St. Antony’s Cave

This post takes its title from the 1980s’ U.S. Department of Transportation ad campaign to get people to wear seatbelts.  They showed you a crash using test dummies and then this tag line.  In the 1990s Big Brother gave up making nice and revealed the iron fist behind the velvet glove.  “Click it or ticket.” Put it on or pay up.  It’s ironic, perhaps moronic, that I sitting in a 4,000 pound automobile surrounded by metal and air bags must wear a seatbelt but the guy on the less than 1,000 pound motorcycle surrounded only by air doesn’t have to wear a helmet. You think I’ve digressed, but it’s not nearly as far as you think. This post is about learning from dummies.

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I was sent the following by a brother pastor. It was used at the Call service at St. Louis. He thinks it was driven by the candidates not the faculty. If so they’re probably not ready for their first Calls. Continue reading →

I referenced in an earlier blog post Dr. Dale Meyer’s article “Pedagogy for a Politicized Church” in the Winter 2014 Concordia Journal, pp. 6-13.  He references there a report to the 2010 convention that said the task force involved repeatedly “heard that the problem of disharmony is the LCMS is primarily a clergy problem” (6), and I believe it. Continue reading →

We tried “everyone a minister” then it was “everyone an evangelist” now it’s “everyone a missionary.”  Sheesh, soon they’ll be no one in the pews to receive the gifts. Soon there’ll be no mothers and fathers raising kids.  Soon will have a synod filled with Salvation Mays. That was the nickname given to the mother of baseball great Ted. She was said to be so dedicated to saving souls in the Salvation Army that she neglected her vocation of mother to the extreme (The Kid, 31ff). Continue reading →