Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Forum Letter Summary of LCMS 2007 Convention

Rev. Peter Speckhard, who went to Houston as a reporter for the ALPB, has written an interesting summary of the LCMS 2007 Convention.

I didn't see the outcome quite as favorably as he did, but I appreciate some of his basic diagnosis:

On ABLAZE! :
"Yet social issues are perhaps the only area where the LCMS is growing closer to the Roman Catholic Communion. Evangelical Catholics are increasingly outnumbered by the Just Plain Old Evangelicals in the LCMS. The Ablaze! campaign with all its trappings could easily be adapted for use by Baptists, Assemblies of God, and various independent evangelical megachurches, but would stand out like a kazoo in an orchestra pit in an Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or high-church Anglican or Lutheran setting."

Nice analogy.

Also, he observes the "conservative opposition" thinks we have disagreements, while the "moderate majority" doesn't.

I agree with this observation. I therefore wonder: if you think you are agreed, and your wife thinks you disagree, don't you, by definition, have a disagreement?

2 comments:

Rev. Jim Roemke said...

I have just realized there is one thing that I use primarily has a gauge: could a Baptist do this? If the answer is yes, I want NOTHING to do with it. I am strange in American Lutheranism in that I am not a Romophobe, but rather a Baptophobe. I think we need more Baptophobes and less Romophobes.

mlorfeld said...

Pastor Roemke,
I overheard a wise Aussie (let the reader understand) giving a classmate some advice to the affect of, "It is dangerous to define oneself by what one is against." Certainly confession in terms of negativa is appropriate, but by and large, we'll run into a new set of problems if we define ourselves as not-Baptist. Maybe Evangelical, Catholic, Confessional, Scriptural, Orthodox (all in the truest sense of the words) is a better route to go.