Here is my latest attempt to view the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod in the best light possible. It comes from the realm of photography, digital photography to be precise.
Have you noticed how common freaky pictures of celebrities are? They are caught on camera with some of the most ghoulish looks imaginable. Go to Drudgereport.com and see how he habitually captures Hillary Clinton with an unflattering expression. Why is this? Welcome to the digital world where you can move facial expressions by the nanosecond. Betwixt all our serious, dignified expressions, and all our beaming, brimming, and smiling there is a whole photo gallery of puckers, frowns, sneer, leers, and jeers. Just advance a few nanoseconds and there it is.
Maybe that’s what has happened to the LCMS. If you freeze frame her at the 2004 or 2007 convention, you catch her in a moment of time looking unchurchly, unconfessional, perhaps a bit ghoulish. But hey, that’s just a moment in time. That’s a marring of an otherwise faithful profile. The real Missouri Synod definitely rejects serial prayer, Baptist worship, lay ministers, and believes closed Communion is a doctrine.
Divide anyone up in digital time and you will find them looking weird. I’ve had moments in time where you could have found such looks crossing my face too. So that’s the question. Are the 2004 and the 2007 Synodical conventions a caricature of the real LCMS produced by freeze-framing her at a moment in time or are they characteristic of her?
