POTF Blog Of The Week: “I didn’t see Jesus on the cross!”

This week’s blog pick of the week comes from Kelly Klages’ self titled blog with her post “I didn’t see Jesus on the cross!”

In this wonderfully succinct piece Kelly recounts how upset her daughter gets when she didn’t see Jesus on the cross in one of Pastor Jonathon Fisk’s Worldview Everlasting video podcasts and the comfort of seeing Jesus lifted up in glory in the ending credits.

Kelly’s closing thoughts on the matter are worth their weigh in gold:

Would that all believers would be that grieved when they are denied Jesus on the cross. Would that we’d all take such joy in that sight as well.

Amen Kelly! Please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing here and you’ll see why it’s my pick of the week (even if it's a week or two late).

POTF Blog Of The Week: Should Our Doctrine be Permeable?

This week’s blog of the week has to go to Jim Pierce’s post over at one of my favorite daily reads Confessional Bytes and his post titled Should Our Doctrine be Permeable?. Jim is looking at an article in the Lutheran Witness that discusses how we as the “churched”might become permeable to reach the “unchurched.”

The idea that the church must look more like the culture has long been a bug in my bonnet so to speak. I’ve heard more than one church bureaucrat say in front of many a people that we need to stop worrying about being Lutherans and try to worry about saving souls as if that is something WE do.

Jim takes the author to task for his taking verses from the Bible out of their clear and intended context which is a tactic frequently used by individuals and marketing gurus to justify replacing church doctrine and practice with cultural sensibilities to attract people who are not so much attracted to church.

Should doctrine be permeable? No. It's sad that we even have to ask that question

Great post Jim!

Necessary Roughness Scores With Second Blog Of The Week Pick

Congratulations are in order as Dan over at Necessary Roughness scored his second Issues, Etc.’s Blog of the Week with producer Jeff Schwarz selecting Dan’s post Repentance is the Better Miracle for his weekly pick last Friday.

Truth be told, nearly all of Dan’s posts are worthy of blog of the week and Necessary Roughness has long been a favorite here at POTF. Congrats Dan on the well deserved win.

POTF Blog Of The Week: Germs and The Common Cup

This week’s blog of the week is a post titled “Germs and The Common Cup” over at Elephant’s Child’s self titled blog. Elephant’s Child, a frequent commenter here at the firehouse, has a few observations of sanitary practices that add to the reasons for her wanting one chalice and not individual cups, even during flu season, at the Lord’s Supper.

A few of her observations:

The edges of your plastic individual cups were touched by an altar guild member, when she inserted them into the trays. Then, your cup was touched by you, when you removed it from the tray.

Did you wash your hands after you shook hands with the greeter before church?
Does your congregation "share the peace" during the service? How clean are YOUR hands?

I've seen our communion assistants grabbing the cups by the edges and rearranging them in the tray, too.

What’s brilliant in it’s simplicity concerning Elephant’s Child’s observations is that germs are indeed everywhere and the more individual cups are handled the greater the chances that a virus is spread.

The debate for and against aside the common cup at the Eucharist aside, the recent H1N1 swine flu pandemic has certainly produced some rather interesting debates on a host of blogs across the blogosphere. Sadly, there are actually people who advocate individual cups with the argument that our Lord and the authors of Scripture had no way of knowing about diseases and such.

It frustrates me to no end to hear folks say that the same Jesus who both created and redeemed the human race was ignorant of the flu and therefore couldn’t have had enough insight to mandate individual cups so that the sheep wouldn’t get sick. Sorry, but if you want to make an argument for individual cups, you’ll need to better than that.

Great post Elephant’s Child!

POTF Blog Of The Week: Pastoral Meanderings ”Who Is On The Defensive”

This week’s blog of the week (or month… or year even) comes from Pastor Peter’s blog PASTORAL MEANDERINGS in a post entitled “Who Is On The Defensive?” Pastor Peter writes:

When the objection is an exception to the established practice or teaching of the Church, then the innovators have to prove the point… not those who continue that established practice or teaching… Imagine if (reference the discussions below) we did not have to prove in every generation baptismal regeneration, the Eucharistic mystery, the efficacy of the Word, the wisdom of penance, the importance of faithfulness, the maintenance of the Truth (and not its adjustment) in times of question… whether Lutheran or Orthodox or Roman… ah… if that were the day… when those raising objections to or departing from historic and accepted teaching and practice had to prove not only the rightness of their point but the wrongness of the accepted tradition…

From my perspective, this is the genius of the Lutheran Confessions… they do not innovate but reach back to what was and claim it as what is… from Scripture and the fathers… No, not perfect at all, but a vast improvement upon the corruption that was average parish life in Luther’s day… and if only we Lutherans kept to it… what a dynamo it might mean for today…

Absolutely brilliant!

