The Seeker-Sensitive Military Machine Grinds to a Halt

The 2004 movie Downfall portrayed the last twelve days of Hitler’s life in his Berlin bunker. Since then, the movie has taken on a life of its own. The scene of an enraged Hitler in his bunker has been co-opted by all sorts of people as they insert their own imaginative subtitles, which works well if your audience doesn’t speak German. In this one, Hitler berates his general staff for their failure to fully embrace Hitler’s expansionary seeker-sensitive church growth plans. It’s got some pretty funny lines. Enjoy.



HT: Chris Rosebrough

Lutheran Missiology: Confessing the Primacy of the Means of Grace

Quoting from Dr. Naomichi Masaki's article in the Holy Trinity 1998 issue of Logia (VII, 3) titled "Confessing Christ: Office and Vocation":

Lutheran missiology must confess the primacy of the means of grace. To confess the means of grace is to confess the office of the holy ministry (AC V) and its instrumentality in the confession of the gospel itself. Such, indeed, was Luther’s own understanding of the missionary task. According to Luther, the task of a missionary is to teach true worship. To emphasize this point, Luther cites the example of Noah. Luther notes that when Noah was traveling around the world, preaching everywhere, he was “giving instructions concerning the true worship of God.” Since for Luther there is no true worship of God other than what God himself has given, the sacraments together with preaching, he sees Noah as guiding people to sacramental worship so that they could meet God in “the covering.” The work of a missionary never stops at baptism, but it continues in teaching, until all are brought into the world of the Divine Service, where our crucified and risen Lord is present to give them his gifts.

Get Your Free Copy of Higher Things Magazine

The Spring 2012 issue of Higher Things Magazine is out.  It has a number of great articles on apologetics, designed to arm you, or your high school or college age kid, with tools that will help you give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.  Authors include Pastor George Borghardt, Pastor Jonathan Fisk, Pastor Mark Pierson, Editor Katie Micilcavage, Pastor Bill Cwirla, Pastor Ian Pacey, Pastor Brent Kuhlman, Dr. Adam Francisco, and apologist Craig Parton.  That's one heckuva lineup!

Equally impressive, you can download this issue for free at the Higher Things website.  Give it a read, and pass it along to the kids at church.  Check it out here, or download the whole thing here.

Eat Chocolate, Get Skinny

Here’s a study I can get behind. According to a letter published in the Archives of Internal Medicine and reported on Bloomberg, a study of 1,000 people concluded that those who ate chocolate about five times a week had a one point lower body mass index than those who didn’t. That equates to about 5 pounds less for someone five feet tall and weighing 120 pounds.

Will eating chocolate five times a day make you even skinnier? I’m offering to be a participant in their next study to find out.


HT: Pastor Scott Klemsz

photo credit: Dale

The Glamorous Life of the Airline Pilot

My buddy Jim Lancaster is a fellow pilot. He, like a lot of other pilots, leads a charmed and glamorous life. When he's not commanding a big jet airliner, he might be spending time at one of his homes, the closest one to work being three miles east of Dockweiler Beach in Los Angeles. It’s a short trip to sand between your toes and a little boogie boarding. As you might expect, the price of real estate here is pretty high. There’s an even steeper price to pay for this prime piece of terra firma though. What price does Jim pay for his slice of California dreamin’?

$60 per month – it’s a rented piece of crumbling asphalt in the Los Angeles World Airport’s Parking Lot B, directly under the approach end of Runway 25L. This prime spot is great if you’re a pilot. You can hear the alluring whisper of a high bypass turbofan jet engine (or four) passing directly over your head every couple of minutes. Or the subtle concussion of a 747 taking off from the adjacent runway. Never mind if one of these airborne aluminum marvels should happen to land short and send trailers skittering like silver balls across the tilted horizontal plain of a pulsating pinball machine. As an added bonus, Jim gets to live away from his family for much of the time in his luxurious 2001 Tradewinds trailer, parked among a bunch of other airline types who also live the glamorous life in Lot B. Jim dreams of going home to Seattle on the “weekends” – although maybe that dream is a kerosene-induced chimera, brought on by the constant smell of combusted jet fuel gently rolling between his and the other trailers like a romantic San Francisco fog.

