The Texas District of the LCMS released a short video explaining what the Texas District does. Here it is in its entirety, in their own words:

Hi everyone. This is Ben Gonzalez. I’m the Area B Mission Strategist for the Texas District. And I’m excited to come to you today to help answer a question of what is the Texas District? The vision of the Texas District is to catalyze a exponential mission movement here in Texas. To walk together, to work together, to support each other. And it’s our heart’s desire to come alongside and walk with leaders, whether they’re pastors or DCEs or church planters to come alongside and work together in catalyzing that mission movement.

Well, what is catalyzing a mission movement? We believe it is disciples that are making disciples and churches that are planting churches. So the heart of the Texas District is to walk together in supporting one another in how we form disciples that make disciples. So our heart is to come alongside you and your ministries, and in your context, because we know every context is different. We want to come along and support you in that specific context, whether it’s a church or it’s a new ministry or it’s a school or it’s a new mission endeavor. To come alongside you and to help make disciples that make disciples, so that new churches can be planted and those churches can plant new churches.

Luther House of Study is an alternative, online seminary that partners with Unite Leadership Collective (ULC). ULC has, in their own words, “partnered with Kairos University and Luther House of Study (LHOS) to bring affordable and accelerated education on your path to becoming a Shepherd, Evangelist, or Executive Director in your local congregation.” This is because, according to ULC, “LHOS offers a revolutionary approach to delivering a solid Lutheran education for individuals entering into congregational ministry.” ULC’s Director, Tania Hilton recently completed her MDiv from LHOS. She was inspired to enter the program after being frustrated that women could not consecrate the eucharist at an LCMS women’s retreat. She is a parishioner of Christ Greenfield (LCMS) and was interviewed by her pastor, the Rev. Dr. Tim Ahlman, here.

The CEO of LHOS is the “Rev” Sarah Stenson. She was interviewed on ULC’s podcast by Pastor Ahlman here. She is the co-author of a recent essay entitled “Ordination of Women by Evangelical Lutherans Revisited.”

In the conclusion of the paper, Stenson and co-author Christopher Croghan, claim to enlist some interesting theologians in support of their position, including the LCMS’s own Joel Biermann (Concordia Seminary - St. Louis) and David Scaer (Concordia Theological Seminary - Fort Wayne):

While Scripture does not provide examples or guidance for what we now call ordination, what it does demonstrate is that in and of itself, i.e. relying only on Scripture, there is no sound scriptural reason not to ordain women simply because they are women. This is something theologians from across the theological spectrum have concluded, including Biermann, Scaer, Harrisville and Forde as discussed above. In fact, one would be hard pressed to claim, based on Scripture alone, that women must be prohibited from occupying the office of pastor.

You can read their paper, in their own words, here.

This was published December 15, 2025. — Ed.

The Christian faith is a both/and matter. It is neither spiritual to the detriment of the physical (as Gnostics, and as, to a lesser extent, sacramentarian Evangelicals confess), nor is it material to the detriment of the spiritual (as atheists and rationalists confess). Jesus is the eternal Word who was born in space and time. He is the God who created us, and yet He comes to us in creation by means of His Eucharistic flesh and blood. In Christ, the supernatural and the natural come together.

In this day and age of Evangelical dominance in the American religious scene, Lutherans are tempted to adopt the “winning” methodology of the megachurch: entertainment worship, a de-emphasis on sacraments and reverence in favor of casualness and a ginning up of emotional excitement. And part of the “best practices” advocated by the “church growth” faction is to get rid of the hymnal.

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I often hear advocates of “contemporary worship” (CoWo) make the claim that they are liturgical - they just use “modern instruments” instead of the pipe organ. And so, I have been on a hunt to find this elusive unicorn, imagining that somewhere there is a congregation using DS3 with a vested pastor celebrating the Mass with reverence in a chancel with altar, font, and pulpit, a congregation that has a band in the choir loft with drums, guitar, and lead singer instead of the organ and choir. What I typically find when I look at the congregations of people who make this claim is something completely different.

As he reveals in his “Reflections of a Recovering Praise Band Leader,” available here, our own Dr. Eckardt, decades ahead of his time, composed and performed a Rock Mass for use in Sunday worship. And there is a “Lutheran” pastor in Finland who leads heavy metal Divine Services (though he is part of the state “church” that “ordains” women. But in spite of the many times that I have heard about these liturgical CoWo services in the LCMS, I have yet to find one (and thanks be to God that the Chicago Folk Service has long since crossed the rainbow bridge).

Maybe the unicorn exists, or maybe they all drowned in the flood like the ancient Irish hymn confesses.

But to be fair, there are liturgical elements, even if scant, in some CoWo churches. The above service is such an example. It is from the congregation of one of the pioneers of the Lutheran Church Growth and Contemporary Worship movements: the Rev. Dr. David Luecke, author of the 1988 classic Evangelical Style and Lutheran Substance: Facing America's Mission Challenge - who continues to serve there as pastor emeritus. He is not in the above video.

The liturgy above can be summed up in this way:

• Opening announcements by the celebrant

• Invocation:

  • “Before we worship, we come together in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” with the sign of the cross.

• Song performed by the band: “Found In You”

• Reading from Matt 6

• Confession and absolution

  • “Your sins are forgiven folks, that’s how much God loves you. You are forgiven.”

• Song performed by the band: “Christ Be Magnified” (Bethel)

• Nicene Creed

• Announcements and ex corde prayer offered by the lady director of family ministry

• Dismissal of the children

• Announcements by the celebrant

• Sermon by the preacher

• Offering

• Song performed by the band: “Goodness of God” (Bethel)

• Communion exhortation

  • Open to those:

    • Baptized

    • Believe that they are sinful

    • Believe Jesus is the Son of God and personal Savior

    • Believe Jesus is “personally present”

    • Committed to a godly life

• Consecration

  • Verba said not over any visible elements

  • Sign of the cross made twice at the end

• Distribution with song performed by the band: “New Wine” (Hillsong)

• Dismissal with another absolution and two signs of the cross

• Prayer

• Lord’s Prayer

• Announcements

• Aaronic benediction with three signs of the cross

• Song performed by the band: “We Praise You” (Bethel)

So this CoWo service indeed had elements of the Lutheran liturgy, but at the same time, there was a lot that was missing or moved around. There were no Kyrie, Gloria, Salutation, Collect, three paired readings, Offertory, Preface, Proper Preface, Sanctus, Pax Domini, Agnus Dei, Nunc Dimittis, Post-Communion Collect, Salutation, or Benedicamus.

This service was not my unicorn - but was still more liturgical than most. By comparison, here is the chart from the McCain edition of the Book of Concord comparing the Evangelical Style Mass of 1523 to the Roman Substance Mass of the same period.

The reader can decide if this CoWo service walks together with the rest of us. I’m sure opinions will vary. But even with some of the liturgical elements in this service (that are often missing elsewhere), the hunt for the unicorn continues.

This morning I saw reports in the Norwegian language that the bishops of the Church of Norway who officiated at the recent State funeral of HM the late King Harald V omitted the prescribed recitation of Jn 3:16 from the beginning of the visually impressive service held in the relatively small yet very beautiful cathedral located in the heart of downtown Oslo (whose s is pronounced as a soft j, as I discovered on my first and likely only visit to Norway back in April of this year). My all too short visit was a delight, with the rescheduled return trip laying low this ageing gentleman, but I had the privilege of meeting some new brethren in Norway and of spending the Sunday following a conference arranged by Dr David Preus attending a beautifully celebrated Eucharist at a church of the LKNI shepherded by an Icelandic native, Pr Sakarias Ingolfson, who with his teenage son kindly sacrificed his Sunday afternoon to showing me the Oslo downtown. Our visit to the cathedral, followed by a walk past the Storting and up to the Royal Palace, enabled me to appreciate all the more the hours I spent glued to the live presentation of King Harald’s funeral, which proved that the Norwegians perform their Royal ceremonies every bit as well as the British. Moreover, as far as externals are concerned, the clergy of the Church of Norway are many steps above the German Protestant clergy who give such a gloomy impression as they officiate in the black Talar prescribed for Prussian civil servants.

Doctrinally speaking, the funeral of the late King appeared ‘lite’ in the extreme, though it did feature a reading from Jn 14, at least one traditional Norwegian hymn, and the singing (in English!) of Abide with me, whose final words HRH the new Crown Princess rendered with gusto. But today’s news included the report that the presiding bishop of the Church of Norway, who was assisted in the liturgy by the lady bishop of Oslo, deliberately dropped the prescribed reading of Jn 3:16 from the opening of the funeral liturgy, a fact that speaks volumes about the current spiritual state of the Church of Norway and explains why two orthodox Synods are now at work in that historically Lutheran land, a group in the North led by biskop Thor With, a gentleman of my own age whom I had the pleasure to meet at the conference, and a group spread more widely around the country headed by biskop Thorkild Masvie, a human dynamo whose energy belies his age.

Given that my Norwegian is elementary (though, given familiarity with German and my hailing from a part of England where everyday speech remains deeply influenced by Anglo-Saxon, I think I could soon pick up this tongue without too much difficulty), I typed, though not without misgiving, into my computer a question about the kerfuffle around the presiding bishop’s peremptory decision, receiving the following paragraphs in reply, sentences which explain why we should support and pray for the clergy and laypeople gathered under the episcopal ministry of Bishops Torkild and Thor. And oh how I wish I could pay a more leisurely visit to Norway, not a fjord of which Realm did I see back in April.

Presiding Bishop Omits John 3:16 from King Harald’s Funeral

The presiding bishop of the Church of Norway, Olav Fykse Tveit, deliberately omitted John 3:16 from King Harald V’s state funeral, a move rooted in ongoing liturgical reform debates and widely reported in Norway Dagen+1.

What happened

On 9 September 2026, Bishop Olav Fykse Tveit led King Harald V’s funeral service at Oslo Cathedral. Although the Norwegian Church’s funeral liturgy traditionally opens with John 3:16 — often called “the little Bible” — he chose not to read it Dagen. He said he did not want the nation to “misunderstand our message” and that the verse was “misplaced” in the current funeral liturgy Dagen.

Official reasoning

Fykse Tveit, who is preses (archbishop) of the Church of Norway’s bishop’s meeting, stated that he and the bishops believe John 3:16 is not the right place in today’s funeral liturgy Dagen. He confirmed that the decision was made in consultation with other bishops, including Oslo bishop Sunniva Gylver, and that the Church’s rules allow bishops to approve deviations from the liturgy Dagen. He also noted that the verse was omitted even from his own sermon, though he quoted parts of it Dagen.

