Quotable Quotes From Around the Blogosphere
Confessional Gadfly
Rev. Eric J. Brown
Rev. Eric J. Brown
Here’s how Pastor Brown introduces then Vicar Christopher Esget, whom Pastor Brown calls one of the five people who have greatly impacted his life of faith and love on this earth:
And then, my dad and I are wandering around at the Student fair booth, and there is this book-nerdy-looking guy in a clerical sitting with a copy of Tappert. My dad and I looked and each other, and my dad said, "Well, if that ELCA guy is looking at Tappert, maybe he's not completely horrid." Turn [sic] out he was the LCMS Vicar from Trinity in Norman.
Esgetology
Pastor Christopher Esget commenting on the SMP program and other alternate routes to ordination:
Yet more significant than scholarly training, seminary life forms and shapes the spiritual and liturgical mind of the pastor. I learned more in the chapel, lunchroom, and Kantorei van than in any classroom. Yet despite four years of resident seminary education (for two degrees: M.Div. and S.T.M.), two years of fieldwork, a summer vicarage, and a full-year vicarage, I wasn’t at all prepared to be a pastor. Take away substantive theological grounding, and we will have a synod full of Joel Osteens - toothy smiles, good intentions, and moralisms.
By claiming that our communion is “close” rather than “closed” we switch the stress from belonging to something that is God’s to something that is ours.
A Heresy Hunter at Concordia
Bob Hunter’s lamentation on the beginning of his Greek adventures. Bob is a first year Seminarian in Ft. Wayne.
Ode to Greek
Greek is a dead language
As dead as it can be
It killed the ancient Romans
And now it's killing me
All are dead who wrote it
All are dead who spoke it
All die who learn it
Blessed death - they earn it
-Unknown
My second year at seminary has begun and I, therefore, have died to the world (not just in the Christian sense).Brothers of John the Steadfast
An article written by Dr. Joseph Herl
We too are called to be faithful. Do we select our music in church to be successful in moving people, in reaching them for Christ, in convincing them to become Christians? If so, welcome to Arminianism and the Law. Or do we choose music that glorifies God and conveys as well as possible through its texts and associations the fullness of Christian teaching? If so, welcome to Luther and the Gospel.
In reading the above I was reminded of what we are seeing today in the church with the "Seeker Sensitive" and "Church Growth" programs which focus on making those who need to know they are sick, comfortable. Instead of congregations being a "hospital" dispensing the divine "medicine" of Word and Sacrament, some congregations have become the equivalent to Disney Land; aiming to treat their ill patients with entertainment, self-help guides, and diluted, sugary, "gospel".
Brothers of John the Steadfast
Jim Pierce’s Comment on Mollie Ziegler Hemingway’s post about Ablaze! now adding LCMS school children who aren’t members of a Christian church to the Ablaze! tally:
The Mormons baptize for the dead… maybe team Ablaze!™ could start counting “unchurched” buried in Lutheran cemeteries? Hmm… I better not give them any ideas.
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