Click on the graphic for a larger view of the LAX environs

Jim is one of the many pilots who “commute” to work – living in one place but being based somewhere else. These pilots, when their work week ends, seek the nearest congested gate with the fastest jet to get them back home, wherever that might be. Sometimes they do this because they don’t want to uproot their family, or they can’t afford to live where they’re based, or their base is a crime-ridden metropolis where no one wants to live. At any rate there’s a whole lot of commuting going on. These pilots, if the back end of the airplane is full, sit in an uncomfortable extra seat in the flight deck called the jump seat. (The only good thing about this is that it's free.)  There’s no week that goes by where I don’t have one of these forlorn pilots, trying to get where they need to go, sitting in my jump seat.

So the next time you see your pilot showing up for work and looking a little harried, well maybe it wasn’t really his or her first flight of the day. My, what we won’t do to fly for a living! And if you're feeling particularly sorry for your displaced pilot, chocolate is always a nice gesture. Fortunately, I’ve never commuted, having always been blessed with a decent place to be based (although chocolate is still a nice gesture).

The Lot B denizens have been the subject of more than one newspaper article, including this one written by Daniel Weikel in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, from which I drew a little of the information used to write this post. Happy flying!


map courtesy of Google Maps

Good Advice

photo credit: glans galore

Districts Gone Bad

Overtures to conventions have a way of disappearing. Presidents are often given the power to disallow an overture if they deem it to be factually in error. Here is the colorful tale of an overture that was sent to the waterless desert graveyard of rejected overtures. In this case, it was an overture in support of University Lutheran Chapel (ULC) in Minnesota, sent to the Minnesota North District Convention by one of its circuits. I converted the original pdf file to a graphic so it could be posted. You can find the original pdf file on the ULC website here. Decide for yourself it the overture contained factual errors.

The ULC property has been sold out from under them by the Minnesota South District. They are in their last month before they must pack up and leave, leaving behind many hopes and dreams and stepping into an uncertain future. Fortunately, God promises to be with them! More information on the sale of ULC can be found here, as well as ways in which you can help.

Click on the graphic to enlarge

The Church in Motion

Quoting from Dr. Naomichi Masaki's article in the Holy Trinity 1998 issue of Logia (VII, 3) titled "Confessing Christ: Office and Vocation":

...It is clear that the church does not stop. From the Father to the Son to the apostles to the office of the holy ministry to all people. The movement is that of the Holy Spirit delivering the forgiveness of sins. And yet this movement can be halted when the work of missions is halted. Wilhelm Löhe says it well:

For mission is nothing but the one church of God in motion, the actualization of the one universal, catholic church.... Mission is the life of the catholic church. Where it stops, blood and breath stop; where it dies, the love which unites heaven and earth also dies. The catholic church and mission—these two no one can separate without killing both, and that is impossible.

Werner Elert affirms that this statement of Löhe’s was “exactly what Luther thought.” He continues: “The motion of the one church—church is motion, for it merely expresses the endless dynamic of the Gospel.” This motion of the church is further urged by William C. Weinrich:

