Mission Creep(s)

Did you know that, ON THEIR OWN, overseas missionaries in the LCMS have to collect 85% of the cost to operate their missions? The Synod graciously picks up the other 15%.

Oh, there's one exception. NEW missionaries have to collect 100% of their operating expenses.

Here's a radical idea:

Fund the missionaries with 100% of their operating expenses and get Gerald Kieschnick and the other district presidents to fund 85% - 100% of their salaries, going from congregation to congregation, making PowerPoint presentations and asking for money.

In the Northern Illinois District we have FOUR mission "executives." They are supposed to be facilitating the planting churches and promoting missions in the district. Would it surprize you to learn that missions aren't growing too well -- but that salaries and budgets have grown just fine?

Also in the Northern Illinois District, the district's board for missions has been given constitutional authority to review and approve grants to missions congregations. In the past year or so, however, they have not been consulted in ANY of these grants. ZERO. Who has been doing the reviewing and bestowing? The district's Ablaze! Grant Teams -- groups which have absolutely NO constitutional authority to be doing such things.

Is there someone from whom I need permission to get angry? In situations like this within Christ's church, is there some place I need to go to get approval to use strong language, make a whip of cords, overturn tables and drive out money-changers? (I'm primed to have someone pose the question to me: "What would Jesus do?")

Would I feel any better if I read Robert Bork's book The Death of Outrage?

I guess I can try to placate myself by writing up some overtures for next year's district convention . . .

Chalk Talk

One of my sons happened across this video at Blockbuster. It runs in the same genre as The Office but it takes place in a high school. These mockumentaries have a similar effect as fingernails on a blackboard (if anyone can remember the days before dry-erase whiteboards). I covered my eyes, but watched through parted fingers, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

The Plastic Fork Thing

Okay, "tv", since you commented on that last post wanting to know about the plastic fork reference, I decided just to publish the quote from Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing here: (I couldn't find my book but Neuhaus happened to quote from that section in his First Things) . . .

What does it all mean?

One telephone call I received was from a man who was both upset and amused. It seems that he happened to attend Sunday services in a Lutheran church and saw something that almost totally monopolized his attention. The minister, choir members, and a big group of young children, all in the front of the church, had strings around their necks and hanging from each piece of string was a plastic fork. Prayers were prayed, hymns were sung, and plastic forks dangled. The congregation was without a clue.

Finally, the minister talked to the children and explained the symbolism of the forks. 'Remember those times when you were eating dinner and your mother told you to save your forks?'

Continued cluelessness from the congregation.

The minister, sensing that further clarification was needed, continued: 'You know, save your forks for dessert . . . for heaven.'

What does it all mean? First of all it means that Roman Catholics are not the only ones capable of liturgical nuttiness. Secondly it means prepare for the worst. We must surely be living in a dangerous era when any religion begins to treat human beings as if they were little kitsch toys -- without yearnings, without imperfections, without imagination, without the gift of a soul, without art.

We would expect dictators, radical political theorists, and others who have a low opinion of people to indulge in amusing games with symbols, as a sign of their contempt for the idiots called human beings, but in religion this sort of thing is bad news. It means the end of that idea of a special, creating human 'soul,' and the beginning of an age when people in churches will be manipulated as if they were stupid machines-easily turned on or off (with a gimmick) by smart machines. It means head for the hills.

A Musical Moratorium

Point #1: The new LCMS Lutheran Service Book (LSB) has four Marty Haugen hymns.

Point #2: There is actually a Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas.

Point #3: I didn't initiate nor subscribe to the website in Point #2. But I could have.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Don't think for a moment that "modern" innovations in "Church Growth" parishes are all that modern. Things like these have been creeping into congregations for a long time. The following P.E. Kretzmann quotations serve to illustrate Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”

"Gospel Anthems"
We must take note also of a most deplorable tendency of our times, namely, that of preferring the shallow modern ‘Gospel anthem’ to the classical hymns of our Church. The reference is both to the text and to the tunes in use in many churches. On all sides the criticism is heard that the old Lutheran hymns are “too heavy, too doctrinal, that our age does not understand them.” Strange that the Lutherans of four centuries and of countless languages could understand and appreciate them, even as late as a generation ago! Is the present generation less intelligent or merely more frivolous?

(From P. E . Kretzmann; Magazin fur evang.-luth. Homiletik und Pastoraltheologie; June 1929, pp 216-217.)

Secular Dates in the Church
A very strong tendency toward sectarianism and even secularization is found in the increasing number of special days that are celebrated, at least with a special ‘program’ in the Sunday-school, if not with a similar perversion of the regular service in the church itself. We have with us to-day Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, Rally Day, Father-and-son Day, Decision Day, Washington’s Birthday, Lincoln’s Birthday, Roosevelt’s Birthday, Armistice Day, and a host of others, and apparently the end is not yet. “All these,” Rev. F. R. Webber says (Lutheran Church Art, November, 1928), “are anthropocentric. We have a church-year that is highly Christocentric. Any so-called Lutheran who sets aside the old church-year and out of desire to ape the sects indulges in the sloppy sentimentalism of the sectarian, Christless world-year is a traitor to the Word of God. What warrant have we to observe festivals, ferias, and fasts in honor of people?” The stricture, though severe, is well taken and well worthy of serious deliberation.

(From P. E Kretzmann, Magazin fur evang.-luth. Homiletik und Pastoraitheologie, June 1929, pp 218)

Prayers Over the Collection Plates
A very peculiar innovation showing the trend toward sectarianism in our circles is a strange liturgical act, the possibilities of which were evidently overlooked by the old Lutheran compilers of church orders and orders of service for Sundays and holidays. The reference is to the act which the children, in their usual frank, if not brutal, manner, with more truth than poetry, call ‘the blessing of the nickels’ or even ‘the blessing of the pennies’. It is a short prayer of thanksgiving spoken over the collection plates after the deacons or ushers have solemnly marched up the center aisle, with the baskets or plates carefully stacked on the left arm.

Charity fails to find an excuse condoning such an act in a Lutheran church. We have ever taught that good works and the merit of men should be kept out of sight as much as possible, particularly when we assemble in the house of God as poor sinners desiring the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins, without any merit or worthiness in ourselves. Formerly the collection was purposely taken (or ‘the offerings lifted’) as unobtrusively as possible, during the singing of the hymn following the sermon, not during a sentimental ‘offertory’ played with soft stops.

And now much ado is made, not exactly about nothing, but surely about the least of our gifts for the kingdom. That a special prayer of thanksgiving is offered, or even a special service of thanksgiving arranged, for an unusual gift of God’s mercy in overcoming our close-fistedness is entirely in order, but to include the Sunday collection in a regular order of worship, with a special liturgical act, is – simply not Lutheran.”

(P. E . Kretzmann, Magazin fur evang.-luth. Homiletik und Pastoraltheologie, June 1929, p 219.)