Northwoods Seelsorger

Recruiting volunteers remains as one of the predominant ongoing challenges in most churches. Some years back I heard that one trend involved shifting from the traditional elected boards to "task forces." The rationale was that the younger generations showed a greater willingness to volunteer for short-term projects over long-term commitments. This may indeed be the trend of our time. However, is volunteerism in the church overall suffering a decline regardless of its time commitment? As a parish pastor I watch nomination committees and organizational committees for dinners struggle valiantly more and more each year to secure sufficient numbers to fill the election slate and duty roster. We all realize the change in the times from a half century prior, acknowledging that the church was long ago displaced from its central place in many people's daily lives. Myriads of commitments now compete for attention from sports and clubs to other volunteer appointments. Ou...

The ELCA's magazine The Lutheran formally acknowledged the formation of the North America Lutheran Church (NALC) in its most recent October issue. The article announcing it was brief - merely 203 words - and rather dispassionate, given the emotions which initially surrounded the ELCA's action on the legitimacy of active gay clergy. Actually the announcement was somewhat 'after the fact' and anticlimactic anyway, in that the editor spent even more ink talking about it several pages prior in his piece entitled "Just one more Lutheran body." Mr. Lehmann's point was to treat the whole affair rather 'mater of factly' by declaring the new church body as simply another Lutheran denomination, nothing more, nothing less. However, his editorial does not quite rest at that point. Unlike the news piece on page 8, the editorial on page 4 intends to make a point, and that point invokes the ancient Christian indictment of schism. "What we have here ...

On the last day of September I emailed my final paper for this summer's term at Nashotah House . The total number of pages of writing between the two classes came to around 80 pages. 56 of those were finished and then edited by my dear wife in that last week of September. I knew that pursuing this degree would present a needed and welcomed academic challenge, yet the sheer volume of writing still surprised me. Nevertheless, with the one transfer course from Ft. Wayne, and assuming I scored sufficient grades on these two classes, I am now officially half-way through the course work for my STM. The final two papers, by the way, were: "Romans 7: Personal Struggle, Defense of the Law, or Israel's Struggle," which was an exegetical paper for a course on the New Perspective of Paul (where I defended Luther's interpretation of Romans 7 against the New Perspective interpretation), and "Anglican and Lutheran Worship: Contributions, Contrasts, and Comparisons....