Liturgical context

John 3:16 has long been a mandatory opening verse in Norwegian funeral services, but many priests have in recent years quietly skipped it, citing concerns that it is unsuitable for the start of a funeral nordictimes.com+1. The bishops’ proposal to make it optional has drawn criticism from some Christian leaders, who see it as a retreat from “classical Christian theology” nordictimes.com.

Reactions

The omission sparked a national debate. Supporters, including some clergy, argued it was a pastoral choice that avoided a message about “loss” at the start of a funeral Dagen+1. Critics, including some theologians and church leaders, said it broke with tradition and could signal a shift in the Church’s theological emphasis nordictimes.com+1. The Church’s leadership stressed that only bishops can approve such deviations; ordinary priests cannot replicate the move without episcopal approval Dagen.

Significance

This was the highest-profile case of the reform under discussion, and Fykse Tveit said it was part of a broader review of the funeral liturgy Dagen. The decision has been interpreted as a signal to the whole Church that the placement of John 3:16 in funerals is under reconsideration Dagen.

In short, the presiding bishop’s omission was a deliberate, authorized departure from the standard liturgy, reflecting both theological judgment and the ongoing reform of Norwegian funeral rites.

A lot of our rebellion against God’s created order and against His Word involves the concept of “gender.”

It started in the 1970s when the word “gender” replaced the word “sex” on forms. I believe this was a deliberate change designed to advance an agenda rather than just avoiding the word “sex” because of people’s prudish sensitivities. Far from it!

In the early eighties, I took Sociology in college. Our professor was an admitted Marxist. Our textbook was ahead of its time, delving into gender ideology and Critical Race Theory. I wish I had saved the book. It took decades for this nonsense to go mainstream.

They took the grammatical concept of gender and pushed it beyond linguistics. For that is all that gender really is: a grammatical category.

In English, we have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (which is Latin for “neither”). In our language, a noun is categorized as one of these three genders. The masculine and feminine genders correspond to the natural biological sex of people and animals. Neuter is used for inanimate objects.

But there are exceptions. For example, ships and cars are often given the feminine gender (taking the pronouns “she” and “her”). The church is also of the feminine gender. Specific named hurricanes used to be feminine until a few years ago when feminists complained - giving us alternating binary masculine and feminine names. Eventually, the names also had to reflect non-western monikers. How long before the scheme is adapted to add a third category of gender non conforming or some other woke agenda? I’m surprised we aren’t there yet.

English follows the Latin in having three grammatical genders. In Latin, the nouns follow patterns called declensions. The first declension consists of nouns that end in “a” and are nearly always feminine. The second declension consists of nouns that end in “us” or “r” - and they are nearly always masculine. But there are exceptions. There are a few first declension words that are masculine in gender, but behave grammatically as if they were feminine - including the Latin words for farmer (agricola), poet (poeta), and sailor (nauta). Then there is the word for inhabitant (incola) which is a first declension word that may be either masculine or feminine (“common gender”) depending on the sex of the inhabitant.

Modern languages have two or three genders. French has two, German has three. In French, a shirt is feminine (une chemise), while a tree is masculine (un arbre). And in German, a girl (Mädchen) is grammatically neuter. This doesn’t mean the Germans think girls are not human or are gender non binary. It’s just a grammatical quirk that was probably inherited from an earlier form of the language. Like French, German assigns a gender to nouns that represent inanimate objects (and they can be masculine, feminine, or neuter!). These are simply peculiarities of language.

Greek, like Latin, is an inflected language, and it too has three genders. But there are some words in Greek that are “common gender.” Like incola in Latin, they are words that function grammatically like one gender, but can be either masculine or feminine based on the sex of the person the words describe (the antecedent). One example is the word “deacon” (διάκονος - diakonos). The word has a range of meanings, from a general word for servant, to the specific role of a waiter or waitress of tables, to the specific ecclesiastical office (who may be ordained or not) of the minister who vests and serves with the pastor at the altar. And, again, to further complicate matters of interpretation and translation, this is a “common gender” word in Greek.

So in Greek, the word “diakonos” acts like a masculine word grammatically, but it can either be masculine or feminine based on the sex of the person. And diakonos can also mean very different things.

Those who want to ordain women and/or admit women to ecclesiastical diaconal service of the type that they were not created or called to do - neither in the Book of Acts, nor in the early church, nor in the medieval church, nor in the reformation church, but only within the last few decades following the world’s “sexual revolution” - exploit this grammatical irregularity as some kind of hidden Bible code granting divine approval to a program of sex-role change. And the example of St. Phoebe is often trotted out (Rom 16:1), since the Greek text refers to her as a diakonos. This is interpreted by feminists as proof that she performed the same role as the seven men chosen by the church in Acts 6 and by historical deacons like St. Lawrence, and that there is no biblical sexual differentiation between the roles of a male and female diaconate - since the Greek word is the same regardless of gender. See how that works? See how duplicitous that is? We can certainly commend the devil for his shrewdness.

I recently heard one LCMS podcaster unabashedly arguing for an expanded role for women in the church based on the grammatical nature of diakonos in Greek. He mistakenly said that the Greek word for deacon is “non-gendered” when it is actually “common gender.” Phoebe would not be referred to by masculine pronouns, nor as being of a neutral sex - but is still called “she” or “her” in Greek. The gender of diakonos is the same as the gender of the specific antecedent (in this case, “Phoebe”).

In English, we do have both words “deacon” and “deaconess” with genders corresponding to biological sex. We used to do this more often in English, such as “aviator” and “aviatrix.” It was not that long ago that we commonly used the words “waiter” and “waitress” (now gender-neutered into “server”). We spoke of “hosts” and “hostesses” - but now the masculine form is used to describe both. In commercial flight, the typical “stewardess” and the less common “steward” have now been given the dehumanized, bureaucratic, and bloodless-sounding “flight attendant.” Interestingly, German still has gendered terms for most vocations, such as “pilot” (Pilot/Pilotin), “doctor” (Artz/Ärztin), or “teacher” (Lehrer/Lehrerin).

But again, we do have “deacons” and “deaconesses” in the English language (as does German). And their roles are quite different. And like the Greek word diakonos, there is a range of meaning. In the LCMS, we have a rostered female diaconate: deaconesses. We also have unofficial, non-rostered deaconesses, such as pastors’ wives and other ladies of the church who love and serve their neighbors who are women and children in the congregation, and help the pastor give them pastoral care. Some churches refer to their board of (lay) elders as deacons. In my congregation, I have a consecrated (not ordained) deacon who vests and serves with me at the altar - but does not preach or administer sacraments. When I was on vicarage, I was similarly consecrated as a deacon. In the Lutheran Church - Canada - all rostered lay church workers are referred to as “deacons” and “deaconesses.” So to a dishonest person looking to being “change” to our churches and to our synod, these words are fertile ground for equivocation and gaslighting.

In the Atlantic District, and maybe in other more liberal districts, they consecrate women at the district level not as “deaconesses” but as “deacons” - just like the men. They cross-dress them in albs and cinctures and stoles worn on the diagonal, and they assist at the altar. If a pastor, a female “deacon,” and a vicar were all serving together in the Divine Service, the message would be clear: the lady “deacon” exercises authority over the male vicar. For like the pastor, she is vested in a stole: the symbol of the yoke of the office of the holy ministry.

This is the kind of gender and sex mischief that goes on in the LCMS, and has for decades.

Interestingly, there are other “common gender” words that are used in the New Testament. “Apostle” (ἀπόστολος - apostolos) is one. So a dishonest argument could be made to have women preaching, baptizing, teaching, and administering sacraments based on this grammatical quirk in the language, just as some in the LCMS are argue that we should have women deacons. The word for virgin (παρθένος - parthenos) is also such a word. It can describe either sex, but mimics the masculine gender form. The Blessed Virgin Mary is a parthenos, but the “common gender” and declension paradigm of the word in Greek have nothing to do with her sex. Apparently, there are some cases in Koine Greek where the word for god (θεός - theos) is treated as “common gender” (as opposed to using the feminine form θεά - thea) for a goddess. This quirk in grammatical gender usage does not reflect the ontological nature of God (Θεός - Theos) - the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - though once again, you can always find a gaslighting feminist trying to bamboozle the church - at least for now, outside of the LCMS. We need to be clear in our confession of male and female, and not allow confusion regarding grammatical gender to muddy the waters.

There is an interesting illustration that comes from French. Jesus is assigned the pronoun “she” (elle) in John 1. This is because the word “Word” (“In the beginning was the Word”) is the French word Parole, and it is a feminine noun. Therefore, the pronoun “she” (elle) is used to describe our Lord. The word “Word” is found in all three genders in various languages. Feminine in French, neuter in English (though we use the masculine pronoun in John 1), neuter in Latin (Verbum), neuter in German (Wort), but masculine in Greek (Λόγος - Logos). None of this is a reflection on the biological sex of the Son of God, who is the icon of the Father.

Grammatical gender is not a hidden Bible Code to leverage libertine sex roles in the church. Those who have an agenda use this to gaslight people based on the bamboozling that they are already getting from the pronoun-addled sexually-confused secular culture and among others who claim to be Christians (or even Lutherans). Watch for it, and beware. For what they are really proposing is a question: “Did God actually say?”

The Gottes-Stallion bolts ahead again, as it has done every quarter for some 34 years, to a mailbox near you, provided you are a subscriber (if not, click here at once!). Another stellar issue, featuring:

This was published September 30, 2021. — Ed.

When I had children at home, we were quite disciplined, though certainly not perfect, about family devotions after dinner. Since they grew up and moved away, our lives are less structured and Jacqui and I have sometimes gone weeks without doing them. In the recent months, I switched some things around that have been helpful for us. I am sharing what we do here so that you might make use of these things as they seem useful and also comment about what helps you.

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The above wonderful CCLE presentation by the Rev. Roger Mullet - which I highly recommend - introduced me to a reading plan that I had never heard of before: the Professor Grant Horner plan. Instead of four streams tied to the particular calendar day, Horner has ten streams of one chapter each. And over the course of time, the readings will vary - since the streams are of different lengths. This leads to unique meditations on texts that are not normally read together. And once you have read these ten chapters together, you won’t read those exact ten together again. This is different from the OYB in which the matched readings are always the same from year to year. And anyone that reads Scripture in tandem with other Scripture can attest, the consistency of the Word of God is stunning. As Pastor Mullet put it: “It’s almost like the same guy wrote the whole book.”

So I decided to take up the Horner Plan. It is slightly a bigger time commitment - but I think the payoff is well worth it. I rolled with it for a few weeks, and was very pleased with it. And you can find it all laid out on the Bible App - again, with your choice of version and narration.