HT: Christopher Gillespie (no relation that I’m aware of) over at Outer Rim Territories

POTF Blog Of The Week:Cyberbrethren’s Connecting The Dots

This week’s blog of the week has got to go to überblogger Rev. Paul McCain’s Connecting the Dots: Women’s Ordination and the ELCA’s Decisions about Homosexuality over at Cyberbrethren. While I agree with every point Rev. McCain makes concerning how we should deal with the ELCA’s recent decisions at its church wide assembly, it his opening paragraph that had me cheering:

It is painful to watch men and women I’ve come to know and love as brothers and sisters in Christ, in the ELCA, suffer through the agony of their church body crumbling down around them. If somebody wants to chastise me for calling them brothers and sisters in Christ, go ahead, but it changes nothing. They are. I am, frankly, sick to my stomach watching some of the ham-fisted, rude, obnoxious, boorish reactions to the ELCA decisions appearing on Lutheran blog sites and discussion groups, including ridicule and mockery in the form of songs. Must we Missourians go out of our way like this to confirm every worst suspicion of us, that we are a bunch of jerks? No. It is time for clarity with charity.

Rev. McCain isn’t the only one frustrated with sectors of the Lutheran blogosphere. I’ve been a bit discouraged myself, especially with people and sites that purport to teach and who hold themselves up as true heirs of the reformation. More and more frequently these sites I once enjoyed resort to personal attacks and allowing venomous commentary and remarks that will only serve to damage any effort to steer our beloved synod from the road so many have gone down in Americanized Christianity. Sadly some fail to see how their own words will be used against the very causes they so enthusiastically fight for.

Rev. McCain isn’t the only one getting sick to his stomach watching boorish behavior. I fail to understand how anyone thinks an opinion or view on a particular issue will be changed without even a semblance of civility. Watching folks not content to just tear people down using only their true names that they resort to signing in under numerous pseudonyms so as to pile on (because even though we say we don’t like counting heads, we sure do like making sure that there are plenty of non-people agreeing with us to prove our point don’t we?) at these same sites is confirmation that all too often we Missourians are jerks indeed.

Now before anyone asks “isn’t this the pot is calling the kettle black here?” maybe, but I’ve never once put myself on a pedestal or set myself above others as the place to go to learn how to do things the way true blue Lutheran’s are supposed to, I don’t defend my goofy ideas from silence, and yes I will delete a comment if the adjectives jackboot, thug or ilk are used. Ya know why? Because even a slack jawed layman understands civility and what it means to make attacks personal. Just so ya know.

Anyhoo, the rest of Rev. McCain’s post is as good as the opening paragraph and I strongly encourage everyone to give it a read and see what he means by connecting the dots. Thanks for the great post Rev. McCain!

POTF Blog Of The Week: Territorial Bloggings’ A Lesson re: Polity

I’ve often quoted other people’s blogs here at Putting Out The Fire as there are an infinite number of people who write worthwhile material better than I would ever hope to. What I don’t think I’ve ever done is pick a blog of the week and I think that needs to change. I may not always have a blog of the week but every now and then I think I’d like to point out a particular post that just strikes me as a cut above the rest. Hey, why should big time talk show hosts and producers have all the fun? Also, it’s my blog and I can do with it what I please.

With all that being said, drum roll please…GHP over at Territorial Bloggings has a great post titled A Lesson re: Polity that looks at both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s organizational structure and their representation in convention and how the proposed reorganization of our beloved church body, the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod, by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Synod Structure and Governance (BRTFSSG) and what that might mean for us if such a proposal is adopted.

GHP is one smart cookie in that he has the foresight to see the possible problems of “top-down process (wherein the concept of every member having a truly & practically equal voice is lost), or a skewed and less-than-representational national voting body (wherein important changes could be driven by an agenda of the few, rather than by a representative consensus of the many…)” with what just happened at the ELCA convention as backdrop. A great post GHP and congratulations on being selected as the inaugural pick for POTF’s Blog of the Week!