Right-hand, meet Left-hand
Much has been made in the LCMS over the past, well, about as far back as I can remember, that we’re on the cusp of an impending crisis. Namely, a shortage of pastors. It’s driven the recruiting efforts of our fine Seminaries. It’s driven fundraising efforts. It’s driven theologically suspect things as far back as the 1989 Wichita Convention’s lay ministry efforts right up through the passage of SMPP at last summer’s Convention.
Here’s the thing: for a great many reasons, there’s not really a shortage. We’re churning out Sem grads who aren’t getting Calls & have seminarians who can’t get Vicarage placements. We’ve got over 800 pastors working as district and synodical bureaucrats. Pastor Beisel has a nice post on this over at One Lutheran… Ablog! (take note of the link that he has to a posting over at Priestmanship — it’s worth clicking on, too…).
Now for the absurd, ‘right-hand/left-hand’ part of all this…
Today, I just received an email from Synod, touting May as “Pastoral Education Month”. This, in and of itself, is a good thing, and not at all absurd. Let me pull out one quote, though…
With about 100 fewer seminarians than three years ago, and a growing number of retirement-age pastors, “now is the time” for the Synod to get serious about recruitment of pastors, according to Rev. Glen Thomas, executive director of the Synod’s Board for Pastoral Education.
If you haven’t read Pr. Beisel’s post yet, please go do so now & then come back & read that quote again. There’s a disconnect somewhere, don’tcha think? Why, when they can’t place all of the men they have right now, would they continue to perpetuate the fallacy that there’s an impending shortage? That’s just not right.
-ghp
KFU Oh I just don’t get it
So, I get home from work to day to find the April issue of the LCMS monthly house organ, The Lutheran Witness, in my mailbox. I continue to get it out of an almost morbid curiosity to keep ‘in the know’ about what synod is putting out there as the party line. So its arrival tends to be a relatively uneventful thing, as I don’t expect too much from it, and thus am rarely disappointed. Usually, I buzz through it rather quickly, checking out the letters to the editor, all the official notices, and give at least a cursory glance at the articles, at least to see how Ablaze! they are. Most months, I even get through SPK’s column of inspiration & leadership.
This month, however, as I was paging through, I noticed the graphic at the top of this post, on the bottom of page 25. I said to my self, “Self, this just ain’t right! The very first issue after Issues, Etc. gets killed off of KFUO-AM, having never (to my recollection) been touted in The Lutheran Witness, they have an advert for the COMMERCIAL SIDE of the radio station, NOT THE SIDE ENGAGED IN MISSIONAL OUTREACH, MUCH LESS THE PROGRAM THAT SPECIFICALLY ENGAGED IN CHRIST-CENTERED, CROSS-FOCUSED OUTREACH?” Really?
And, yes, I shouted at myself inside my head. I really did.
Boy, and if all this wasn’t bad enough, I just noticed something that will really make you techie gearheads shake your heads — you’ll note that the link to the Witness’ website has a .asp extension. That got me curious, so I looked up the LCMS family of websites at Netcraft, only to find that the main LCMS website is being run off of a Windows 2003 server box! Yikes!
This all just gets uglier & uglier with each passing day…
-ghp
Insert ‘LCMS has Issues’ pun here
The whole Issues, Etc. debacle keeps rolling along & picking up steam. I’m not going to try to summarize things here, one because it’s too big & wide ranging for me to pull it off, and two because I think most of the folks who read my stuff are already plugged in to the best sites.
I will say this: Largely because of these three posts
- Issues, Etc. and the Ideology of Hybelspongism
- About that letter to the editor, President K.
- BREAKING: Political motives exposed
I think that we’re getting very close to the point where we will be unable to use rank incompetence as the best-construction explanation of events. Treachery is fast becoming the only feasible explanation, as sad as that is to contemplate.
I hold no illusions that this will cause some grand reformation of the LCMS. It’s too big a corporate entity, with too many folks who depend on (and believe in) it, to go away. This whole sordid tale, however, might just serve a good purpose in that it will open the eyes & hearts of enough folks (lay and clergy) so that good, salutary organizations like the Augustana Ministerium & the Augustana Confraternity can gain critical mass.
-ghp
Y VU?
Well, once again Valparaiso University is in the news. And, once again, it’s not for anything that I would say is good.
VU to hire first female pastor
Within the past 6 months, VU has made waves in the Lutheran world, first for the hiring of a new President, and now for this hiring of a female pastor.
The hiring of the President was news because it was the first time since Lutheran folk bought VU in 1925 that the President was neither LCMS nor a pastor. New President Mark Heckler is an ELCA layman. While VU was/is not officially an LCMS entity, it has long been known to have strong LCMS ties, and was known/believed to be within LCMS circles to be the university where LCMS laity could go if they didn’t want to be a church worker (in which case they’d go to one of the Concordias). As a cradle LCMSer, and graduate of LCMS elementary & high schools, I can attest to this belief. In recent years, however, these ties have become increasingly loose, and the hiring of President Heckler only served to make that looseness almost impossible to ignore.
This latest announcement, though, takes things to a whole ‘nother level. While ELCA pastorettes (I’ll behave & not use my preferred term…) have preached in the Chapel of the Resurrection, the “official” pastors called to minister to VU have always been LCMS pastors - i.e., male. This has now, to state the obvious, changed. And it might actually start to get noticed by the rank and file pewsitters in the LCMS who have long believed that what was true in the increasingly distant past was still true today. It ain’t true, and it’ll be interesting to see how these folks react when they hear this latest news.
As usual, when issues like this come up, there’s some interesting discussion going on over at the ALPB Forum. And this issue is no exception…
While it’s possible that the whole Issues, Etc. wildfire will keep this latest VU thing from blowing up as big as it otherwise might have, I think it’ll be interesting nonetheless to see just how it plays out within the court of LCMS public opinion.
-ghp
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