To reflect upon “mission” or upon “evangelism” is to reflect upon the Church itself, for the act of mission or of evangelism is not accidental or coincidental to the Church—like the activity of golf, tennis or horseback riding is to this or that individual—but the act of mission belongs to the very “core” of what it means to be the Church.... The Church evangelized because it had to. This assertion is to be understood in the strictest possible sense. The early Church did not begin the work of evangelism simply because Christ commanded it (cf. Matt. 28:19); mission was not simple obedience to a high authority. Nor did the Church evangelize out of a sense of gratitude for God’s love, out of a sense of responsibility in light of the last judgment, or out of a sense of concern for fallen man’s destiny— although these may be considered “emotive causations” for the Church’s mission activity, as we shall note below. Rather, the Church evangelized because it could not do otherwise, and it could not do otherwise because in the Holy Spirit the Church had been taken up into the very activity of God in Christ whereby the final purposes of God are fulfilled. The early Church did not understand mission as a merely human action done in response to the good things God had done. Mission was perceived christologically— as God acting for the salvation of fallen mankind, but God acting only in union with mankind. The early Church understood mission to be the very expression of the Lordship of Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Thus a christological understanding of missions is to be found in the way of the administration of the means of grace through the office of the holy ministry. In the book of Acts, as the faithful celebrated the sacrament and prayed continually, “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). It was the Lord’s doing; they could not claim any credit by their founding mission societies, organizing city missions, or writing books on dynamic evangelism. As the liturgy through preaching and the Lord’s Supper continues to move us from within to without (toward God in faith and toward the neighbor in love), so the church itself moves toward all people. This is the flow of God’s sending.

Quotable Blog Quotes #16

Quotable Quotes From Around the Blogosphere







The Brothers of John the Steadfast
Pastor Martin Noland
SMP Program is “Mega-Death for Lutheran Congregations

So, to put it simply, the real purpose of the SMP program was to reduce the training requirements for the pastoral office and to bypass the “gate-keeping” function of the seminary admissions offices.


Confessional Gadfly
Pastor Eric Brown
Letting Jesus be the Hero

It's not about you, it's not about your works or your praise or your strength or the justice you bring -- it's about Christ and His salvation and His righteousness. Come, let us fix our eyes not upon ourselves, but upon Christ Jesus, for He gives us faith and He brings that faith to its full end and flower in the life of the world to come!


Confessional Gadfly
Pastor Eric Brown
Seeing Through Dame Reason’s Stylish Sunglasses

I see people dimming the light of God's revealed Word by choosing to look through dame reason's stylish sunglasses.


Gottesdienst Online
Pastor Jason Braaten
Playing the das-ist-Katholisch Card

The Western Rite then should be the Lutheran's default position not an add-on of Roman Catholic style to an otherwise abstracted and neutral Lutheran substance. The historic ceremonies of the Western Rite retained during the Reformation are ours. They are our heritage. This isn't about style. This is about who we are as Lutherans and about what we believe, teach, and confess. After everything that obstructed the Gospel was removed, what remained was pure Gospel, a Gospel enacted by the very ceremonies of the Western Rite.

And so claiming the ceremonies of the Western Rite is, in fact, to teach and confess as Lutherans believe. It is teaching what it means to be Lutheran in word and deed. That is, after all, what ceremonies do, is it not (AC XXIV:1-3)? They teach. So let's teach. Teach your people. Use the historic ceremonies of the Western Church, vetted and retained during the Reformation, to teach what we as Lutherans believe, teach, and confess.

Click HERE to continue reading >>

Your Long Lost Cousin Wasn’t a Chimpanzee!

Time to redraw the diagram. As genome mapping becomes more sophisticated and more organisms are studied in greater detail, it looks like the branches of the evolutionary tree have been drawn in the wrong spots. Maybe there aren’t any branches. To quote Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D., discussing a recent article in Nature magazine on the Institute for Creation Research website,

In a significant number of cases, evolutionary trees based on DNA sequences show that humans are more closely related to gorillas or orangutans than chimpanzees—again, all depending on which DNA fragment is used for the analysis. The overall outcome is that no clear path of common ancestry between humans and various primates exists, so no coherent model of primate evolution can be achieved.

Of course, that’s not news to many Christians, who draw their evolutionary conclusions first and foremost from Scripture. For them, man was created in God’s image rather than having evolved from the primordial goo to you. Once again, it appears that science is further vindicating the truth of the Bible. But then again, whether science seems to agree with Scripture or not, Truth will always be found in the person of Jesus Christ – He is the way, the truth, and the life.


photo credit: Bryan Wright