Mrs. Ichabod and I often look through animal photos and videos for laughs. Sassy is proof that animals smile - and laugh - sometimes for us, sometimes at us. She outbarked me in a contest where she barked and I yelled "Done!" for each bark. Usually I win, but when I gave up, she looked at me and smiled.
Sassy laughs at me when she wins a contest about where we are going. She will stop in the middle of the street and not move until I cave in. Then she prances off.
Once a squirrel jumped up to the window at the kitchen sink. He looked in and showed some dismay that I was being late with the food. They can get very angry when their food is moved.
I have to question whether Christianity can thrive in urban areas, because people lose sight of Creation and God's purpose. They figure the calculus, statistics, and marketing they use for business will take care of all church plans, so they slowly become apostates.
The tree of faith - Matthew 7 - can only produce good fruit, but they adopt the weed tree of unfaith - which produces a lot of sterile, worthless fruit.
The bullies of Church Growth - whether rough-shod or silken (like David Valleskey) should unroll their statistical tables for everyone. Some books, like Kent Hunter's, included graph paper bound into the magical tome (or was that tomb?). Now is harvest time. But "harvest with a sickle, not went a pen knife," as McGavran admonished a moon-eyed Larry Olson. Yes, bring in the sheaves, even if they look more like clover.
But lo, the LCMS produced their report with no statistics, no listing of staff fired from lack of funds, no muster of college campus sold to save some loot. Isn't it odd that Marvin Schwan poured out all that money for buildings and now the recipients are selling entire campi at fire-sale rates? Not odd at all - they were selling indulgences to Marvin and he was buying them with frozen food money. The ELS probably got more money per member of the synod than LCMS and WELS, and they are failing faster.
When the leaders of the LCMS-ELS-WELS repudiate the Gospel, how can they expect anything but ruin and division? They have the anti-faith institutions lined up like Soviet planned housing, row after row of sterility:
- Christian (aka Calvinist) News
- LutherQuest (sic)
- Steadfast Apostate Lutherans
- Concordia Publishing House - Matt the Fatt's After-dinner Mint
- St. Louis, Ft. Wayne, Mordor, and Bethany Seminaries, vacating faster than NYC
- Colleges with fantastic tuition costs and mediocre professors
- OJ Synod Popes, District Popes, and Circuit Popes
