ICHABOD, THE GLORY HAS DEPARTED - explores the Age of Apostasy, predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, to attack Objective Faithless Justification, Church Growth Clowns, and their ringmasters. The antidote to these poisons is trusting the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Isaiah 55:8ff. Romans 10. Most readers are WELS, LCMS, ELS, or ELCA. This blog also covers the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Left-wing, National Council of Churches denominations.
ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ Γ΄ 101550 Stephanus New Testament (TR1550)
10 δια τουτο εαν ελθω υπομνησω αυτου τα εργα α ποιει λογοις πονηροις φλυαρων ημας και μη αρκουμενος επι τουτοις ουτε αυτος επιδεχεται τους αδελφους και τους βουλομενους κωλυει και εκ της εκκλησιας εκβαλλει
Acts 16 - Households, one example
ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΤΩΝ ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΩΝ 16:151550 Stephanus New Testament (TR1550)
15 ως δε εβαπτισθη και ο οικος αυτης παρεκαλεσεν λεγουσα ει κεκρικατε με πιστην τω κυριω ειναι εισελθοντες εις
τον οικον μου μεινατε και παρεβιασατο ημας
Titus 3:5 Baptism Defined
5 ουκ εξ εργων των εν δικαιοσυνη ων εποιησαμεν ημεις αλλα κατα τον αυτου ελεον εσωσεν ημας δια λουτρου παλιγγενεσιας και ανακαινωσεως πνευματος αγιου
"There aren’t many ways that lead to a priest being fired from the Anglican Church of Canada; in fact, providing one isn’t too enthusiastic about one’s faith, it is rather difficult. Criminal activity such as embezzlement and paederasty tend – if found out – to be frowned upon, as is trying to murder a parishioner. On the other hand, disbelief in Biblical principles and spreading that disbelief is the bedrock upon which Canadian Anglicanism rests: the less a priest believes, the more secure his job.
Flouting the wishes of the Anglican Synod, far from being a cause for censure or termination is hailed joyously as prophetic. Providing it is liberal flouting – just look at the antics of Bird, Chapman et al. following the last Anglican synod..
Nevertheless, Rev Jacob Worley has been fired. No reason was given but it’s difficult not to suspect it is because he is that most rare clerical specimen, now almost extinct in the Anglican Church of Canada, a genuine Christian.
The writing was on the wall for Worley since it wasn’t too long ago that his election as bishop was overturned on a technicality."
Ex-WELS, Ex-ELCA, ElCiC Pastor Horst Gutsche's bishop is in fellowship with the Episcopalians. One wit offered by email - "They can go down together."
The Mother of All Crepe Myrtles was surrounded by Buckwheat for a time, but the first frost slew the intrepid Buckwheats and their seed.
We had enough cold nights to change the leaves of the trees and start them falling. But now we have warm days and a long steady rain.
Noting our weather and still-soft soil, the gardening companies are sending me frantic messages to buy their plants at Great Depression prices. However, the bloom is off the rose, as they say, and the urge to plant anything remains dormant in me... for the season.
Instead, I am looking for ways to build the soil throughout this season and winter. One way is to let the deeply rooted plants and weeds continue reaching down and branching out. Hog Peanuts are green and robust - let them store more fixed nitrogen in the soil and add their organic matter by growing.
Ornamental bushes look ragged and need a trim, but I do not want them to start growing, becoming vulnerable to the freezing nights. Instead I rake and collect leaves from the neighbors, for the empty spaces. I even have a group of cardboard boxes among the tallest Butterfly Bushes, where they will soften and soak into the soil over time.
People rake up leaves and throw them away - so I can recycle them. God lets them serve as mulch everywhere. When it comes to gardening, always bet on God's methods for renewal and fertility - not man's. The bags of peat moss say I should rototill the material into the soil, but the soil amendment can easily be spread like mulch and pulled down by soil creatures.
The sound of the street cleaner alerted me to the piles of crushed and soil-enhanced leaves stuck in the street. As everyone knows, the mower reduces leaves and allows them to decompose faster into the soil. One neighbor wisely does this for his lawn. Tires crush leaves the same way, condensing them while turning them into dusty fragments. Those are free fertilizer for the Mother of All Crepe Myrtles, which now has a pyramid of leaves and washed-off topsoil, resting under the drip line.
Buckwheat is like bagpipe music - great in small doses.
