LCMS Youth Gathering Praise Music Now Comes with a Theological Disclaimer, by Pr. Rossow

We thank a BJS reader for alerting us to this troubling development. Here is a disclaimer on the bottom of the website promoting the bands that will be playing at this summer’s LCMS national youth gathering:

Performers are contracted for a specific Gathering task or presentation at the direction of Gathering planners.  Information on a performer’s Web site may not represent the position of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in its entirety.  The YMO does not necessarily suggest endorsement of the entire editorial or theological opinion of the performer or organization.

 

Here is a close-up of the bottom of the website as it exists today. We have saved a PDF copy of the page as it exists today.

Bands page of National Youth Gathering Disclaimer
Bands page of National Youth Gathering Disclaimer

 

This development does not surprise us. It follows the trajectory that President Kieschnick has set for the LCMS – change with the times because this is no longer your grandfather’s church.

Here are some Scriptures that we wish the YMO and President Kieschnick, who by policy is to be the supreme supervisor of the synod, would consider before inviting heterodox praise and rock bands to minister to our youth:

Galatians 1:6  I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7  not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9  As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Romans 16:17  I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. 18  For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites,  and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive.

Jude 3  Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Matthew 10:34  “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36  And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.

Click here for  a link to a sermon by C. F. W. Walther, one of  the grandfathers of the church,  on preserving the pure Gospel.

President Kieschnick is already according to the LCMS  Handbook the chief supervisor of doctrine of synod in the church and these things are happening. We do not like the prospect of him also becoming the temporal supervisor of the ministries of the synod as would happen if Blue Ribbon proposal #18 passes. Again, we call on the members of synod churches and the delegates to the convention to wake up and restore Biblical purity to our denomination.

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