The Nihil Rule

The Trouble with Seminary Accreditation (youtube.com) Pastor Smyth provides an overview of accreditation through ATS, the Association of Theological Schools, which accredits most seminaries in the United States, including the WELS' Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary .  Why accreditation? It is required to receive government funding, state aid, federal student loans. It is also required if you wish to transfer credits between institutions, or if you would like your M.Div graduates to be able to go on to receive post-graduate degrees like a Ph.D. If you visit the  About ATS  page, you will discover that diversity is their #1 core value (not the Bible, theology or even Christianity!) A perusal of their  Standards of Accreditation  include the following "1.5 The school acts with integrity by valuing, defining, and demonstrating diversity within the context of its mission, history, constituency, and theological commitments . The school has a publicly available stance on ...

  Rev. Karl Hess - @theamericanmartyr "The American Interim is only a little different. Its unwritten stipulations require subservience on the part of the Lutheran Church (and any church that wants to adhere to the Scripture as the Word of God) to the ceremonies and doctrines of the American state religion until such time as the Church is swallowed up by apostasy and its children have all been converted. Until that time, the Lutheran Church is allowed to preach whatever doctrine it sees fit within the increasingly narrow confines of its churches, but publicly it is required to be neutered and signal its submission to the tenets of American civic religion. Even within the churches, both theologians and sitters in pews are likely to ostracize or condemn any vocal dissent from Americanism." Read the whole thing.  

(A continued discussion on the WELS Statistical Report ) What wasn't shown directly in Hein's report is the precipitous dropoff from 2010 to 2019 - a 30% decline in children over ten years. Then we see in a single year from 2019 to 2020 a decline of 37% with no signs of recovery as of 2023. Since a child spends nine months in the womb gestating it's difficult to assign that drop in fertility to COVID, which was not in full swing until March. The trailing indicator of COVID influence on births would be November 2020. It seems like we have a pretty severe problem on our hands. So, what should we do? Might I suggest the following three things  1. We need to repent of not talking about birth control. We need to repent of throwing our children to the wolves in the name of The Great Commission by sending our youth to public schools , denying the importance of a Lutheran education - one of the WELS' great heritages! However even if all those WELS kids stayed in WELS schools,...

"You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the Lord’s table and of the table of demons." - 1 Cor 10:21 Pilgrim Lutheran Church & School  is a WELS church in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin which would be wise to heed the words of St. Paul: you can't commune with demons in the gym every Thursday and then drink the Lords' Cup on the first and third Sundays of the month... 

  Much like our Lutheran grade schools , our ECM's are overrun with heterodox, heathen and demon-worshippers, outnumbering our children three to one. Recall from that discussion: there were five different reasons for inviting the heathen and heterodox, and four of them revolved around money. The fifth was evangelism. As it turns out while our ECM's might have a higher per-student return on adult confirmation than our grade schools, it accounts for less than ten percent of adult conversions. The futility of ECM's as a mission strategy is borne out in Plot KK: When the distribution is so skewed that 5% of your ECM's account for nearly 50% of your conversion output, this would seem to indicate that the ECM conversions are not due to strategy but are due to a different environmental factor, and that the placement of the ECM was coincidental. Perhaps studying the environment they operate in would be worthwhile to expose a common thread. As I explained in an article relating ...

Berthold von Schenk “We have preached a Cross without a dare, a Cross without a sacrifice, an empty Cross, for it is the least disturbing. And what happened because of this sickly sentimental verbiage which has gone under the name of Lenten preaching? This is what has happened: to satisfy the masses, to satisfy those whose highest expression of Christian service is to run a card party, we have lost men and women who were groping for faith. Something more has happened. We have lost our young men and our young women, because we have taken the dare out of religion, the romance, the adventure, the attack, the sacrifice. We have taken the one thing which makes for Christian manhood: Sacrifice and struggle, and have substituted rites and popular preaching which, at best, can satisfy only the typical church worker of middle age. Our young people will not have that kind of religion at any price, because they know it is not true. It is less than life, for life is intense, thrilling, challenging...

Continuing our examination of the WELS 2023 statistical report, Rev. Jon Hein enumerates four categories of students using secular categories.  I have kindly fixed his list and placed them into Biblical categories of heathen, heterodox and demon-worshippers. It's not very winsome, but it is biblical... So why do we admit heterodox, heathen and demon-worshippers? ...it's all about the Bemjamins, what?... WELS enrollments continue to decline, and as of 2023 we have more heterodox, heathen and demon-worshippers in our WELS schools than we have WELS/ELS students. 2023 was a tipping point: WELS/ELS students are now a minority at their own educational institutions.  Hein pays brief lip-service to the Wauwatosa theologians in a footnote "Prof. John Schaller, in a paper titled The Need of Christian Education by Means of Parochial Schools, shared his belief that Lutheran parochial schools were simply a tool to aid parents in discipling their children. “We are at once confronted b...

[  Leaders' Guide  |  Video 1  |  Video 2  |  Video 3  |  Video 4  |  Video 5  ] for the love of God, make it stop! Seriously, you guys, I thought I was done with this thing. But apparently feedback has made its way to synod because there is now revised verbiage on the landing page and an edited leader's guide. In addition, there is a brief summary of the COP statement on sexuality.  The videos are unedited as of this writing; so, any massaging of the landing page and leaders' guide is just to try and assuage the reader. The substance of this Bible study has not changed . Every criticism levied at the five videos remains in play. Revised Landing Page Let's take a closer look at the five "Approach" bullets. An Honest Conversation is a glimpse into a conversation that is not happening, but should be happening with our youth. It’s not meant to be the final word, nor the only word, but to prompt further dialogue on this matter...

    [ Leaders' Guide | Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 | Video 4 | Video 5 ] We complete the series with Video Five , which kicks off with a discussion on choosing "choosing a lifestyle over Jesus... because they felt like they had to choose." Yes, if you want to live a lifestyle that is condemned by the Bible then yes, you have to choose. Am I going to deny myself and reject a LGBTQ+ lifestyle, or am I going to deny my Savior? This is a 1 Corinthians 10 thing - you can't commune with the Lord and with demons, you have to choose. Now certainly (as I've reiterated several times) one can struggle with an LGBTQ+ desire, but in struggling with that desire you are denying yourself and following Christ.  There is a common thread about singleness laced throughout the video. First, we have the same young lady quoted above reminding us that "relationships aren't a thing in heaven" so apparently, they shouldn't be a big deal here on earth - except, of co...