Drip Line
And what is the drip line? Gardeners call the area under the branches of a tree or bush the drip line. Most of the roots will be found there, near the surface and deep below. In a sunny location, the drip line is where shade-loving plants thrive. Each year I put Caladiums under the Crepe Myrtle, with leaves matching the CM flowers. One neighbor burst into smiles talking about the matching CM and its carpet of bright leaves below.
We enjoy driving onto our cul-de-sac in the summer and seeing the Crepe Myrtle glowing with dense flower clusters.
Organic farming and gardening used to be called farming and gardening.
The Rain Reminds Me
Whenever we have days of rain, the blessed event reminds me of how quickly we take Creation's bounty for granted. Our rain-barrels are full from the last rain. The new plants are getting ideal rain already, and the barrels overflow, so I take it for granted. During our drought season I was watering everything and hoping for a two-day rain.
As Luther said, "The Gospel rain moves on." Years ago, everyone took traditional congregations for granted. Whether someone attended an LCA, ALC, LCMS, ELS, or WELS service, the liturgy used the same Biblical wording and the same Creeds. Hymns were slanted toward one tradition or another, but the classic hymns were always sung. The ministers gave sermons - instead of coaching talks (Church Growth) or harangues about saving the world through the latest Left-wing methods (ELCA and "enlightened" Lutherans).
Now this Biblical, liturgical, hymn-singing, credal congregation (with sermons) is a rare bird. The above sects, which were once united in the basics, are divided by their frantic printing of new hymnals and new Bibles, which are terrific money-makers. Bibles and hymns are like owning mints, so the numbers of bad ones multiply. Fidelity to the Word gives way to Mammon. The shepherds sheepishly fall in line.
God has created many plants with long-lasting colorful leaves. Caladiums love the shade.
Invest in the Rainfall with Organics
The rainfall, so easily taken for granted, can be captured and held by encouraging a larger biomass below the surface. Gabe Brown has shown that in farming by his use of cover crops. He captures large rainfalls without flooding and waste; he stores spare rainfall without crop failures.
Plant roots add most of the organic matter to the soil, and that feeds the soil life - fungi, bacteria, protozoa, earthworms, slugs, mites, sowbugs, spiders, and moles - to name just a few classes. Something alive has moisture, stores and uses water to live. If the biomass is considerable larger, the water and nutrition stored is also exponentially larger.
Many books present the soil as something inert and neutral, like the stuff they use when potting plants for sale. Therefore, anything else is an intruder. But that is utterly wrong. The soil teems with life, a complex Creating engineered to renew itself, even under the worst conditions.
The ideal garden enjoys a thriving biomass beneath, where the basic chemicals - like nitrogen - build proteins and pass on as waste, to be used again to build protein. The fragile fungal networks collect and distribute all these components - with water - to the plant roots, which pay with carbon credits. Is this not a miracle of Creation and engineering? - The fungus must have carbon to grow, and the plants have carbon to share for the components they need. A given fungus may work its magic with several plants at once and send out feelers for that rotting log resting on the soil, the sheet of bark forming a toad shelter, the dead bird in the tall grass.
Naturally - or Creationly - the garden with a thriving biomass below has an equally populated one above - insects, birds, butterflies, hawks, and bats will feast because the garden is toxin-free and left to the very creatures designed and managed to do their jobs.
John Sebastian was the gifted lead and composer for the Lovin Spoonfuls. I could not stomach the TV show, but the theme that he wrote and sang for it fits today's post.
The Birds Left - Even the Squirrels - Welcome Back
During this warm season at the end of summer, not really autumn yet, when the birds are almost absent. Even the hungry Mourning Doves are barely to be seen. Squirrels - they stopped using the feeders too.
We had the new cold spell and rain, so I believe the birds who are here for the winter began coming back. I spotted a male Cardinal yesterday, and a solo baby squirrel showed up to eat most of the day.
That is another wonderful part of the dreaming season, when nothing is planted but the spring catalogues start arriving. The worse the weather gets, the better the bird-watching becomes.
US Presiding Bishop Jefferts made a hobby out of suing her own bishops and congregations - using national church funds to do so. When she took away a church building, she closed it or sold it off to another denomination. Her successor seems to be no better.
Below is the link to Virtue Online, an excellent source of Episcopalian news, facts, and opinions.
