Liturgical Observer: Endemic Clerical & Liturgical Problems in the Missouri Synod Rev.Dr. Burnell Eckardt Novemberfest 2022 Seminar at St. John Lutheran Church Mattoon, IL November 13-15, 2022
We need flexiblity as to how to discern leadership. Local congratulations can affirm and bear witness but ultimately one needs to be called. The Apostles left folks in leadership and at some points some were sent by Jeresalem. Blessings to all
The intro to Luther's Catechism says, "As the head of his house shall teach..." Now, respectfully, I doubt you disagree with Luther's intent to equip fathers in their Spiritual leadership in their marriage and family. Correct?
No doubt, but they are not in the office of holy ministry vis. pastors over a congregation. They are fathers, doing their duty to raise children in prayer, teaching, and exemplifying a godly life. This is the doctrine of vocation, not office of holy ministry. Separate issue.
❤❤The polity of congressional liberty is an issue. The top shoud appoint. But more importantly I believers in there churches should at times be home grown appointed by leadership..
@@scarbo2229 it was bizarre, as if god hasn't explained all this stuff in depth in his latest best selling novel "the bible, talking animals everyday" funny how god has made a total ballsup of everything eh.
When the Roman Church ordered its bishops in the German Territorial Lutheran Churches not to ordain Evangelical priests then there were still priests in these territories that could come together and select one of their own to be consecrated as a bishop. There is ancient precedent for this emergency practice for the Church in Alexandria and even the Roman Church considered this action a valid consecration.
The Missouri Synod would be better served with an Episcopal polity only because the pastor/priest also needs protection from the members of the congregation that would prevent him from doing his job or unjustly deprive him of a living if a majority dislike his preaching or for administrating church discipline.
You are absolutely right. LCMS must have the episcopacy in the Apostolic Succession, three fold ministry, and paying the pastors' salary not by the congregation but by the diocese. I have been so frustrated by the lack of these so I left LCMS, and I joined the Anglican Church in North America. Now my frustration is gone with this. I feel sad for the confessional Lutherans who are struggling.
When Lutherans' doctrine maintain the pastor is the shepherd of the parish and represents Jesus and the mention of "church discipline" is included, please know that you have a severe problem in this regard. Besides the fact that Lutherans and Christian seekers alike are running from the old, Germanic orthodoxy in record numbers, Jesus' ministry was NOT that of being Judge, jury and/or executioner. His was a ministry of the pure Gospel of God's mercy and love shown to mankind with the clear warning that God would indeed judge AND sentence those found not in the faith and then only at the appropriate time. Pastors pretending to be of the law and the courts and the jailhouses destroy their own ministries and thus despise the Holy Spirit's working in the hearts and minds of sinners somehow deemed worse than the sinners not under church discipline are. The church and the pastor are to preach, teach, administer the sacraments (you know: 'the precious means of grace') and like a physician refusing to treat a patient because his/her sin may have caused the illness, that pastor, synod and denomination has crossed the proverbial "bridge too far". God is judging the LCMS for its ancient Germanic style of command and control ugly religious practices and sans a complete repentance and reversal of such vicious doctrine, the synod will continue to decay into nothingness. There are many pastors of the Christian faith who feel no calling, orders or need to be a judge of other people's lives, and in particular, to ascribe sentences of punishment for not being a good enough German Lutheran Christian, the so-called "orthodox confessional" Lutheran. Unlike the Dark Ages of the past, we are a literate laity and are well educated in Biblical truths and applications and thus no such practice is either wanted nor needed. I continue to pray that pastors and synodical leaders find their ways back to the path Jesus taught and lived and like He did for the woman at the well in John chapter four, simply ministers to her and does not preclude her from coming to him as so many now do in the LCMS. Denying any professing Christian, particularly of the LCMS, access to Christ's holy Body and Blood for ANY reason other than outwardly stated unbelief is heresy. And more and more of us have figured that out and are voting with our memberships. Wake up or become a neo-Mennonite clan living on the outskirts of Christianity and without any real world witness. God forbid! And stop celebrating Luther's Reformation and begin to please begin your own re-formation into a Gospel-based, loving, merciful and graceful church body for if you do not, the world will continue to leave you in the proverbial dust heaps of religious history. Your choice. We will be watching.