Using Horner, you will complete the whole text of the Bible in 250 days - instead of 365. But over the course of a year, you will have read:

• The Gospels - four times in the year

• The Pentateuch - about twice

• The Main Epistles (Rom, 1 & 2 Cor, Gal, Eph, Phil, Col, and Heb) - about 4.7 times

• The Other Epistles (1 & 2 Thess, 1 & 2 Tim, Titus, Phlm, Jas, 1 & 2 Pet, 1-3 John, Jude, and Rev) - about 5.6 times

• The Wisdom Literature (Job, Eccl, and Song) - six times

• Psalms - about 2.4 times

• Proverbs - twelve times

• OT History (Josh, Judg, Ruth, 1 & 2 Sam, 1 & 2 Kgs, 1 & 2 Chron, Ezra, Neh, Est) - about 1.5 times

• The Prophets - about 1.5 times

• Acts - thirteen times

I don’t know why Professor Horner chose this order, but I followed it, and, as I said, found it edifying.

But as I was going through it, I wanted to experiment a bit to try a kind of “Lutheran use” modification. This is the plan that I have come up with for now, and have been at it for a few weeks now. I like it even better than Horner:

• Keep the Gospels - four times in the year

• Keep the Pentateuch - about 1.9 times

• Keep the Wisdom Literature, including the Proverbs - almost four times

• Create a new list called Evangelical Epistles (Rom, Gal, Eph) - thirteen times

• Remove Rom, Gal, and Eph from Main Epistles, increasing the remainder to about 7.3 times

• Other NT Epistles (add Acts) - almost four times

• Keep Psalms - about 2.4 times

• Keep OT History - about 1.5 times

• Keep the Prophets - about 1.5 times

• Add the Apocrypha - about twice.

This drills down on Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians - reading them thirteen times a year, keeping the Gospels at four times, reading the main epistles 7.3 times, and the rest of the epistles roughly four times. This still keeps the time needed to cover the whole Bible at about 250 days.

One disadvantage has been to lose the automated reading plan on the Bible App. I bought this ESV that includes the Apocrypha, and use Post-It flags for the ten streams. I sometimes still use the narration on the Bible App (except for the ESV Apocrypha) - it just has to be entered manually chapter by chapter.

As far as the order of reading, I modified it devotionally to mirror the Divine Service of the Word:

Introit:

• Psalms

Old Testament:

• Pentateuch

• OT History

• Wisdom

• Prophets

Gradual:

• Apocrypha

Epistle:

• Evangelical Epistles

• Main Epistles

• Other Epistles

Gospel:

• Gospels

Once again, this is working great for me. I’ll be interested to see how it goes in the long term.

A pastor recently explained in his sermon why he chooses not to wear a clerical collar. It boils down to his belief that a collar makes a pastor unapproachable. He said:

You know, why do pastors wear the the collars? Well, they wear the cassock, the black outfit, and then they have a white collar around their neck to show I’m a sinner, but when I speak, I speak on behalf of a pure and holy God. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. There are many, many communities and many places where that works. For me, if I were to wear that, people would go, “Oh, Father, what time is Mass?” You know, and I’m like, “Well, that’s not us. That’s not what we do.” And there, there are some people that that would not see that as an approachable person to talk to. And I want to seem approachable….

If I was to wear [vestments] every Sunday, you would have to give me IVs in between services because I would sweat to death up here. I would I would literally be a mess, and that’s just not my style. I wouldn’t. There would be people that would not see that as approachable, and I want people to approach me…. I feel like I’m approachable because of the way I dress.

As I said in a comment on the blogpost:

I try to buck the slovenly trend when flying, and so I usually dress up a bit - which for me, means wearing a clerical when traveling. Since I like to travel without checking a bag, I sometimes fly cassocked (if I will be conducting the liturgy and/or preaching at my destination). People come up to me all the time. They smile. They ask for prayers. They know I'm one of Jesus' Men because of the uniform - just like when we see a young marine or soldier or airman or sailor - and we thank them for their service. Civilian clothing doesn't make anybody more approachable. It just allows you to blend in with the scenery, so that nobody knows who you are. It makes you anonymous.

My backpack has a chaplain's cross on it, and a young Air Force officer at the DFW airport recognized the insignia, and we had a great conversation. It turns out that she was stationed in the New Orleans area, and her colleague was a specific Air Force chaplain whom I was playing phone tag with. I took a picture and sent it to the chaplain - and we had a great phone conversation right then and there. We are now colleagues in the Louisiana State Guard.

There are benefits to standing out a bit. Why he thinks this makes a person unapproachable is, as I said, not my experience at all.

I have no problem with people knowing who I am, and who my Boss is. And if it brings them comfort in a time of trial in life - because they can come to me with questions or prayers or asking for a blessing (which happens often) - then how is that being "unapproachable"? I have had people tell me that they appreciate simply seeing a pastor willing to be seen in a collar, that it makes them think of Jesus. I think there are blessings and benefits of wearing clerical garb that we will never find out about until eternity.

And just yesterday, the Boss used His impeccable timing and clerical garb to give pastoral care to one of His beloved.

I lead an online Vespers service for Wittenberg Academy every Tuesday afternoon. My wife and I planned to make a Walmart run afterwards. Well, during the Magnificat, my phone belted out a fire alarm (I’m a fire chaplain). I managed to continue chanting while I discreetly snuck the phone out of my pocket and silenced it (now there is a skill that has nothing to offer a man on his resume). After the service ended, I looked to see what the fire alarm was. Lo and behold, the call was to Walmart to clean up spilled gasoline at the gas station. Some might call that a coincidence. Yeah. I know better. So off we went.

After the situation at the gas pump was handled, I met up with my wife at Walmart, ran off on my own and and grabbed a few things, carrying them precariously in my arms while trying to find my wife. An elderly black lady stopped me at an endcap along the main aisle.

“Are you a minister?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Would you pray for me? I’m going through some stuff.”

I was able to give this dear lady pastoral care right there, juggling all of my items. As I began to pray, I made the sign of the cross and invoked the Most Holy Trinity. Joellen grabbed my right hand. “God is in the right hand,” she explained. Well, I don’t know about that, but I accommodated. I prayed for her. I gave her a blessing and made the sign of the holy cross on her forehead. I patted her on the shoulder and assured her that Jesus loves her and has her back.

I realized that the Boss, in His divine providence and perfect timing, conspired through several divinely coordinated events so as to make sure that Joellen had pastoral care at that moment. In His mercy, He provided a pastor for her in her time of need. (If you’re so inclined, please say a pray for Joellen).

She did not find me “unapproachable.” In fact, she approached me. She sought me out. If you’re drowning in a pool, the guy with the lifeguard uniform is the most approachable person of all. Had the pastor who said clericals “don’t work” for him had been the one walking past Joellen instead of me, she would not have approached him. The clerical shirt made me approachable - not a sportsball jersey or even a T-Shirt with some Jesus glurge on it.

Now, I don’t always wear clericals to go to Walmart, but it’s also not uncommon that I end up doing so. But if I’m in street clothing, my ministry is camouflaged (at least to strangers). When I’m in clericals, everybody knows that I am one of Jesus’ men. Once in a while, we get glared at. That’s fine. I’m not ashamed of Jesus. I’m not ashamed of my ordination. I’m not ashamed of my vocation.

While in my first seminary class, our Greek instructor, Dr. Peter Scaer, told us to get over the awkwardness of wearing clericals in public. He told us to buy a clerical shirt, and leave the campus. Go out in public with it on. Go to the mall. So I did. And it was awkward. Some people stared. You just get used to it. It goes with the calling. In our recent trip to post-Christian Canada, I got a few glares. I sometimes get a few doubletakes on the motorcycle.

I’ve worn clericals in every region of the country, including in the Bible Belt. I have never felt unapproachable. I think that is just a canard.

My advice for seminarians and young pastors (since you CoWo types and “men of a certain age” are already set in your ways) is to wear your clericals often. And God will place you where you are needed. You will be more approachable for the sake of the kingdom and for the love of your neighbor. Don’t be a chameleon. Don’t just try to blend in. When you’re a pastor, you are a pastor 24-7 - and you are not only your congregation’s pastor - for you are a minister of Jesus, an ambassador for Christ to the world, and a servant of King and kingdom. You never know when the Lord will manipulate space and time to direct you to someone who needs pastoral care. And this is less likely to happen if you’re in mufti.

As Bishop Bo Giertz wrote:

Would you respect an officer who as a matter of principle appeared at maneuvers in mufti? Or a Salvation Army soldier who doffed his uniform when his corps was assembled in the market square?” Torvik was becoming irritated. “You must certainly understand that I want to come as an ordinary human being.” But the rector continued his argument. “Then you are sailing under false colors. You are no ordinary person. You have been ordained by the Church as a servant of the Word. You have been elected and called by the Christian congregation at Ödesjö to be its pastor. You get support from the fields which godly forbears donated for the pastor’s upkeep. It is pure dishonesty to take the money, if you want to be just an ordinary person.”

Five years ago, I implored pastors, “Be comfortable in your own skin.” Indeed. And be comfortable in being approachable.

These are two installations of pastors in the LCMS. The top one is from the indiana District a couple years ago. The bottom one is more recent, and is from a U.S. district (and by U.S., I mean “Usual Suspect”). Yes. It’s them again. The faces have been altered by AI because I’m actually embarrassed for the real guys.

Ordinations and Installations are joyful and yet formal events for churches and pastors. Vows are taken and repeated. Scripture is read. There is a formal blessing by the District President. And the draw of tradition is so great that even in some of the most casual and hipster LCMS congregations, the red stole often persists, even if used only for this occasion, and even then, only reluctantly being worn over street clothes (which is kind of like wearing tighty-whities on the outside of your jeans - which would be, of course, as some of these guys will eagerly tell you: an adiaphoron).

No doubt, the guys wearing the stoles over their street clothes think they look sharp. It’s a little like watching an American Idol contestant who can’t sing thinking he is going to be the next big star. It’s cringe, but makes for good TV, I suppose. But churchly rites are not televised entertainment. There is a ceremony for such things for a reason.

Ordinations and Installations are kind of an ecclesiastical equivalent of a military Change of Command ceremony. Depending on the circumstances, those participating in the ceremony may be in either dress or utility uniforms. But they are in uniform. It would be incredibly crass and disrespectful to show up in civilian attire. And it would be downright scandalous to show up in civilian attire with a uniform jacket. In fact, it would be unthinkable.

The top picture was taken at a U.S. Navy Change of Command ceremony. I considered having AI generate a picture of what it would look like for American military personnel to be wearing their dress uniform jackets over civilian clothes. I couldn’t do it. It would be to disgrace the uniform. So I had AI generate a fictional picture of foreign soldiers mixing civilian attire with a uniform jacket. You get the idea. There is no country on earth where this would be considered anything other than mockery of, and disrespect for, the uniform, the service, and the nation.

