Thoughts On A Thesis Of Worship(?)

The following is what I sent to a friend of mine after he emailed me the Theses on Worship issued by the Council of Presidents and asked for my ever so humble opinion (I actually hadn’t seen them myself until Monday as I’ve been pretty busy with matters outside and off of the interweb):

While I have a love for theology I’m certainly not a trained theologian. I’m also by no means a wordsmith or anything approaching a good communicator. That being said; this document is a convoluted mess that a council of trained theologians should be embarrassed to issue! My thoughts on the thesis are as follows:

· We’ve surrendered the word worship to the evangelical view that worship is something that we do instead a Divine Service where it is God who gives His gifts.
· The liturgy is adiaphoria so we can each do what is right in our own eyes and anyone who says otherwise is only doing so to burden the souls who seek to experience God through their worship. In other words, AC XV 1 should be ignored and we amend AC XV to simply say all liturgy is a human tradition and therefore contrary to the Gospel. AC XXIV should also be amended to reflect the same.
· Our view of the Old testament is now equal to that of the Mormons where the liturgical rites that prefigure temple and synagogue worship were plan A and B and where overturned By Jesus and the apostles and are rightfully ignored and condemned. Our understanding of these rites as essential to understanding the vicarious atonement of Christ at Golgotha is as old fashioned as those dusty sixteenth century confessions and need to condemned.
· Worship is about you and community (read into this the emergent influence and undertones). Your calling is to expand your community so that more folks can understand that worship is about you and community.
· There can be true forms of worship just don’t tell me that there are wrong forms of worship because that will make me sad and I’ll accuse you of burdening my conscience.
· We should talk about the above until everyone agrees with us and can then claim unity.

Well, that’s my thoughts on this nonsensical drivel.

Pastor Klemet Preus also has some things to say about the thesis over at a post on Steadfast Lutherans.

How Do You Grow Your Church? Part Deux

How Do You Grow Your Church?

So, how do you grow your church? Looking around I see a couple of different ideas:

1. Preach God’s Word purely (it’s all about Jesus and Him crucified folks) and administer the Sacraments rightly. Baptize babies and catechize all people in sound Christian doctrine.

2. Open up a day care center and tell the parents that they will get a discount if they join your congregation. If members of your mother congregation apply for a job; tell them that it would probably turn out better if they transferred membership. Don’t worry, that mother congregation, they have plenty of members to spare.

3. Call your mother congregation’s members and just ask them outright to transfer to your exciting and dynamic congregation. Be sure to email the member’s pastor after they agree to give it a shot. Remember, if he objects; you need to say that you didn’t think he would mind… after all, they still have plenty (too many) of members to spare.

All three scenarios are in play in my little corner of the haut south.

My congregation, that uptight mother church that thinks it’s important to make sure her sheep are fed above all else without Madison Avenue programs has always went with the first of the above options. With two of our three daughter congregations are choosing the remaining options, is it any wonder why I have a problem with the Ablaze! program and it’s emphasis on counting?

We reap what we sow and we are reaping big time ‘roud here.

LCMS Market Share Declines While Revenues Exceed Expectations

In case ya’ll missed it last week, from the inbox:

"...baptized membership throughout the Synod decreased by an estimated 34,913 (to 2,383,084) for the year and confirmed membership dropped by 21,719 (to 1,835,064).

On the "plus" side, the number of reported "specialized ministries" grew dramatically, and total contributions rose by an estimated $44,316,144 (to $1,399,774,702) compared with 2006, with the total for work at home increasing by nearly $50 million. The average amount given during 2007, per communicant member, is estimated at $762.79 -- an increase of $32.79 from the previous year."

I wonder if by “specialized ministries” LCMS, Inc. means people paid to churches and convince them that they just aren’t giving enough. I wonder if this also means the prayer teams praying for congregations like mine that “the Lord would open their hearts to participating in Ablaze!” during their Sunday worship service.

The email does go on to say that “specialized ministries also included satellite worship sites -- with 122 congregations (39 more than in 2006) reporting that they host 139 such sites -- as well as focused worship opportunities.” Satellite worship sites can mean meeting in movie theaters and like places with a video feed to the host congregation.

The Death Of Captain America And The Church Growth Movement

Comic book aficionados like myself were horrified to turn on the TV last week and find out that Marvel Comics killed Captain America in issue 25 of the current self-titled comic in a story entitled “Death of the Dream.” The Captain America character was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby way back in 1941. Over the years, over 210 million Captain America comic books have been sold. Read more about Captain America here.