Agreed. In college the LCMS church called a pastor from the ELCE, and he moved his whole family from Europe. They didn't like his teaching/discipline, so they chased him off. He went to another congregation in the States, and then back to England. It was sad. His preaching and discipline was good. I guess it was too close for comfort for the church council.
To be honest, this kind of stuff sours me on Lutheranism when I see conference after conference and public infighting while the mission field of evangelicalism is neglected. Lutheranism has SO much to offer wandering sheep, yet where is the effort to practice hospitality and bring the Word and Sacrament to them? Instead, the clerical class seems to be more of interested in building their presence on social media than in saving lost souls. I find this kind of speechifying frustrating.
In the early and orthodox churchs, the Bishop were elected and entronized by the people. No the priests. Today, only in Malta they keep tha tradition. You can a Lot of Saints tradition were the people pressured monks to seat in throne in the cathedral
In his preface to the Small Catechism, Luther wrote: "The preacher should take the utmost care to avoid changes or variations in the text and wording of theTen Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the sacraments, etc. On the contrary, he should adopt one form, adhere to it, and use it repeatedly year after year. Young and inexperienced people must be instructed on the basis of a uniform, fixed text and form. They are easily confused if a teacher employs one form now and another form- perhaps with the intention of making improvements- later on. In this way, all the time and labor will be lost. In the modern church, Luther's wise advice here as been ignored, rejected, or is simply unknown. Instead, the LCMS has had many changes to liturgy, the wording of hymns, the Catechism, and, most seriously of all, the Bible itself. The LCMS has gone from the King James Bible to the Revised Standard Version to the Revised Revised Standard Version, to the New International Version, to the English Standard Version to the revised English Standard Version. Rather that giving the message that the Bible is timeless (it is supposed to be regarded as sacred), the Bible has been reduced to an ongoing research project by scholars hired by the publishing houses of various corporations. In 1965, With the decision to adopt a new ecumenical hymnal to replace the 1941 hymnal, the LCMS partnered with some of the more radical liberal elements in Lutheranism (the LCA and the increasingly liberal ALC) to help produce what eventually became the Lutheran Book of Worship, which was then rejected by many LCMS congregations, who then adopted the very similar (with some of the same gender-neutral language changes) Lutheran Worship. Other congregations rejected both and retain to this day the 1941 hymnal. Thus to this day the LCMS has no agreed upon hymnal, and some congregations probably do not even sing hymns anymore. Once upon a time a Lutheran theologian, Kurt Marquart, suggested that liturgical worship in the LCMS should be as moving and as beautiful as such worship is in the Orthodox Church. Aleksandr Solzhenitzen once wrote that the words and music of Orthodox worship was so beautiful that no amount of intellectual and atheistic argumentation and propaganda from the Soviet regime was ever able to overcome it. Marquart argued that Lutheran music and liturgy should be just as beautiful. I wonder if Marquart's advice was ever acted on, or whether the LCMS has liturgy and music much like that of the ELCA and other liberal mainline denominations, with gender-neutral language, modernistic rather dissonant music, and so on...
I am from the Missouri synod and we always read the Holy Gospel and have Bible study for Holy Gospel you are wrong. or you went on a day that maybe they were preaching an Old Testament reading! We preach the entire Holy Bible, not just the Holy Gospel. Also we do not consider ourselves Priesthood, but Disciples of Christ and followers. Sorry that you do not want to follow or call yourself a Disciple of Christ. Then who do you follow?
Also, he rejects voting. but he read elect in Paul's writings. We are not at all like the Baptist and I find that offensive. Our Pastor's go through years of seminary training. Some go on missions. We pick married to one wife and children if God grants them that beautiful gift. Them they go to be an Assistant Pastor and then after they get an approved sermon by the President make their first sermon. Then if they get positive results. They will deliver every other Sunday until a call comes to another congregation who has a retiring, or needs a second Pastor for more than one service because one is getting old etc. That is a Divine call. He usually gets a choice between 2 places and then they hear his sermons and see his seminary or missionary service and elect him as their minister. It's not a bad thing. They go through a lot to get there. Questions, knowing the Holy Bible. Psychology classes, more classes. Know the Catechism. Know if it's a mission church that needs to be built or an established one.. on and on. He need to do Bible classes and Confirmation classes and so much more. he is paid hardly beans to eat and you are criticizing a simple election.