I’m not saying that that CoWo guys who wear red stoles over their civilian clothing are being intentionally disrespectful. I’m sure they mean well, and have the most pious intentions. But they do lack self-awareness. It just looks terrible. It comes across just as ridiculous and mocking and disrespectful as the picture of the soldiers in the AI generated picture. It sends a message of buffoonery, that we Lutherans - unlike the other historic communions in Christendom - are not serious Christians. It reflects poorly on all of us. Do they care? Well, that’s a question for them to answer.

The comments in response to the actual installation picture featuring stoles over street clothes are overwhelmingly negative. I would think that would be valuable feedback for folks who are usually looking for empirical and quantifiable data.

But I get it. It’s adiaphora, like wearing your underwear outside of your pants. We all know the bumper-sticker theology: “Come as you are. God doesn’t care what you wear, but what’s in your heart. Do what thou wilt.” Did I say “adiaphora” already? In case I didn’t: “adiaphora.” Oh, and “context.”

Maybe when our forty years of wandering in the desert is over, a new generation of LCMS pastors will emerge, men who take their office as seriously as soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines take their vocations of service: respecting meaningful symbols of the uniform with dignity, honoring all who served and sacrificed and even spilled their blood as a result of their service. We pastors are all part of a holy office, a corps of service that is greater than ourselves, an army that stretches back to the days of the apostles, whose effects will outlive our own lives in this fallen world.

Why do men under authority make such a fuss over uniforms? It all boils down to respect: for the vocation, for one’s brothers in the service, for the kingdom, and most of all, for our King.

Friday, October 9 to Sunday, October 11

Join others confessional Lutheran singles at Advent Lutheran Church for a weekend of fellowship, worship, and connection with fellow Lutheran singles. This weekend-long event is open to any LCMS single adult ages 21-40. Follow the link to register and for a schedule of events for the weekend.

https://adventlutheran.ccbchurch.com/goto/forms/81/responses/new

Questions? Contact Rev. Aaron Schultz Aschultz@AdventLutheran.org

www.adventlutheran.org | 317-873-6318

Lodging: Out-of-town attendees needing low-cost or free lodging can indicate so on the registration form.

We can help arrange accommodations or hotel cost-sharing with a same-gender attendee.

Location: Advent Evangelical Lutheran Church 11250 N. Michigan Rd. Zionsville, IN

Cost: An optional $20 offering is suggested with your online registration to defray the costs of the weekend.

I heard a recent podcast in which the guest, the pastor of a very large LCMS congregation, was complaining (along with the hosts) that large churches don’t have a big enough voice in the synod. The complaint is that the member congregations are treated equally, when, according to them, being bigger, they deserve to have a greater say in synod. They appealed to the example of the U.S. federal government that has a House of Representatives that is apportioned proportionately according to population.

Of course, Jesus rules a kingdom, not a republic. But it is also true that our synod is governed as a kind of republic. But it is a unicameral republican model. We do not distinguish between Lords and Commons, nor did we begin with a compromise to create a House and a Senate. The LCMS began as a free association of equal congregations and pastors. They did not join a synod that gives big churches a proportionally bigger vote. They did not establish a pecking order of pastors of big churches getting a larger share of votes than the pastors of normal-sized, or even small-sized churches. For all the plusses and minuses that go along with it, our polity is more confederate than federal, more Jeffersonian than Hamiltonian: a decentralized union in which the member congregations are autonomous, and even retain the right of unilateral secession. Such an arrangement is naturally going to be more democratic and egalitarian than a more traditionally centralized polity in which the large rules over the small.

Normally when this topic is broached by advocates of abolishing this original equality between LCMS congregations, it is prefaced by a lot of “buttering up”: strategic praise for “small churches.” They will swear up and down that they think small churches are wonderful, and the fact that that they are bigger churches doesn’t mean that they are better churches. They rather typically frame this as a matter of fairness, as “taxation without representation,” as if their larger per capita assessments to remain in synod ought to equate to influence-purchasing. After all, that’s how it works in the world: pay to play, the one who pays the piper calls the tune, the one who works twelve hours gets a bigger payoff than those who only worked one hour (rather than everyone getting a denarius). When you are of the world, you begin to think of the church as a worldly organization.

But on this occasion, this large-church pastor said the quiet part out loud:

I guess the large churches are large churches because they're they're doing something right. I mean, I don't know how to say that in the context of, I mean, God is blessing what we're doing.

Now, with any given large church, that might be true, or it might not be true. And the corollary is the same for small churches. Maybe they’re small because they’re doing something wrong. But then again, maybe they’re not. I don’t accept this pastor’s premise that size is an indicator of “doing something right.”

One of my critiques of the church growth movement is that, like the world, it is driven by econometrics, by data, statistics, and things that can be monitored by executives on dashboards: the commodification of people, turning them into a product, manufactured widgets, enumerated empirical cogs in an organization. The church growth movement sees itself as entrepreneurial, and has coopted the language of marketing and industry. But isn’t the church sui generis? Isn’t she supernatural? Isn’t she the mystical body of Christ? Isn’t she confessed in the third article precisely because she is the creation of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus compared to the wind (using the same Greek word for Spirit) that “blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8)?

Maybe we should be cautious about taking credit for what seems to be success. Maybe we should adopt the mindset as taught by our Lord, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty” (Luke 17:10). Maybe we should be careful about too much number crunching (2 Sam 24:10). Maybe we should think of the success of the kingdom less in terms of our own numbers and more about the Lord’s miraculous work, as our Lord revealed through the divine counterexample of Gideon (Jdg 7:1-25). Maybe we should take heart even when we do feel outnumbered, just as God instructed the dejected Elijah (1 Kings 19:9-18).

One of the podcast’s hosts made a curious claim that his large congregation had “no representation” at the synod convention, limiting his ability to support his position that SMP should not focus on men above the age of 40. But his large congregation had the same representation as my small one. I was not our pastoral delegate. None of my laity were the lay delegate. But our circuit elected its representatives, as did his. We all have the same opportunity to participate in synod elections. And that is the point. He wants churches to be equal - but for some churches to be more equal than other churches.

The pastor (the guest on the podcast) complained about the challenges facing large churches: large budgets, large building projects, large staffs, etc. I’m sure that’s all true. Of course, it’s even harder to maintain buildings with a small budget and to keep things running with a small unpaid staff. But his point is well-taken. I’m sure I have a lot less financial and managerial headaches than he does. Of course, he probably makes district pay scale, if not more. He probably has a decent benefits package. Maybe not. I don’t know for sure. But I’m willing to speculate in the affirmative. He probably doesn’t have a side hustle or two like many pastors do these days. Unlike my classmate at his first call that I remember visiting, and partaking in the government cheese that was part of his family’s “benefit package,” I doubt that he or any other large church pastor, has that particular headache of worrying about feeding his family or making sure his child can get his prescription drugs. So there are trade-offs.

He also complained that the large church model makes it hard for the parish to be a family. They have to simulate it by means of a small-groups program. And I can see where that would be difficult. That is something I don’t have to worry about.

So for that reason, I do feel sorry for this pastor. I have been serving my smaller-than-average parish now for 21 years. We have endured good times and bad times together. We have been through deaths of every kind imaginable (and a good bit of my beloved parishioners now rest in the above-ground tombs of our city’s very old cemetery - and I visit them when I take strolls through the neighborhood). I don’t drive to church, I live a block away in the historic neighborhood. I know my neighbors and my vibrant community. It is a walkable small city where we know the mayor and councilmen, and see them often at civic events. We know the business-owners, the firemen and cops by face if not by name. Our civic events almost always involve not only prayer, but also food and beer and wine. And similarly, there are always “Lutheran beverages” available at our congregation’s Bible class and potlucks (not to mention the tradition of Easter mimosas). And speaking of potlucks: this is Louisiana, cher!

If I were at a large suburban church, at best, the church family would be an institutional programmatic simulation. I would not be able to be as involved in my community. I am often called upon to give the prayers at local civic functions - even though we are an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city. Yes, I have side hustles. But I am also able to volunteer as a local fire and police chaplain. I serve as a military chaplain at both the federal and state level, and participate in emergency preparedness and disaster relief missions with my neighbors of every age, ethnicity, and religion. If I served a megachurch, I suppose all of that would have to go too. These are all invaluable parts of my ministry in the kingdom, and service to my neighbors, though they don’t translate to people joining my congregation. Measured econometrically, such ministry is a “waste of time and resources.”

My little church really is a family. A high school student that I taught is now one of my parishioners, and I am teaching her children. Her father in law and aunt are my parishioners as well. I have families with children, and we all take care of one another. Nobody grumbles about the kids in church - and we don’t cast them away so the grown-ups can worship without them. Our services are inclusive, traditional, and reverent. We use the liturgy right out of the book, and we sing the same glorious hymns that are the treasury of the early church, the medieval era, the Reformation, and those of more modern times. We have a talented organist who has played for us for more than fifty years. We are so blessed! We eat together, laugh together, suffer together, console one another, pray for one another, worship together, do business with each other, and we study God’s Word together. Most importantly of all, we receive the gifts together, week in and week out, in the Holy Mass. We don’t have to break up and factionalize into small groups. Jesus doesn’t turn His nose up at small churches, but promises His Presence even if the congregation is only one pastor and one layman. The world sees this and mocks. And so do some Christians.

As for outreach, we live in an area where almost everyone already belongs to a church. We are about 40% white, and most of them are Roman Catholic, and we are about 30% black, and most of them are Baptist, Methodist, or Church of God in Christ. We have Hispanics and Asians in our community who are generally Christians as well. We enjoy a kind of “Christian Urbanism” that includes the public display of Christian symbols, the reading of Scripture, and government and business leaders who are open about their Christianity. Even our Democrats here are Christian conservatives. Everywhere I go in the city, I’m greeted warmly. People here love the clergy. My congregation is a small Lutheran church surrounded by Roman Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals. It makes numerical growth for our congregation difficult, but we don’t see ourselves as not “doing something right.” When we have needed money, the Lord has supplied us with what we have needed. We really do have to “walk by faith, not by sight.”

So, we’re not a large church, not by any means. But I pray that we are “doing something right” and that “God is blessing what we’re doing.” I don’t think the fact that this other pastor’s parish is fifteen times the size of mine is indicative of whether or not we are faithful. Nor do I think our congregation ought to be punished with proportionately diminished representation.

And who knows? Maybe one day this pastor will be called to a small, traditional parish that is doing something right and blessed by God apart from the pressures of Big Numbers, Big Staffs, Big Programs, and Big Budgets. Having watched this podcast and reflecting on his plight, I do feel bad for him.

I hope he gets over his big church blues.

