(Toby is a regular contributor. He represents the Lutheran Mission Alliance (LMA) which works to plant new confessional churches. They are one of the many confessional groups that post regularly here on the BJS site. You can see all their posts by clicking on the Regular Columns button. The sermon was delivered at Toby’s “winkel” meeting in February. Winkel is a German word for group and is often used to refer to monthly pastoral circuit meetings.)   Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ and may our Lord and Savior sanctify you in   More…

The pretense is over, the jig is up, and the powers to be within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod have played their hand and have shown us their hole cards. As we suspected, it is now becoming questionable to speak of the The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod as the church founded by C.F.W. Walther. On September 23-24 of this year, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, will convene a Theological Symposium entitled “Lutheran Ecclesiology for the Third Millennium: Beyond Walther.”   For some this may sound like the study of church architecture or chancel paraments used for worship. However, Lutheran Ecclesiology in this context   More…

When I was a young man, I served in the U.S. Navy. During my service, I made three tours to Vietnam. On one of those tours, I served in the air wing of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Bennington. She was an older carrier, commissioned at the end of WWII and therefore not as sophisticated as the newer, more modern carriers. Often time’s things didn’t work as well as they should but this never affected her service performance or the ability to meet her mission. I can remember once when we were embroiled in the angry throes of a very strong   More…