts, that can happen. Catch up whenever you want.

Easy to copy, easy to find - Plagiarism in college continues at a brisk rate, and I uncover it just as fast. Forgotten is this fact: The essay they found so easily with Google is just as easy to identify with Google. I am much better at Google than college kids, who were teething when I began using the tool daily.

College tantrums, photos at a drunken party, and video stupidities are no longer confined to one school, where they can be forgotten. The students themselves publish them on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook. A few smart-alecs have picked fights with this blog, only to realize that their inanities are part of the search when they look for a job.

Corporations routinely do these searches and often eliminate people as prospects when the vampire, Nazi, drug-taking, and alcoholic images show up. Lame excuses sound pretty hollow when they are still in print (or worse - in Google) a few years later.

One young man repented as he faced the job market. He asked that I take down posts that included his name or photo. He was excruciatingly polite, which is rare today. I was happy to remove them all. At the time he was eager to send me messages, and seeing them seemed to energize him to write even more. I began hearing from his college friends, who were stunned by his attitude.

Publishing the truth is not slander, even if makes you upset. The best defense against the charge of slander is - "It's true." If someone says, "This is what I do," then it is not slander to say, "This is what you just claimed you do." To threaten a lawsuit based on your own words is rather silly.

Citing the Eighth Commandment is so routine for WELS/ELS slanderers that I created a graphic just for that. A friend of mine laughs every time he sees it - and he sees it often. I have numerous cry-baby graphics too. If people are laughing at you right now, they might have a reason for it.

Staged tantrums are good for blog page-views. When I first took computer classes in the late 1990s, I was so appalled by student behavior that I wondered about ever teaching them. I saw girls and boys have fits because they walked into a scheduled quiz, forgetting the date, and challenged the teacher about it. "Was this on the syllabus?" Quiet answer - "Yes." Books were slammed on the desk and floor.

When students cry, threaten, snivel, and tweet their outrage, interest in the blog soars among those collegians who normally stick to sports scores and celebrity tweets. The Party in the MLC lobby got students at Martin Luther College, Bethany Lutheran College, and Wisconsin Lutheran College involved in reading Ichabod. MLC teachers warned students against Ichabod, denied warning them, and planned things so they could not be published on Ichabod (denying that fact, of course).

Funny episode at WLC. They were shocked that I had a copy of the lying student editorial defending Party in the MLC. How did I know that? Who invented the Internet - not the Millennials! Uploading to YouTube does not make one a computer expert.

At the moment, 1560 page views show up on the combined posts about one person's Martin Luther College graduation. I wonder if the selective outrage of the college students could be directed toward reconsidering what they are defending.