Note: This sermon was preached by a pastor of a “Contemporary Worship” LCMS congregation. I’ve redacted anything that would identify the pastor or the congregation. I have only made slight edits regarding punctuation and repeated words (this is a transcript pulled from YouTube). Any such errors are mine. This is the entire sermon.

I urge Gottesdienst readers to read it or listen to it. It is a window into the minds of those who see preaching very differently than we do (I’ve served as the Sermon’s Editor for our print journal since 2010). It is also a window into the minds of those who have abolished the Mass: an apologetic for doing so. It is a window into what they believe our Lutheran confession of faith is, and to what extent their practice is shaped by the Real Presence. It is also a window into what this pastor believes about those of us who retain the traditional liturgy and hymnody, and what he believes our motivations are.

This sermon is also a window into the pastoral practice of those who opt out of liturgical worship, especially as illustrated by his own account of the liturgy remaining in the heart and mind of a person with Alzheimer’s. How are pastors to care in the future for such parishioners whose piety has been formed in a non-liturgical church? He never reflects on that pastoral dilemma in this sermon. While articulating the benefits of the liturgy, he chooses not to retain it. I find that tragic and lamentable.

I believe this sermon lays out clearly that we are two separate and irreconcilable synods. Our members and pastors move in mutually-exclusive circles. And while I disagree with this pastor, I appreciate his candor. — Ed.

A Sermon on Joshua 5:2-15

So excited to have you here. We’re in the middle of our series on Joshua, and you might be wondering, hey, every other week you’ve done the reading from Joshua. Why didn’t you do it this week? You did it from Ephesians. Well, see, chapter five is all about circumcision, and I didn’t feel like that was a great topic with the kids in the room, or just a fun thing to read about. So, but we’re going to talk about it because it’s very important.

And so, what we’re going to talk about today is in chapter five, we really see three things that point to the same thing. And the first thing is this: God comes to Joshua. He says, “Joshua, you guys are getting ready to fight a big battle and win. And he says, “The the all the younger people of the Israelites they haven’t been circumcised, and this is a sign to show that you belong to me and that I have a covenant with you. And so you need to circumcise all the young men that aren’t circumcised. So I’m sure that was a great meeting that he had with them. But because they had two flint rocks that they would, yeah. Do you guys want some more details on that?

Okay, but then what we also see is in the next little section of chapter five is that they, as they are getting ready for for battle, they observe the Passover meal. This is something that they had done for 40 years now, as it was a celebration of what God did to rescue them out of Egypt, and so they they celebrate the Passover meal.

So we see them doing that, and then the third thing that we see in chapter five is that the commander of the Lord’s army, so an angel in charge of the the Lord’s army, comes down to Joshua, and Joshua is standing there with him, and he says, “Well, take off your shoes. This is holy ground.” And he takes off his shoes. And so, what we see is three different things. Because today, what we’re going to talk about is traditions. And what we see is three different traditions in front of us.

We see, well, there’s certain attire you’re supposed to have when you’re in the presence of the Lord. So, take off your shoes. We see different services that remember different things and celebrations, and so that’s another type of tradition. And then we see circumcision, another type of tradition. And so when we step back and we say, okay, we know that churches are filled with traditions, and customs, and rituals, and so why are they all different? Which ones are the right ones? Which ones are the wrong ones? Which ones are the old ones? Which ones are the new ones? How do we decide what we do and what we don’t do? And what is the role of traditions?

How many of you maybe have a friend or a family member that is a part of a church that has a tradition that you’re at odds with, and maybe it’s caused tension before? It’s like, well, your church doesn’t do this. Our church does do this. You guys don’t stand. We stand. You guys don’t recite this. We do recite this. You say, and we let these traditions be very important. And and so here’s the question: Are they important, and why? And if they are important, what what should we do, and what shouldn’t we do? And so what we see here is this: with circumcision, to to start with, God is the one who who tells us to do this. He does this in Genesis chapter 17. He says, “This is a way I’m going to make a covenant with you, and so I want you to do this to show that you belong to me, and you’re the people under the promise that I have given to Abraham. And so they they do this. The Israelites do this, and there’s many other outward traditions that that God has them do. For instance, they have dietary laws. They’re not allowed to eat any unclean animals. It lists them all in Leviticus chapter 11.

And so, no pigs, so no bacon, no pork chops, no shellfish. Any lobster and crab cake fans out there? Yeah, and no rabbits, camels, eels. I don’t have a problem with that. No scavenger birds, and God says we’re not going to be like everybody else. We’re going to be set apart. You’re going to not eat these things, but you can eat everything else. But you’re also not to have rare steak, nothing with blood in it. And so, all you rare steak people, that’s gross. But you can do that now. [Note: the red color in a rare steak is not blood. The blood was already all drained out of the meat — Ed.]

But then they also had a lot of people go to like Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 22, and they say, “Look, God has even these weird things about what kind of clothing you can wear. Like it can’t be wool and linen woven together, you know. And the punishment for that is death. Like what kind of God is this, you know? And we step back and we see all these things: the Sabbath, the festivals, the sacrifices, the purity rituals that they would do, the sacrifice rituals that they would do. And we go, okay, God, you had all these rules and traditions. Like, what was the point of all this, right? And God tells us that the point was this: that these weren’t just arbitrary things that He wanted His people to jump through a bunch of hoops. That He said, all the people on this earth, I want to set apart My people, and they’re going to do things differently so they stand out to the rest of the world, so we’re going to do things this way, and this will mark you as a follower of me, and this will discipline you to say I’m not going to be like the rest of the world. I’m going to follow God, and when you hear that, you go, Oh, that’s kind of like what you do with us today, that there are certain things that we’re to abstain from, and certain things we are to do if we’re going to mark ourselves as followers of Him and stand out to the rest of the world, and so this was His way of doing it back then.

But then, what we read is Jesus comes into the the scene on in the New Testament, and Jesus says, “Look, good news! I fulfilled all those old things that that I have fulfilled the sacrifices in the synagogue. You don’t need to do those anymore. I am the spotless lamb that has died once and for all.” He says the the different foods that you’re not allowed to eat that’s all been forgiven. You don’t have to do any of that, and so that’s in Mark chapter seven that that’s that’s all taken away. That you can eat whatever you want.

He says all these rules between the the Jews and the the non-church people. You know what kind of clothing, what kind of practices, rituals, purification, all this. He says, “I’ve abolished all that. It’s all been fulfilled in my life, death, and resurrection. And so we step back, and then we even look at circumcision in Acts chapter 15. So the the Jews start to believe in Jesus. Some of them do, some of them don’t, and the ones that do believe in Jesus, they’re going around and they’re spreading the gospel to all these people that are not from Jewish backgrounds, and so they’re telling them, “Hey, if you want to believe in Jesus, you need to be circumcised.” And the people on the outside are going, “I don’t really want to believe in Jesus that bad,” and and so then they have this debate. Well, do they actually? Because that’s an Old Testament thing, and Jesus is telling us that following Him is all we need to do. And some of them are debating this. Well, I think you you have to be circumcised in order to be saved.

And so in Acts chapter 15, they actually have a whole church meeting about this, and we can read about it. And what they come up with is this. They said, okay, we need to decide what traditions are worth holding on to and what traditions aren’t worth holding on to? Because right now, some of our traditions are actually pushing people away, and we want people to come and believe.

And if our traditions are actually pushing people away, then we should we should talk about whether they we want them or not. And so, at the end of this, what they say in Acts chapter 15 is they write a letter and they say, “Okay, look, here’s the things that you actually have to keep doing. These are the requirements. You can’t. You have to abstain from from what’s been sacrificed to idols. So so no meat with blood in it, and nothing that’s been strangled. And you have to stay away from sexual immorality because they would have like prostitutes that you would sleep with at the temple so that you would get things out of these idol gods. And they would have orgies and stuff like that, and they’re like, okay, all this stuff that goes with all this foreign god worship, none of that. But otherwise, you’re free to worship as you want.

And what they said was this: if you want to boil it down, it comes down to this. They said that all of all of the things that we have, all of our traditions, that what we see is that we want people to come to Jesus, and if these traditions are going to get in the way of people coming to Jesus, then then we’re going to get rid of them because what is necessary, we want to set apart to follow Christ and do. But but the traditions can’t get in the way of reaching the lost, which brings us to today.

You see, some of you might not know this. We’re a Lutheran church, and specifically a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and and here we are, you know, 2000 years later from all of this, and we are still in our church body having debates like this. We just had our national convention this summer down in Phoenix, and and still today they were talking about this battle of what traditions do we hold on to and what traditions do we not hold on to because there is a group within the Lutheran Church that says you know what like all the pastors should be wearing collars and wearing vestments and should have the same order of service and the same liturgy.

They said you should be able to go to a Lutheran church, Missouri Synod church, anywhere in the United States, and it should be the exact same service every single place, singing the same hymns, everything, so that there’s unity, and that’s a beautiful picture. And I understand why that is, but then there are other churches within the Lutheran church that are contemporary churches like ourselves that say, well, that that works for some people, but for some people, that’s a distraction from the gospel. That’s a distraction from Christ. That they don’t understand what all that means, or or you know, to just tell me this is what I have to say and this is how I worship. That that my heart is not in that worship, and so we we have a different style of worship, and it’s not a better or worse. It’s a “hey, I always do it this way. “

You know when you get a gift card to somewhere like a restaurant, and you’re like, oh okay I like that restaurant. But you know what’s interesting is you flip it over and you’ll see that they actually have like a couple different chains and the gift card goes to all of them. You know so they have like a steakhouse and a seafood place and maybe a fast food, and it’s kind of the same thing within the Lutheran Church. Like, I love that within the box that is the Lutheran Church, you can have an incredibly traditional high church. You know, collars and smells and bells and an organ and everything. And then I love that we can have a contemporary church where we have drums and we have guitars and we can sing because all all of it goes to Jesus, and so if if this church is reaching those people that we would never reach, great. And if we are reaching these people that that church would never reach, great, because it’s all working together for the kingdom.

But still, there’s this big debate about well, okay, but what traditions should we hold onto, and which ones are we allowed to let go of? And Martin Luther famously, when he broke off from the Catholic Church, he still held on to the traditions and the Mass. He just took the services. They used to do the the services in Latin, and the the Bible used to be in Latin, so nobody could read it. He said, “Well, guess what? We want to put the the the Word of God and the worship of God in the language of the people, so they can be a part of it,” and so they they put the Bible in German, and they tried to kill him for this, and they they put the service in German so that the people could be a part of it, and and his whole spirit in that is this, that you want to speak the language of the people so that they can connect with the Lord, right?

And for me, when people ask, well, okay, is [our congregation] going to ever have a traditional service? My answer is no, and they’re like, “Why?” I said, “Because as soon as you start having different types of services, you create factions within a family, and we’re not going to do that here. And we’re not saying one is better than the other. We’re saying this is what we’re gifted to do. This is what we can do best with the team that was assembled and when we started, this is how we can best worship the Lord and lead people.