"Anglican Church of Canada Faces Financial Collapse
By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
Nov. 134 2017
It is starting to look as though the Anglican Church of Canada, a church in denial for nearly two decades about the direction it has been going, is having to face the reality that it might face collapse as it looks to an uncertain financial future. Archbishop Fred Hiltz might well be the last Primate of the Anglican province.
It goes like this. You no longer believe the Bible is authoritative on issues like human sexuality, so you change your views to compete with the zeitgeist; you watch as your congregations age with no new young people coming along as they won't hear or read anything that is significantly different from their cell phone apps, Ipad news or twitter accounts. You watch as clergy age and retire with no heir apparent waiting in the wings to fill their pulpits. Then talk about things that are mostly irrelevant to the lives of average Canadians who are more concerned with house prices and what happens in the US. Congregations begin to shrink because of the uncertain sounds emanating from the pulpit. Parishes slowly wither and sooner or later, they close their doors. At this time of writing, the dioceses of Huron, Ontario and Quebec are most notably in free fall.
A priest in the Diocese of Quebec recently opined from his pulpit, "that without radical change, the Anglican Diocese of Quebec could soon be extinct." His is clearly not the only diocese.
The three horsemen of the Anglican apocalypse; interfaithery, sodomite marriage and focus on a plethora of social justice issues, coupled with a failure to preach an unerring gospel focusing on the reality of sin, salvation and judgement on clergy who fail to do so, is largely responsible.
As one Anglican columnist noted, "rather than "make disciples of all nations" the mission [of the ACoC] has become "observe similarities with all religions". Furthermore, promoting same sex marriage and participating in queer parades has not filled pews, and never will. The action of former Bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham to authorize the blessing of same-sex unions in 2002 was the down payment on the decline that ensued. By May 2003, six of the diocese's 76 parishes received authorization to use the rite, which was nothing more than a pyrrhic victory.
The Anglican Church of Canada is on a kamikaze mission of self-destruction, with its public mission to promote pansexuality and, by an unwritten agreement, to destroy its withering orthodox wing. A case in point was the announcement this week to expunge from its rolls an evangelical, former Bishop-Elect of Caledonia, the Rev. Jacob Worley. He was summarily fired by Archbishop John Privett, Metropolitan of the Province of BC & Yukon in a phone call and a letter for no stated reason. Worley has 10 days to leave the country. Worley's "sin" is that he was once associated with the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA), an unforgiveable heresy, according to the revisionist bishops of Canada. "
Bishop Cook was drunk at her own installation. Later she ran down the married father of two, who was biking, and she ran away to her deluxe condo.
When I entered the ministry in 1826, what is
called distinctive Lutheranism was not a subject of thought, much less of
discussion. A few of the older clergy were probably orthodox on the sacraments,
but they gave themselves no trouble about bringing their views prominently
forward, either in their sermons or in writing. I know that Dr. J. G. Schmucker,
of York, was a genuine Lutheran, for it was his explanation of the Lutheran
doctrine of the real presence in the sacrament that first led me to reflection
upon that subject, and which has more or less influenced my theological
Richtung (tendency) ever since. Sometimes, owing to adverse
associations, my faith was shaken, for at first it was not very firm;
but when I got beyond the influence of living teachers, and began
independent examination, the old Scripture doctrine would come back with double
force.
From Life Reminiscences of an Old Lutheran
Minister by John G. Morris, 1803-1895. (emphasis added)
***
GJ - Alec Satin has discovered in depth what I have notice from various authors. The General Council authors, though mentioned piously from time to time, are ignored entirely by ELCA and bypassed by the Synodical Conference fragments.
The SynCons (Synodical Confidence Men) have the same effect as ELCA apostates - devotion to UOJ while rejecting Justification by Faith.
ELCA, especially on The ALC side, repudiated the Real Presence by having joint communion with the Reformed. In fact, the Lutheran Seminary at Wartburg (irony alert) pioneered this effort with the Reformed seminary nearby. "See - it don't mean a thing!" ALC President David Preus spear-headed that move, perhaps because of jealousy over James Crumley's cuddly relationship with the Pope.
Wartburg Seminary is almost gone now, like my Canadian seminary, which has the lowest attendance in pastoral training, given over to counseling, sessions with dogs, and other hip events.