After a miniseries entitled Civil War, a sniper gunned down Steve Rogers exiting a courthouse following a cease-fire between the heroes of the Marvel universe who had been battling it out over the last nine months. Why was he gunned down you ask? It was to sell more comic books. That’s right; to sell more Captain America comic books they killed the lead character.

This is definitely not a new idea. DC Comics tried this stunt back in the early nineties when they decided to “kill” Superman. Remember that? And, truth be told, it did indeed sell more comic books. But only short-term readers and speculators bought into this garbage. Most of the true fans saw this for what it was: a gimmick.

DC Comics during the same period broke Batman’s back and replaced him with a brutal mind controlled killer, killed off the Green Arrow, and made Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, a galactic psychopath that ended up killing all of the Green Lantern Corps. Out with the old ways and in with the new. Again, the fans saw this for what it was: a gimmick.

But these particular gimmicks helped cause the near collapse of the entire industry before the decade ended. Speculators (who knew nothing of the mythology of the heroes) were buying special chromium and variant covers just to be in the “in crowd” (and make a buck) and drove the print runs into unmarketable numbers. Fans who had been reading comic books since the forth grade could no longer recognize the heroes they grew up with. By the time the nineties ended, most of the print runs that were jacked up to meet the speculator’s demand were being sold by the pound just like recycled newspapers. And now we see history repeating itself.

So what does Joe Quesada (Editor In Chief) at Marvel Comics say to all of this in regards to characters dying, "Times are different now. There was period in comics where characters would just die and then be resurrected. And the death had very little meaning and the resurrection had very little meaning."

HYPOCRITE! Under Quesada’s watch Colossus of the X-Men, Captain Mar-Vell, and Bucky, all who died noble deaths, have been resurrected. Under Quesada’s watch Thor, Hawkeye, and Foggy Nelson all died only to be quickly brought back to life to sell comic books. For crying out loud, Foggy died less than six months ago and he’s back. Hypocrite!

All this is different than the explosion that seems to engulf a hero on the last page of December’s issue only to be resolved within two pages of the January issue. Characters are being killed with no respect the long standing mythologies that fan boys like me have grown to love. Alienation is one of the quickest ways to kill readership whether the character be a Harry Potter or a Steve Rogers.

But people like Joe Quesada just don’t seem to care about the fans that care about these characters. All that matters to this bunch is the “let’s increase the sales no matter what the long term cost is.” I guess they figure that if they get ‘em buying the book now and we can worry about keeping them later. Maybe the fans that have kept the book going…maybe they’ll come back, maybe not. Instead of writing good stories paired with decent art, these yahoos have switched to slick Madison Avenue marketing mode.

And so it is with the church growth movement disguised as outreach to the “unchurched” and lost. Their cries are the same as Joe Quesada’s; “get ‘em in at any cost” with no respect to what has gone on before.

Those who promote “church” growth at any cost say we need to abandon the historical church liturgies. We are told to get in the younger unchurched crowd we need to come up with newer hipper ways of presenting “our” message. But the truth is that these young people are savvy enough to know a marketing scam because they have been exposed to this their entire lives.

Those who promote “church” growth at any cost say we need newer hipper songs because the old ones just don’t cause us to feel the emotion that we should be feeling. But the old hymns do cause us to experience emotion as we confess in song God’s Word set to music. By singing our confession we join with all saints of all time and place in doctrinal unity. The difference is that we don’t focus inward when we sing our hymnody. And that younger crowd we are trying to attract, well, they’re smart enough to know that if they hear the same thing playing on the secular radio stations, the chances are it doesn’t belong in church.

Those who promote “church” growth at any cost say the confessions are just dusty old documents left over by some Germanic sect who needed them at the time but are now outdated. But it is the confessional types who say in our postmodern anything goes society that the historical symbols are even more important as the Church is under even more vicious attacks disguised as tolerance and ecumenicalism.

I, as do most other confessional Lutherans, have no problem with outreach. But what we do and what we say in church really does matter. Church is God’s word preached purely and the Sacraments administered rightly as Augustana VII clearly states. When we abandon the very means and places where God has told us He is and will be, we have decided to do things our way, apart from God. And when we have done that, we are no better than those slick Madison Avenue marketers that just killed Captain America for three dollars and ninety-nine cents.