Master of Divinity trained pastors are going to become as rare as hen’s teeth. With upwards of 9 ‘alternate’ and much easier, quicker, and funner ways to ordination, the educated way is going to go by the wayside. So how do you find them? Moreover, even some of the MDiv educated are wonky if not woke.
In the 90s, right when we (really my wife) was beginning homeschooling, the books What Your 1st Grader Needs to Know came out. It wasn’t till 2007 and the TV game show “Are you Smarter Than a 5th Grader aired that my approach – or maybe the approach – to these books was debunked. If you watched the show, I’m quite sure you discovered two things. There were many things a 5th grader knew that you didn’t, and many of those things were arcane not in the sense ‘secret’ but only known by few and needed to be known by even fewer.
So, I don’t what to reduce what every confessional Lutheran pastor should know to what this arcanist could put forth. I, therefore, suggest Professor Kurt Marquart’s 1994 Essay: “Church Growth” As Mission Paradigm – A Lutheran Assessment. It can be found in The Luther Academy’s 2001 publication Church and Ministry Today – Three Confessional Lutheran Essays. I have the original 1994 essay published by Our Savior Lutheran, Houston.
You could also get Klemet Preus’ 2004 The Fire and the Staff for a more in-depth treatment of what every 21st century confessional Luthera pastor should know. But it’s all in the shorter Marquart monograph. He defends liturgical worship over against entertainment, and as always he gets to the assumptions behind it. He pillories Church Growth as the Foolish Women who is tempting Christianity to fornication and exposes some districts of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod for their adulteries with her. This is why it pains me to point this out.
The rock-ribbed Confessional Lutheran, Professor Marquart, who bore the scars for many a battle for the truth led the way to confessional Lutheran Pastors embracing women voting in church polity. He led the way to the current generation of pastors belief that as long as it takes place before the Invocation or after the Benedictions a woman can do anything a man can, no harm no foul.
He did this in his 1990 book The Church. We read on page 207: “In the temporal sphere, given democratic arrangements, to vote is to take part in and to exercise the awesome powers of Rom. 13:1ff. Voting is an act of supreme sovereignty, which can, within constitutionally specified limits, enforce the majority will with the ultimate sanctions of the death penalty and war. Voting can mean nothing like this is the church at all (Mt. 20:24-28)” (Emphasis mine).
Years later in “Church Growth” As Mission Paradigm he argues in defense of traditional worship over against Evangelical. “Kneeing and folding hands, therefore, are appropriate to the sobriety of the church’s worship, while the more involuntary, instinctual foot-tapping and hand-clapping, typical of atavistic nature-cults, fit the emotionalism of anti-sacramental sects. It is useless to object that clapping is, after all, ‘scriptural,’ since Ps. 47:1 says: ‘O clap your hands, all ye people.’ This biblicism forgets that we have no ‘feel’ for the ancient Hebrew sacral culture. Clapping today does not convey, as in the Palms, that ‘the Lord most high is terrible’ (v. 2). On the contrary, in our culture such behavior evokes the folksy self-indulgence of a karaoke singalong, and of a sectarianism which apes such popular pastimes” (104-5, emphasis mine).
You can’t argue both ways. Either the church can rise above, beyond, or divinize a “usus loquendi” current in culture or it can’t. In defense of Professor Marquart, and all LCMS leaders of the latter half of the 20th century, they were not prepared for the blitzkrieg feminism launched in the 60s in politics, education, work, and home, much the same way my generation was not at all prepared for the speed that homosexuality went to gay, to LGBTQ, to transgender.
You can still use Marquart’s works for evaluating confessional Lutheran pastors. Dr. Robert Preus said in 1979 that in dealing with the liberal Lutheran pastors who walked out of the LCMS in 1974 but wished to colloquize back into the LCMS, he would use the Book of Concord, Tappert edition that he had rebound in blue rather than in the as published red. He would read from it and ask the colloquizing pastor if he agreed with the statement or not. You can do the same with these books using a brown paper bag book cover. Actually, you could use these works uncovered, and if the interviewed pastor asks, “What’s that?” you have your answer.
