Territorial Bloggings

Now things might start to get really interesting.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway — LCMS congregation member, former LCMS Board of Communication Services member, and current nationally published writer of news, politics, & religion — has published an article about the whole Issues, Etc. controversy on WSJ.com, the website of the Wall Street Journal.

In the article — Radio Silence — Mollie lays out in devastating fashion just what has transpired over the past week and a half.

And by doing so in a very public way, she could be starting a second wave of controversy - one which might actually hit the Purple Politburo so they’ll take notice, because it’s negative publicity. The outside world might start to ask about all this, and the powers that be aren’t going to look too good when all is said and done.

Here’s a particularly interesting excerpt:

“Despite the show’s popularity, low cost and loyal donor base, Mr. Wilken and Jeff Schwarz, the producer of “Issues, Etc.,” were dismissed without explanation on Tuesday of Holy Week. Within hours, the program’s Web site — which provided access to past episodes and issues of its magazine — had disappeared. Indeed, all evidence that the show ever existed was removed.

So what happened? Initially, the bureaucrats in St. Louis kept a strict silence, claiming that the show had been canceled for “business and programmatic” reasons. Yesterday the synod cited low local ratings in the St. Louis area and the low number of listeners to the live audio stream on the Web site. But the last time the synod tracked the size of the audience was three years ago, and it did not take into account the show’s syndicated or podcast following. The synod also claimed that the show lost $250,000 a year, an assertion that is at odds with those of others familiar with the operating budget of the station.

The Rev. Michael Kumm, who served on three management committees for the station, said that the explanation doesn’t add up. ” ‘Issues, Etc.’ is the most listened to, most popular and generates more income than any other program at the station and perhaps even the others combined. This decision is purely political,” he said.

He may well be right. The program was in all likelihood a pawn in a larger battle for the soul of the Missouri Synod. The church is divided between, on the one hand, traditional Lutherans known for their emphasis on sacraments, liturgical worship and the church’s historic confessions and, on the other, those who have embraced pop-culture Christianity and a market-driven approach to church growth. The divide is well known to all confessional Christian denominations struggling to retain their traditional identity.

The Rev. Gerald Kieschnick, the synod’s current president, has pushed church marketing over the Lutherans’ historic confession of faith by repeatedly telling the laity, “This is not your grandfather’s church.”

Since Mr. Kieschnick narrowly won election in 2001, the church has embarked on a program, called Ablaze!, that has the admirable goal of “reaching 100 million unreached and uncommitted people with the Gospel by 2017,” the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Historically the church kept statistics on baptisms. Now, however, it keeps a tally of what it calls “critical events.” On March 17 a man reported discussing Jesus with his waitress — and the Ablaze! count went up by one.
…
While “Issues, Etc.” never criticized Mr. Kieschnick or his colleagues, its attacks against shallow church marketing included mention of some approaches embraced by the current leadership. It opposed, for instance, the emergent church — an attempt to accommodate postmodern culture by blending philosophies and practices from throughout the church’s history — and the Purpose Driven Church movement, which reorients the church’s message toward self-help and self-improvement.”

Wow. Just… Wow.

Mollie nailed it. Check out the full article and you’ll see.

Thanks, Mollie, for carrying the ball & doing something that needed to be done.

-ghp