And if I’m being honest, when when y’all drive away and you got your music on, I don’t hear a lot of people listening to handbells and organs. Like, I hear you listening to songs that have pianos and guitars and drums. And so we want to put the worship. And this isn’t to mock anybody. This is saying, as I best see it, I want to make sure that we have a way that you have a song that’s in your head for the rest of the day, that’s in a style and in a language, and that you you actually worship in.

And so, when it comes to traditions, there are there are necessities. Then there are things that complement, and then there are things that abstract. And so the necessity is pretty simple. And within the Lutheran Church, there’s only two necessities that need to be there: Word and Sacraments. That the Word needs to be preached in purity, meaning that sinners are justified by grace alone, not by their works. That that through faith alone, not by rituals, through for the sake of Christ alone, that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and He is the narrow way, and the truth is revealed to us in Scripture alone, not by human reason. That that needs to be the the paramount thing that happens every Sunday. And the second thing is this: that we have the Sacraments that are done rightly, that the Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are done according to Christ’s instruction. Everything else is a big word, adiaphora.

That’s a big word today, and everybody asked me how to spell it last time. I don’t know, but it’s adiaphora, and what that word means is it’s not told to us to do in Scripture, but it’s also not forbidden in Scripture. And so that’s things like the order of service, the ceremonies, the rites, the customs, and even Luther himself – he wrote this in the Augsburg Confession [Note: Luther did not write the Augsburg Confession. — Ed.] in Article Seven. He said it’s not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites and ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere. He’s saying there ought to be expressions of the church in all different languages, in all different expressions, in all different cultures, all pointing to the same God, and we don’t all have to look the same, and so when we when we look at the things and we say, okay, is this a complementary thing where it helps us find Jesus, or is this a distracting thing where it takes us away from Jesus? There are these things that we have to wrestle with as a church. For instance, you know, like collars. You know, why do pastors wear the the collars?

Well, they wear the cassock, the black outfit, and then they have a white collar around their neck to show I’m a sinner, but when I speak, I speak on behalf of a pure and holy God. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. There are many, many communities and many places where that works for me. If I were to wear that, people would go, “Oh, Father, what time is Mass? You know, and I’m like, “Well, that’s not us. That’s not what we do.” And there, there are some people that that would not see that as an approachable person to talk to. And I want to seem approachable.

When this church got together, there were seven families that started this church nine years ago. And what we said was this: the two things that made this church, we said we want to start a church where where you are excited to invite somebody to come, and where even someone with no church background will feel comfortable and want to come back, and so we actually weighed through all these things. We actually talked about what I would wear on a Sunday, and this is what we came up with. They were like, do something that looks natural, but not like you just rolled in off the street. And I was like, how about this? And they were like, keep it up.

And but, you know, vestments. You know, the there are churches where the pastors wear albs and cassocks, and and they they wear the stole. And it’s a beautiful thing. It points, you know, the robe points to that we have been washed in Christ and we get to wear His righteousness. The stole has the different colors to show that He speaks on behalf and the authority as a shepherd of the flock, and the cassock to show the beauty of God. And those are all great things.

If I was to wear that every Sunday, you would have to give me IVs in between services because I would sweat to death up here. I would I would literally be a mess, and that’s just not my style. I wouldn’t. There would be people that would not see that as approachable, and I want people to approach me. I love that there are people that show up here every Sunday. Some of them call me Reverend [Lastname]. Some of them call me Pastor [Lastname]. Some of them call me Pastor [Firstname], and there are some of you that just walk up and you’re like [Firstname], and I’m good with all of those, but I feel like I’m approachable because of the way I dress.

And so it’s not saying something’s wrong, and it’s not saying this is better. It’s saying this is just the way we’ve chosen. And then you know you take things like candles and chanting. That was my biggest fear coming out of seminary was God, please don’t send me to a church that chants. And it’s not because chanting is wrong. The reason why churches chant is because it elevates the words of scripture and liturgy above the everyday conversation to show these words are special. But if I had to sit up here, it would be gut wrenching for you guys because I cannot do this. My voice cracks and I can’t. Like it would be a distraction.

So we don’t do these things, and then there’s things like the liturgy. For those of you that grew up in a traditional church, you know I grew up in a traditional church, 8 a.m. You know, same, page 5 and 15 every Sunday, you know, and it was the same thing, and it was beautiful. You got to memorize it. You would know it by heart, and and that was kind of the problem for me with it was that I could just say it without meaning it, and I could just go through the motions of it. But I also understand the beauty of it.

You see, my wife, when we were dating, we went back to her parents’ house, and her grandma was in a nursing home. And her grandma [name] was was blind, but had dementia, and sometimes she’d forget she was blind, and so we went to visit her. And you know, I was holding her hand, talking to her for a little bit, getting to meet her. And we were about 15 minutes into our conversation, and all of a sudden she goes, “Whoa, who turned off the lights?” And I was, I was trying not to laugh. I was like, “Is this a joke? What’s happening here?” And then I thought, “Oh my gosh, do I have to tell her she’s blind? How is she going to react to that? You know, like what do I do? You know, and and you know, finally she was like, “I’m sorry, I’ve been traveling. I can’t see you very well.” I was like, “I don’t know what to take of that, but okay. Hope it was a great place.”

But here’s the thing. And then we took her to church, and this woman who cannot see, she participated in the entire service because she grew up a pastor’s kid and was the wife of pastor, and she knew the entire service by heart, and she participated in the whole thing, and even the hymns she began to sing. And even later on in her dementia, when she was struggling to speak, (my sister is a speech pathologist) and they see this with Alzheimer’s patients that that she would just mumble. You couldn’t understand her, but the part of your brain that sings is different than the part that speaks. And old hymns, she would sing them clear as day, and yet she couldn’t speak and mumbled. And so there is something beautiful about that ritual. There’s something beautiful about that liturgy.

In my home church, when I go home and I sing a little, “This is the Feast.” My heart is happy, and I remember that nostalgia of that. And I pray that our kids grow up with that and understand that, and so there’s there’s something beautiful about the liturgy, but also there’s something where it can be dangerous, where it can just become a check the box thing, where you come into service and it’s like my heart’s not in this. I’m just saying the words you’re telling me to say. This isn’t what’s on my heart to pray for it or to go through.

And so we’ve chosen what we’ve chosen, but it doesn’t mean that the other ways are wrong, and the hymns that we sing, we do sing hymns every once in a while, and they’re beautiful. And there are a lot of terrible, terrible new songs that are out there that say the same words 17 times, and you’re like, “I get it. I got a good, good Father.” Okay, like, come on! Like, there are some really bad new songs, and so we we want to be careful to say, well, we there are some hymns that we’re going to pull up and sing, but there are some new songs that have beauty to sing as well, and so we just want to try and balance this.

And so here’s the things that that we see is that no matter what, we do want tradition. We are always going to continue to do the creed. We do it every communion Sunday, because we want that to be part of what we do: the statement of faith that unites us as a family. And people say, “Well, why don’t we do it every week?” Because I don’t want to every single week have something that says, “Hey, this is what we all believe,” and there’ll be a new person going, “That’s not what I believe.” And so, on a communion Sunday, it makes sense to do something like that, to say, “Hey, we’re about to do something that is a sacred meal, and this might be something that you’re not included in because you’re not there yet. You don’t believe.” But I don’t want to have something like that every single week that makes somebody feel off because they’re not believing that yet. And so we just do it on communion Sundays. We say the Lord’s Prayer, and that’s something that we recite. And there’s beauty to that.

I’ll tell you a quick story. We went two summers ago, to the national youth gathering with all our high schoolers, and on the way back, we went through the most horrific storm I’ve ever been on on a plane. And I thought the plane, I mean, it felt like the plane was coming apart.

Like I mean, the plane was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I had I had kids crying, throwing up. We had one in the front screaming, “We’re all gonna die!” I mean, and it felt like it. It felt like it. And in that moment, I was like, I forgot who I was for a second. I was like, wait a minute, I’m the pastor, and I was like, I should pray. Like, and I was so scared and terrified, I couldn’t even think of what to say. And so, what came out? The Lord’s prayer, because it was so ingrained in my heart. And what did everyone around me start screaming at the top of their lungs? The Lord’s Prayer. And so there is a beautiful thing about having these ritual prayers.

But also at our dinner table, when all of a sudden we sit down and the kids are like, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.” Okay, is is the ritual serving the purpose that we’re that it’s supposed to serve it in that moment, no. So now we we don’t do that. Now at our table, I pick somebody and I go pray for us, and they’re like, okay, and they have to pray from the heart.

So rituals are good if they continue to point to Jesus, but once rituals become just checking the boxes, they’re not good. And so we always want to hold on to rituals, and anytime a ritual gets elevated above Jesus, and anytime that you have these rituals, and there are churches that say this, well, if your church doesn’t do X, Y, Z, then your church isn’t saved, and only these people that do these rituals, and you’re like, no, that’s a ritual, that’s an adiaphora, that’s not a biblical thing, that’s you, that’s a man-made tradition that you have elevated and said this is what it is. And anytime we put faith in rituals, like if you have last rites, you’re going to be saved. If you pray this prayer, you’re going to be saved. No, that’s you, and that’s what he’s talking about in Ephesians. This is what [the lector] read. How are we saved? By grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It’s not our works. It’s not our rituals. It’s not our human traditions. It’s nothing that we do that saves us.

And so, when we have these things that we struggle with, like these traditions that come between us, we should never let them divide the church body. That your friend goes to another church that has different traditions, great, because all of us are pointing to the same God. But at the end of the day, what we need to recognize about this is our traditions don’t save us. Coming to church doesn’t save us. Praying certain prayers doesn’t save us. Doing certain rituals doesn’t save us. Faith in Jesus Christ saves us, and so let our traditions always be something that point us to Jesus and not distract away from Jesus.

And some of you right now are probably thinking, you know what? There’s some traditions that we do that I think are just checking the boxes and don’t actually point to Jesus, and that’s what we want to talk about today. And so, pray through that as you go home and talk about that as a family. What are the rituals that point us to Jesus, and what are the things that are distracting from Jesus?

Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, we come before you today, and Lord, we pray that everything we do would glorify you. We pray that in every way we would continue to grow in our relationship with you, and whether we’re brand new here today or whether we’ve known you all our lives, all of us continue to take steps forward to you. That’s what we pray for. And Lord, we come before you, and we are sinners. We are in need of your salvation, and so we confess our sins, our thoughts, and our words, and our deeds that we have done against you and against others. And Lord, we pray that you would hear our confession now. Lord God, hear our prayer. Forgive us of these sins that we have confessed, and Lord, the sins that we still need to lay before you.