The Synodical Conference came down from heaven, holy and immaculate, if we believe their press. WELS was orthodox from its inception (having Lutheran and Reformed communion in the same church). Because of Walther's need for adulation, the early years were not discussed or published until about a century later - Zion on the Mississippi.
Thus the LCMS did not struggle over the Confessions as the General Council did. The General Council was not perfect, but their flaws were no worse than Missouri's or WELS or the ELS.
Therefore, honest Lutherans will look into those other authors of the General Council era, who were and are far more valuable to read than the Calvinistic Church Growth UOJ phonies of today.
Arizona-California Mission Board Report
AZ/CA District Pastors’ Conference
Henderson, NV October 20-22, 2015
Crown of Life, Corona/Beaumont/Riverside, CA - Crown of Life, a multi-site ministry served by Pastors
Steve Koelpin and Rick Johnson, is now offering 4 Sunday services at three locations. They serve just
under 400 members (318 communicants) and average 267 for worship attendance and 100 for Bible class
attendance (in a number of “growth groups”). Their current situation is that they have a landed campus
in Corona with two services and a childcare center; a landed campus in Yucaipa plus parsonage with one
service; and a rented campus (storefront) in Riverside with one service (having recently moved from their
original movie theatre location). They are currently in active discussions with St Paul Riverside about
their merging into and become a COL campus, and that involves them as well in active discussions with
the DMB, BHM and CEF. They are looking toward beginning growth groups in the Coachella Valley in
winter 2015-16. After the loss of key people, they again have a strong COL Board and the campus
ministry teams are made up of faithful, creative and energetic leaders, especially a good cadre of
exceptional younger leaders. Tim Johnson has done a fine job of building up their group of musicians
after so many moves in one year.
Michigan Lutheran Seminary - their high school in Saginaw, Michigan. Note the blusher. They should be blushing on their own.
All this for only $44,000 - to earn a high school diploma. But only $24,000 for those who commute.
Cross-dressing does not stop at the prep school. Church and Change Pastor Adam Mueller cross-dressed with his council members at their congregational picnic.
They learn the most important skill in Church Growth - plagiarism, endorsed by Mordor and the DPs.
That never happened. Besides - SP Mark the Mirthless absolved him.
$80,000 degree at Martin Luther College, New Ulm.
No charge for trans tutoring.
---
From Naughty Marietta -
Sung by Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy
Ah! Sweet mystery of life
At last I've found thee
Ah! I know at last the secret of it all;
All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning
The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall!
For 'tis love, and love alone, the world is seeking
And 'tis love, and love alone, that can repay!
'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living
For it is love alone that rules for aye!
Love, and love alone, the world is seeking
For 'tis love, and love alone, that can repay!
'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living
For it is love alone that rules for aye!
Nelson Eddy also sang the unforgettable GA hymn:
Don't quit and join ELCA for their ministries. WELS is up to speed, asking for confidential information via email to Scott Barefoot.
Disgusted? Joining the LCMS, ELS, CLC (sic)? There is no escape. There is one Synod. One Dogma. One Despair. One Father Below.
Emily,
We recently came out with a new guide for promising young students like you
who are looking to prepare themselves for the college search process. It's
called Think
Ahead ... Get Ahead: The Scholar's Checklist for Acceptance Into Top
Colleges, and I want to send a copy to you right away. I'm very
excited to be able to share this with you.
This
guide is a great resource for those taking aim at the country's best
schools. It provides action items in different areas (from extra-curricular
activities to campus visits) that you can check off as you continue on your path
toward a successful academic career.
With our welcoming student atmosphere, dedicated faculty and beautiful
campus, Wittenberg University provides the perfect environment for talented
students like you. We emphasize hands-on learning, so our students graduate with
skills that lead to great jobs. In fact, Wittenberg was included on the "Best
Buy" list in the 2017 Fiske Guide to Colleges.
With your potential, I believe you could really benefit from a guide like
this, Emily. I hope to receive your request for Think
Ahead ... Get Ahead very soon!
Sincerely,
Karen Hunt Executive Director of Admission Wittenberg
University Post Office Box 720 Springfield, Ohio 45501-0720
I received your contact information from the College
Bound Selection Service. If you'd rather not receive e-mail from Wittenberg
University, please let
me know.
***
GJ - Someone keeps putting me on spam mailing lists. It strikes me as part of the juvenile never-grow-up WELS culture. Little do they know that all their work ends up being blocked by software.