Jackass, I love my Pastors. They are like a Father figure and we are so much closer to the Restored Catholic Church then Baptists. I cannot stand the Calvin and the Baptist way at all. So stop making me cringe every time you refer us to Baptists, you can go to hell literally. You are so wrong in so many things it makes me want to cry. I am a very religious woman. I have studied religions my entire life, more than any person I know. i adore Theology when it's true and gets me to study a new religion, that I had never heard of. I have driven my parents crazy buying books in the religion section since I was 7 years old and reading and studying. I never found a religion I loved more or trusted more than the Lutheran Missouri-Synod. I grew up in Salt Lake City in the land of the Mormons and when Mormon Missionaries came around at the age of 7 I told one I read it and found it a great piece of war and science fiction that I have to study more of. They quizzed me and I said oh you mean Nephi 1:12, told you I read it. Now let me tell you a little about Jesus.. One was a recent convert and he was having doubts and if a 7 year old could know better he might go home. I told him I would pray for him. I always listened to them but only if they agreed to listen to me about Jesus afterwards. i then married a Muslim man and now I have studied the Koran and I have a Divine calling of my own . So shut up about Divine callings they are beautiful. They are so wonderful, when you get a new minister because my old one got a stroke and he needed speech therapy to speak again. I dated his son once. I loved him too. His son wasn't ready to leave hearth and home and I was ready to be a mother. He married later in his life. I loved all my ministers and their wives and their children were well brought up. The children married and brought their children to the Lord. What is so wrong with a friendly happy minister. I would hate to have you as a minister.
Also, I feel so sorry for Rev. Dr. Burnell Eckardt. He says he only tastes bread in the Holy Communion. When I take the Holy Communion it is so beautiful, . It is transposed no longer bread I taste and no longer a fine or regular Concord wine, but Jesus's body and blood and the body makes me go to the time of Jesus and I feel I am with Him, and I am a part of Him and my sins are upon Him and then I take the wine it is the blood from being strapped and flogged, pierced and hung on a cross with nails for my sins. the wine is his blood shed for me. It is no longer wine. I love being part of the Missouri Synod. I am cleansed and the Pastor announces By the power of God. your sins are Forgiven you! I am once again with a clean slate! You who have only had bread is not remembering or forgiven.
This guy seems to be saying the LCMS claims direct descendants of the Apostles. You know..LCMS is the true line that goes through Rome. Better go get your rosary lol.
Woke much? "The basic embryonic plan of mammals is inherently feminine" That, along with 1.2 billion years of Binary, Sexual, Natural Selection... must be perplexing for the caste of Jesuit little "men" perched atop what's left of their 6000 year old young earfer theocratic shrubbery. #MakeTeachingBiologyGreatAgain
doen't god make all this stuff clear, i mean he wrote a book didn't he, i'm told it's VERY clear on ALL matters? is that a lie? surely god doesn't talk nonsense?
Intellectuality and biblical indoctrination is a sign of a non-Jesus Church! When you need to carry a scripture with you and do nothing but quote from scriptures, you are not thinking on your own, but intellectualizing the "simple message of Jesus which is all about love and acceptance!" Jesus was all about people - reaching out to sinners and saints. He did not carry an Old Testament around with him and preach from the scriptures! Jesus was all about the individual. Jesus loved even Judas who would betray Him! To eliminate women pastors and to besmirch gay people is not where the Church of Jesus should be! To bury oneself in the scriptures is to miss what Jesus saw: the son or daughter of God who needed acceptance, not preaching!
@@mpkropf5062 Young people refuse to enter the door of a church once they move out of the family nest! Fear is what makes you feel important enough to say that women pastors are somehow unbiblical. But you need to know that young people are not fearful. You can't scare them into a pew!!!! They think logically unlike their parents and people like you! I really don't think Jesus followed the Old Testament!
@@leoinsf The reason young people leave is because they never experienced Jesus! Jesus definitely stands for Gods Word! Anyone who goes against it is really not born from above as Jesus taught. The devil is working hard in churches especially the denominations ( not conservatives) but the worldly churches who are falling away and using all kinds of excuses to justify themselves just like they do about divorce and remarriage yet Jesus made it very clear it’s adultery but they don’t like what He said so they keep looking for excuses. But one day Judgement is coming for all! You are not thinking logically if you go against scripture!!