We pray that you would convict our heart and show us the ways that we fall short, so that we can be right with you and right with others. Lord, forgive us in the name of your Son Jesus, who died on the cross in our place and shed his blood over us to forgive us once and for all. It is in His name and by His power that we pray that we would be forgiven. And all God’s people said, “Amen.”

You see, the mission of the church that Jesus gives us is one thing: to reach the lost, to reach one more. And however best we can position ourselves to do that, whether that is historical liturgy that continues through generation to generation, or whether it’s carefully adapting forms of the liturgy so that the gospel can be heard clearly in a new context, no matter who it is or how it is. Our job is to reach the lost, to let them know that there is nothing, there is nothing they can do to separate themselves from the love of God, and so go from this place, knowing that you are loved, you are cherished, and you are forgiven.

The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and all God’s people said, “Amen.”

We’re going to invite the kids to come in, and then we have a tradition that we stand when we sing, and there’s no reason behind it besides that it’s reverent. So get up.

We who conduct traditional liturgical services have certain advantages. In many ways, our task is far easier than those who choose a different path.

For example, by keeping an altar, a Best Practice stretching back into antiquity and retained by the Lutheran reformers - we have a place to gather the elements that we are consecrating. Having an altar is not just a matter of theological theory, but of practicality. For by gathering the elements and consecrating them together, there is no ambiguity regarding what is consecrated and what isn’t. Our Lord’s word “this” (as opposed to “that”) in the consecration permits the celebrant to indicate exactly what is being consecrated and what isn’t. In my own case, the elements that I am consecrating are on the altar, and more specifically, located on a central linen cloth called the corporal (Latin: “body”). The elements that are not being consecrated are not on the corporal, and are covered up. There is clarity in this ancient Best Practice. The Words of Institution in the hymnal include two signs of the cross, a Best Practice which indicates exactly which elements are being consecrated. There is clarity in word and in gesture concerning what is the body and blood of Christ, and what isn’t.

Since about 80% of human communication is non-verbal, rubrics are important in the Divine Service - especially for the consecration of the elements. The Words are primary and necessary; they are the verba Christi, the words of Christ, after all. Christ is our High Priest. He is our Celebrant of celebrants. He is the one speaking the word “My” and inviting us to “take.” For that reason, the traditional Best Practice is to read or chant the words exactly from the ordo, without deviation, even if the celebrant has them memorized. The traditional Best Practice is that if he flubs the words, he should start over, so that there is no ambiguity or doubt about the consecration of the Sacrament. At the consecration, our Lord’s words - not ours - accomplish what they say they accomplish. There is nothing that we can add to improve these words, or make them somehow more special or sincere-sounding by exchanging the Lord’s words for our own.

Traditional worship is the culmination of centuries of Best Practices that takes all the guesswork out of the celebration of the Divine Service. No time and energy goes into what I will be wearing as the celebrant. I don’t have to plan the order. I don’t have to write a new script every week. There are no logistical issues about where to put the elements, or how to indicate what is being consecrated and what isn’t, since there is an altar: a table upon which the bread and wine are gathered, and where they can be clearly consecrated, and from there distributed. The traditional rubrics of consecration - bodily actions such as genuflecting, elevating, and ringing bells - also communicate and confess unambiguously that we believe God is present with us in space and time by means of a miracle. A Lutheran Mass is sacramental, and is very different than a non-denominational memorial ordinance of bread and wine (or grape juice). And this is clear in both the words we say (the black) and the ceremonial acts that we carry out (the red) in tendem.

We traditionalists have a great advantage in standing on the shoulders of centuries of Best Practices.

CoWo or Modern Worship (so-called) is much harder. Those who lead the worship have a plethora of issues to navigate. Its practitioners have left the well-worn path of Best Practices to chart a new course into the unknown. There are always unintended consequences and unforeseen challenges in such deviation. They are unintended, because these churches and pastors are sincere. In the above example, the pastor really believes that wearing a TV-show t-shirt as he celebrates the Mass is beneficial to his flock and serves to advance of the Gospel. The pastor and the congregation are sincere in their contention that removing altar, font, and pulpit, and replacing these with a stage, is an improvement in their context. There is no evil motive going on here.

That said, leaving Best Practices behind creates some logistical issues.

Without an altar, the celebrant cannot gather the elements that he is consecrating in one place. This is especially a challenge in a large congregation - and most especially where individual cups are used instead of a chalice. Even traditional churches, for the most part, use the individual cups, creating complications regarding gathering the elements, distributing them, and dealing with the reliquiae. The simple Best Practice precedent set by our Lord: having the communicants share one chalice (per the Words of Institution spoken by our Lord Himself, preserved and given to us by the Holy Spirit’s inspiration), serves as a helpful rubric: “Drink of it, all of you. This cup is…” Our Lord’s clear invitation and imperative take all of those complications away. If we share one cup, we are following our Lord’s Best Practice. The wine is gathered, not scattered, it is easily managed during the consecration and distribution, and the cleansing of the remaining blood means drinking from, and cleaning, one metal cup instead of many glass or plastic cups with traces of the holy blood that must not be desecrated.

There is always a cost to deviating from Best Practices.

Some very large LCMS congregations opt for pre-packaged plastic communion packs with both wafer and wine (or juice). In such churches, you might see them being held by everyone in the seats, while the celebrant consecrates his own elements - making the sign of the cross over them, and then encouraging the congregation to tear open their own packaging, eating and drinking what is hopefully actual bread and wine (though grape juice is often used). There is no gathering of the elements, no clear consecration of those elements that the people are holding and consuming, and no sense of unity that we are partaking of that which was gathered at the altar during the consecration. There is the unintended sense of atomization instead of the Best Practice of communal intimacy, not to mention doubt about what was actually consecrated.

And then what happens to the reliquiae? And if there is no clear reverence for it, what does that confess about the Lord’s Supper?

The Best Practice of having communicants kneel reverently at a rail, communing together, and receiving the body and blood directly from the hand of their pastor, speaks volumes about who we are, and what the consecrated elements are. This culmination of centuries of Best Practices is able to deal with things like Christ’s body accidentally being dropped, spilled blood, and using a purificator to wipe the chalice. Our Best Practice takes out all of the guesswork, and allows us to focus on the miracle instead of logistics.

Of course, as things exist currently in the LCMS, churches are free to uphold, or reject, Best Practices - and thus incur the unintended consequences. Even in the example of the contemporary Mass above, making use of grape juice, which the CTCR rather forcefully ruled out, is still done.

In the LCMS, we have set aside the Best Practice of bishops to oversee pastors and congregations. We have created a complex web of ecclesiastical supervision that includes not only individual District Presidents, but also the Council of Presidents, the Praesidium, the Synod President, the Synod Convention, the District Convention, the Board of Elders, the Board of Directors or Church Council, and the Voters’ Assembly.

Because of our polity, the CTCR can issue an opinion on grape juice that can simply be ignored. The convention can pass closed communion resolutions, and any congregations can just opt out. Unintended consequences and confusion can be practiced in one congregation, while its neighbor follows Best Practices.

Medieval deviation from Best Practices regarding Holy Communion was part of what made the Reformation necessary. Regarding the liturgical confusion and issues of their own day regarding Word and Sacrament, the reformers put the issue squarely on the shoulders of the church’s leadership (AC 24:14-18):

[14] The bishops were not ignorant of these abuses. If they had corrected them in time, there would now be less discord. [15] But until now they have been responsible for many corruptions seeping into the Church. [16] Now, when it is too late, they begin to complain about the Church’s troubles. This disturbance has been caused simply by those abuses that were so open that they could no longer be tolerated. [17] There have been great disagreements about the Mass, that is, the Sacrament. [18] Perhaps the world is being punished for profaning the Mass for such a long time and for tolerating this in the churches for so many centuries by the very men who were both able and duty-bound to correct this situation.

But, of course, we in the LCMS have no bishops. Article 24 notwithstanding, the Best Practice of the liturgy - including the unity of its use in our synod - is treated as just one option among an infinite number of alternatives. Contrary to the Best Practices of the church universal of every age - including among the men who wrote the documents of the Book of Concord - our congregations are sovereign and independent, synod is advisory, and whatever happens, happens. Every organ of synod can speak, and every organ of synod can be ignored.

Unless and until that changes, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt, the cross we are called to bear. But it is a double-edged sword. For as congregations and pastors we are free to address and advocate for these Best Practices - both in our writing, and in how we worship, as celebrants and as participants. The Best Practice of the liturgy brings salvation to bear in Word and Sacrament, and avoids the complications of unintended consequences.

The first living creature was like a lion, the second living creature like a calf, the third living creature had a face like a man, and the fourth living creature was like a flying eagle.

The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night, saying:

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!”

Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever,

the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying:

“You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power; For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created.” (Revelation 4:6b-11)

Verse 7: “The second living creature like a calf.”

               The first characteristic of the faithful teacher and church servant is a bold and joyous courage in the midst of persecution. This was indicated by the first living creature, who was like a lion. Now, we move on to the second characteristic of the faithful teacher and church servant. He is like a calf or an ox.

               The Elector Bible says that the ox indicates that “servants of the church shall be hardworking and shall be untiring in their office.” The corroborating verse is 1 Timothy 5:17-18:

               Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.

               The ox was the original threshing machine. Farmers threw bundles of their grain into the threshing floor. They were spread as uniformly as possible over the whole area to a depth of about a foot. Then cows, calves, sheep, and donkeys tramped the grain out of the straw and chaff.

               Sometimes, a row of cows or donkeys were yoked together by a pole bound to their horns and necks. They would be walked in one direction for a while and then reversed. While they worked, they were not muzzled. They were free to eat what they had stomped out.

               St. Paul tells us that this is about servants in the church. They are worthy of their wages. They should be able to eat the fruit of their labor in the word and in doctrine. While God is concerned about the humane treatment of animals, He is more concerned with the humane treatment of His servants by the church.

               But this presupposes that the pastor is actually laboring and not lazy. A laborer needs to work or he doesn’t get paid. The ox must tread out the grain or there is no meal. This is true of those who labor in earthly callings, just as 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says. How much more true is it of church servants!

               What can we learn about work from this? First, read Hosea 10:11 and 12: “Ephraim is a trained heifer That loves to thresh grain . . . Sow for yourselves righteousness; Reap in mercy; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the Lord, Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.”

               The work of treading out the corn was pleasant and easy. Like Ephraim, we should enjoy and love the work which God has given us. The Apostle John says: “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3) I pray that you enjoy and love the work of the ministry.

