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| Wrong focus, professors! |
The claim was made that the seminary professors - at Concordia St. Louis - want to back away from the Six Day Creation, because that concept is hurting them with the youth. I agree with them and will argue with great ferocity for their intentions. They want to remove what is causing a rapid decline in the Missouri Synod, not to mention WELS, the Little Sect on the Prairie, and the CLC cult.
Their focus is bad, like the Space Telescope that was launched with the wrong prescription for its optics. In harmony with all Enthusiasts, the Concordia professors imagine that the right man-made solutions will cure their ills.
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| WELS, LCMS, Seminex, ALC - they are pointing in the same direction as Jungkuntz did. |
What has their Missouri Synod obsessively promoted the last 50 years?
- Objective Justification - Forgiveness without faith, as taught by their syphilitic founder, Martin Stephan, STD; Jungkuntz, who helped set up Seminex for the Metropolitan Community Church; Herman Otten, spiker of synod scandals; David Scaer, and other enemies of the truth.
- Church Growth - Gimmicks and manipulation, doctrine watered down to success ideology, established by no less than five (5) LCMS gurus in Church Growth - Waldo Werning, Kent Hunter, and three addition morons.
Focusing on results is all wrong - that is their problem, something that even the daft Walther realized (borrowing from Luther). One does not seek for the fruit, as Pietism does, but for the good tree - sound doctrine.
I would love to see the city slickers at Concordia Seminary shopping for gardening supplies. They would see the splendid bulb flowers from Dutch Gardens, order a bunch of them, and say, "Eeek! These daffodils and tulips are ugly, not at all what we imagined. We saw perfect flowers, but these are homely and smell funny." Fools. The best bulbs are just as ugly as bare root roses. That is why people buy both in pots, which does not change the reality, only the perception.
The various synods and cults need to abandon their Enthusiasm and their sneering at ELCA to return to the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. ELCA makes them feel superior, so why are the quasi-conservative synods collapsing just as fast? Shouldn't the escaping ELCA members fill their pews and send their male candidates to college and seminary?
No - and this is why. The LCMS-WELS-ELS-CLC entities are just another version of ELCA, working with ELCA, and secretly coveting ELCA.
A priest or Babtist or non-Christian can lecture at their schools, and there is no murmur, no opposition. But if I were named a guest-speaker, their customers and leaders would go nuts. Herman Otten is just their pretend whipping boy. The synods use him to keep their scandals from coming out, to help elect the right non-leaders to office. And Otten is happy for those moments of fellowship, those whispered phone calls, those "don't tell anyone I called" calls. If a candidate for the synod president composes a song of adoration and travels to the sacred publishing location to sing it, and the editor keeps it a secret, how far apart are they?
People over the years have contacted me about the abuse and scams of the synods. Thousands have given up having any impact on their own congregations and synods, so they quietly withdraw. That will continue because the leaders skim the cream for themselves and let everything else rot away.
The numbers they give out make me laugh. WELS has 400,000 members and ELS 20,000? They cannot even scrape up cash for capital repairs on their failing prep school in Saginaw. Now it is too late to have reasonable charges, which were once subsidized by synod offerings. The Lutheran schools are luxuries that many are happy to bypass.
The leaders were content to take the money for themselves, their deluxe office buildings, portly staffs, and let the student population borrow their way to an education. Now the overhead is beyond belief and everyone is drifting away, which accelerates the problems of cost and income.
Let's look at small numbers at a tiny college. If they have a total of 200 students and lose 30 in enrollment, that is 30 x $30,000 per year. The loss is $900,000 per year - same teachers, same buildings, same utilities, same insurance. There are many tiny Bible colleges like that. The big picture is much scarier, whether LCMS or WELS or ELS or CLC. ELDONA can lose their entire seminary study body once he graduates. Then they could merge with the CLC seminary as Andover did with Newton, and Andover-Newton did with Yale, and so forth.
Luther did not worry about results. He taught sound doctrine and rejected false doctrine. Many faulted him during the Reformation, as the Lutheran leaders of today do. But if we believe the Word of God is efficacious and powerful - as I do - then God will accomplish His will through His Word, as promised.
