The Big Three Apostates - ELCA-LCMS-WELS-ELS-CLC (sic) - do not seriously belong with the Tiny Two. The Tiny Two are comical in their roles, anxious to gather the crumbs from their Father Below. Just like caulking the windows as winter sets in, the Big Five hope to accomplish something and argue statistics about how they will do better in the future.
The Tiny Two should feel some relief now, because ELCA, Missouri, and WELS are trying to unburden the burden of their rotting buildings and stale programs - xeroxed from Fuller, Willow Creek, Trinity Divinity, and Mark Jeske. Some call it the 50 year rule, the time it takes to realize they have rotting roofs, wheezy furnaces, and leaky windows. Thus the WWII Baby Boomers sparked growth in parishes, colleges, and deluxe sect offices - the pig in the python, 25% of the population. Y2K was not so much a terror about upgrading all computers as it was a sullen dread that the Boomers would be the last hurrah.
Casting all pride aside, Boomers did their assignments with typewriters (at best) and depended on corded phones, not hand-held mini-computers. The new generation has online studies from almost any place. I was part of the UOP boom, teaching a total of 5,000 students (for real!) and getting another degree, but Missouri is stuck with HotChalk, an enormous lawsuit about providing quick and easy online education. We can imagine someone wise, with the online buzz was peaking, saying "Don't do it Matt!" - the beginning of the Salvation Army, the end of one more LCMS college.
I would take on another round of online education, just to boast, "I earned my DMin in Church Growth on HotChalk!" There are more examples. The NYC Missouri college rolled over and played dead. They were bought up immediately. Nunes was so skillful in closing that university that he took on another prize school - ELCA this time. Ichabod was posting about Nunes in 2009.