               Second, we should learn that, while we work hard and are untiring, we should also work smart. Our work is intellectual work. The apocryphal Sirach tells us what we pastors need:

The wisdom of a scribe cometh by his time of leisure: and he that is less in action, shall receive wisdom. With what wisdom shall he be furnished that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth the oxen therewith, and is occupied in their labours, and his whole talk is about the offspring of bulls? He shall give his mind to turn up furrows, and his care is to give the kine fodder. (Sirach 38:25-27)

               We pastors need leisure. Leisure isn’t binging Netflix. Josef Peiper has written a wonderful book on leisure, which everyone should read. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586172565?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback) But here’s a quote we should contemplate:

It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it.

               Pastors are praying men. Pastors are scripture men. But this can very quickly become witchcraft. We can seek to master the divine. We can make our Bible readings functional by only reading for the next Bible class or sermon.

This is the temptation. Leisure gives us the space to appreciate and love God’s Word because it is God’s Word. Just like we don’t love our wives as a means to an end, we should certainly not love God’s Word or His work as a means of our employment or as a means to fame.

               Third, how do we do this intellectual work? Two authors help us with this. The first is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His character Sherlock Holmes primarily does mental or intellectual work. Sherlock cries out:

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of Existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” (The Sign of the Four)

               But how does Sherlock accomplish this mental work? Listen to this description. Holmes tells Dr. Watson, "It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes."

He curled himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his hawklike nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he had dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind, and put his pipe down upon the mantelpiece. (The Red-Headed League)

               Pastors know that the work we do isn’t often evident. People say: “Oh, you only work 1 hour a week.” But even men like Doyle understood the nature of mental work. Sherlock’s mental work, while it looked like sleep, was incredibly practical in catching criminals. How much more practical is our intellectual work, which saves and enlightens souls?

               The second author is Herman Melville. In chapter 62 of Moby Dick, he writes concerning harpooners: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.”

               A pastor must be rested and calm—rising from rest rather than exhaustion—to perform his critical task with complete success. Isn’t this what Psalm 46 says: “Be still, and know that I am God”? (Psalm 46:10) How about Isaiah 30:15: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”

               There are many books that can help you focus your productivity as a pastor so that you work both hard and smart. Theodore Graebner’s book “The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker” is great. “Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth” by Doug Wilson can also help.

               But above all, the pastor must first take heed to himself. He must receive the rest which Jesus gives. He must find the quietness of mind and the contentment which comes by knowing what Christ has done for us. It is only by the rest of the soul that a pastor can work hard and tirelessly by treading out the grain.

               In our next section, we will look at the third characteristic of the pastor from Revelation: the pastor as a man.

This was published September 4, 2019 — Ed.

The tagline of Gottesdienst, namely, “The Journal of Lutheran Liturgy,” can be a little misleading. For when we say “liturgy,” some people believe that the entire journal (and by extension, the blog, the podcast, and the conferences) is, or should only be, related to things like rubrics.

Continue reading…

The above clip is from a larger podcast video found here.

“No one is saying that the Lutheran liturgy is not a treasure. Just don't make consciences burdened to think that salvation is not secure unless every rite of the liturgy is done just right. Thank you, Augsburg Confession 15 on church ceremonies. Also, don't make the liturgy legalistically narrow, making it into a type of work to make satisfaction for sins. This was the error of the Catholics that the reformers wrote against. Again, Article 24, the Apology on the Mass.”
— Rev. Dr. Tim Ahlman

It is a great irony that Dr. Ahlman uses these words “No one is saying,” and then proceeds to make a really horrific accusation against apparently someone in the LCMS, that someone is burdening consciences “to think that salvation is not secure unless every rite of the liturgy is done just right.”

Who says this? President Harrison? The seminary presidents? Professors? The Praesidium? Gottesdienst? The CTCR? The CUS Board of Directors? The newly-reestablished COW? The editors of various synod publications? I’ll tell you who: “No one is saying” anything like this. It’s just another broad-brushed smear with no grounding in reality. What is true is that “No one is saying” this.

And then to elaborate that someone in the LCMS is making the liturgy “a type of work to make satisfaction for sins” and in so doing is repudiating Apology 24. Really? Apology 24? The one that begins like this?

"In our churches Mass is celebrated every Sunday and on other festivals when the sacrament is offered to those who wish for it after they have been examined and absolved. We keep traditional liturgical forms, such as the order of the lessons, prayers, vestments, etc."

That Apology 24?

The only repudiation of Article 24 that I have ever heard in the LCMS has come from CoWo guys, like the one who said that Article 24 “is no longer binding,” or from others who say that it is “descriptive, not prescriptive,” and those who claim that other passages from the confessions have somehow rendered Article 24 null. But now we apparently have some unnamed liturgical advocates in the LCMS who are repudiating Apology 24 and embracing papalism. Who are these people? Where are they writing or arguing for such things?

The answer is, “No one is saying” this.

No one in the LCMS is saying that people go to hell for messing up a rite, or that the liturgy makes satisfaction for sins. No one. Not one man jack. If Dr. Ahlman can give some examples, we would be happy to join him in act of unity to correct the people who are teaching such a doctrine about the “treasure” that is our beloved “Lutheran liturgy.” For it is a treasure, and not all liturgies are, in fact, Lutheran. The problem is, “no one is saying” any such thing about conscience-burdening and satisfaction-making. It’s all Bubulum Stercus.

This is yet another straw man, yet another false accusation, yet another calumny against Lutherans of the same kind that precipitated the writing of the Augsburg Confession in the first place. And to call that “koinonia” is just the cherry on top.

Wow.

But I have an idea. If this really is a thing, maybe ULC can write a blog post called “In Their Own Words” and provide some actual quotes. But don’t hold your breath. Because as Dr. Ahlman says above: “No one is saying...” And this is most certainly true.

Anyone can take the King of Kings spiritual gifts assessment that is offered here: www.kingofkings.org/serve. It’s a series of 78 questions. They will then e-mail you your assessment, and even see if you’re interested in various kinds of church work based on your gifts.

Here is an example of one person’s results…

The Questions

1. Every year I have a number of books, podcast, or sermons that I look forward to

learning from.

2. I’m effective at challenging people to take a next step in their faith.

3. Sometimes when I pray the Spirit steps in and prays in words I cannot understand.

4. I enjoy helping people that others may regard as undeserving or beyond help.

5. People enjoy listening as I open up God’s Word and explain.

6. I love investing and have a positive attitude towards the next generation.

7. The first thing that I do or think when I hear about a problem is pray.

8. The thought of beginning a new church in a new community is exciting to me.

9. I can rally people behind an idea.

10. I love to listen and learn from a number of preachers.

11. I can find, recruit, and empower future leaders.

12. I like to work with my hands to make things to serve

God.

13. I enjoy spending time nurturing and caring for others.

14. I am able to relate well to people of different cultures.

15. I prefer to be behind-the-scenes when I serve.

16. I enjoy praying for sick people because I know that many of them will be healed as a

result.

17. I can identify preaching, teaching, or communication which is not true to the Bible.

18. I look forward to opportunities to speak in public.

19. I have a heart to help Christians who have lost their way.

20. 1 am intentional about seeking relationships with those who don’t believe in Jesus.

21. I have a gift in graphic design or editing content to be used digitally.

22. I get lost in prayer and can pray for a much longer period of time than most.

23. I can easily find my way around large home improvement stores.

24. When I hear or receive a prayer request, I pray for that need for at least several

days.

25. I can read a Bible verse or story and uncover something that no one else has seen.

26. I can see through phoniness or deceit before it is evident to others.

27. I can use my musical ability to help inspire others to worship God.

28. I can never learn enough about God.

29. 1 am committed, and schedule blocks of time for reading and studying scripture, to

understand biblical truth fully and accurately.

30. I enjoy working creatively with wood, cloth, paints, metal, glass, or other materials.

31. Sometimes when a person speaks in tongues, I get an idea about what God is

saying.

32. I regularly use my places of influence (neighborhood, work, social media, blog, etc.)

to tell others about Jesus.

33. I am proficient using online tools and platforms to get a message across to a variety

of audiences.

34. I frequently am able to judge a person’s character based upon first impressions.

35. I have seen God show up in my past and this gives me confidence to live

courageously in the future.

36. I would rather work in secret than have my work recognized publicly.

37. I am extremely comfortable in environments where others are speaking a language

that no one else in the room may understand.

38. I like attending fundraising dinners.

39. God has given me the ability to teach spiritual truths.

40. I connect deeply with God in my personal relationship through music.

41. I am drawn to and comfortable in worship environments where the Holy Spirit moves

in uncommon, out-of-the-ordinary ways.

42. I challenge myself intentionally and regularly to be in positions where God has to

show up.

43. I often volunteer my time and talents to worthwhile causes.

44. I will give above and beyond when I know it will help further God’s mission.

45. I can take a message, project, or event and communicate it effectively to a broad

audience.

46. People want to follow me.

47. I have organizational skills and know how to use multiple programs on my computer

to help forward the mission of the church.

48. I love hosting people at my home for a great meal or to watch the big game.

49. People have told me they were moved spiritually by my singing or playing music.

50. Others can point to specific instances where my prayers have resulted in what

seems impossible happening.

51. I can speak to God in a language I have never learned.

52. It is enjoyable to motivate people to a higher spiritual commitment.

53. I am totally convinced God will fulfill His word even if He is not doing so yet.

54. I have a way of bringing unity into what could become divisive topics.

55. People have told me that I throw great parties.

56. I have compassion to the point of tears for persons or places that have no direct

connection to me.

57. I know my testimony and am prepared to share it at any moment.

58. I have original ideas that will help reach new people for Christ.

59. I can apply scriptural truth to help guide others in difficult or uncertain times.

60. I can’t help but start new things.

61. I have a knack for welcoming people to our church or our home.

62. People have told me that I have communicated timely messages that must have

come directly from the Lord.

63. I’m effective at challenging people to take a next step in their faith.

64. I give practical advice to help others through complicated situations.

65. I am able to troubleshoot most electronic issues with confidence and success.

66. I plan to give a set amount and I also look for opportunities to give to additional

causes.

67. I feel God has called me to go forth to establish new churches where people have

never heard the Gospel.

68. People will often come to me to help support their technological needs.

69. People of a different race or culture have been attracted to me and we have related

well.

70. I am passionate about reaching the next generation of students and/or kids with the

Gospel.

71. I have an attractive and winsome personality that others are excited to come

alongside of.

72. I like to help organizations or groups become more efficient.

73. God has used me personally to perform supernatural signs and wonders.

74. I get excited, not intimidated by cameras, computers, lights, and cables.

75. I have interpreted words, or a language, that I have never learned.

76. When others may see obstacles, I can help spot the opportunities.

77. I like to find small things that need to be done and often do them without being

asked.

78. One-on-one relationships are important to me.