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| This impressed me as the best graphic for the Wise Men from the East, aka the ALPB Online Forum. |
Matt the Fatt has released the State of the Synod Report, a document with no statistics. What happened to the demand - from LCMS' Dr. Waldo Werning and Dr. Dr. Kent Hunter, both products of Fuller - that churches had to graph their statistics?
Like ELCA, the LCMS is sinking "into the depths, with bubbling groan, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown."
The ALPB solutions listed are funnier and scarier than "Lucy and the Long, Long Trailer."
One is the goal solution - every parish should have a goal of five new members in the next year. You gotta have goals and you gotta make disciples. Fuller taught us that.
Another is the sociological analysis - which is just plain depressing. People are aging. Society has changed. Wuhan Flu has hurt attendance. Seminary costs too much. Boomers are moving upstairs in the near future. True, this is no solution; it is only the threnody of sad old boozers crying in their beer, something to do.
Another solution is group confession. This revolves around the idiocy of buying an empty campus in St. Louis, because Lutherans love to buy failed Catholic schools (see WELS for advice on that). That purchase was not looking good, so they sold the campus for a loss. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Nowhere (please prove me wrong) does anyone suggest sermons - yes sermons as the building block of the Church - teaching faith in Christ as the Chief Article of Christianity, visiting members and shut-ins especially, or shutting down the political games.
Seminex and the Barthians own the LCMS. Their dogma is as sterile as moon dust, as appealing as warmed over mainline stew. They are so full of Lutheran self-loathing that they borrow every fad they see marching by. The evidence for that is in their despicable treatment of the Reformation's 500th Anniversary. Missouri, WELS (and ELCA of course) were openly ashamed of Luther and glad to mock or criticize his Biblical teaching.
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The LCMS improvers and perfecters have:
- Neglected the sermon, except for opportunities to damage faith.
- Eliminated the KJV in favor of the grossly corrupted NIV and ESV.
- Skipped the edifying work of pastoral visitation.
- Clamored for phony degrees and certificates of stupidity from Fuller, Willow Creek, Trinity Divinity, and other diploma mills.
- Buried The Lutheran Hymnal in favor of warmed over Calvinist bar music.
- Worked hard to invent plush salaries for fake jobs and invisible results.
I have been an observer and participant in the LCA, LCMS, WELS, and ELS. The old LCA honored to some extent the divine call. That vanished with radical quotas and the toxins of ELCA. The other synods gained nothing because of their hatefulness toward members and ministers alike. So many District Presidents and bishops have the perpetual angry look of Captain Queeg - "Who stole my strawberries?"
Missouri politics and vindictiveness are exemplified by the Preus-Otten attack on Walter A. Maier II, precisely because he was well liked as a person and professor - and taught Justification by Faith. People thought Werning's last book was crazy hateful, but they should read David Scaer's.
WELS-ELS-CLC-ELDONUTs - they are simply a smaller version of Missouri, less money, fewer drones to feed off the Thrivent and offering plate money. Each one pretends to be IT!, but they are tied to their family connections and idiosyncrasies.
Tent-making is better than being hand-cuffed to a nasty little or nasty big synods. WELS would never answer my letters, but they sure loved to mail me ugly letters, signed by the DP, various seminary professors and executives - especially the alcoholic ones, the circuit pastor (hand-delivered!), and parish pastors too.
All a congregation needs is a place to meet and a faithful leader. The ALPB Online Geezers do not trust the Gospel Word to accomplish God's work, because - as apostate Calvinists or wannabee Catholics - they are above all that. When man places his reason above God's Word, the results will be bad. WELS-ELS-LCMS built palaces from the guilt-offering of a rich but unrepentant adulterer. Now they get to pay the price for the upkeep.
Good fruit will not grow on the tree of unfaith. Sanctimony will flourish, but the fruits of the Spirit will not.
