LCMS considers fellowship with enthusiasts
Uh-oh!
April 11, 2005 ................... LCMSNews -- No. 25
AALC, LCMS plan talks to explore fellowship
Following a March 22 meeting in St. Louis, representatives of the American
Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC) and The Lutheran Church--Missouri
Synod have set dates for official theological discussions that could lead to
the establishment of altar and pulpit fellowship.
The meeting was the latest between the two church bodies since the formation
of the AALC. The AALC is made up primarily of congregations that chose not
to become members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when it was
established in 1987. The AALC has 83 congregations and a baptized membership
of 11,732. Its headquarters are in Minneapolis.
In 1989, an agreement with the LCMS allowed AALC students to study for the
pastoral ministry at LCMS seminaries. The AALC established its own seminary
in 1991 and has talked with officials at Concordia Theological Seminary,
Fort Wayne, about relocating its seminary to that campus.
"We had a very positive meeting with the AALC representation," said LCMS
President Gerald B. Kieschnick. "Each of our church bodies accepts the Holy
Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and both accept the
Lutheran Confessions without qualification as the correct exposition of the
Scriptures."
The AALC Presiding Pastor, Rev. Thomas Aadland, agreed, adding, "The basis
clearly exists for discussing our respective positions on a number of
specific issues such as church and ministry, communion practices and
charismatic issues."
The next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 6 at an AALC congregation in
Albuquerque, N.M.
In addition to Kieschnick, LCMS representatives included Rev. William
Diekelman, first vice president; Dr. Raymond Hartwig, secretary; Dr. Charles
Arand, chairman of the systematics department at Concordia Seminary, St.
Louis; and Dr. Samuel Nafzger, CTCR executive director.
AALC representatives included Aadland, Rev. Darell Deuel, chairman of the
Commission on Doctrine and Church Relations; Rev. Frank Hays, interim
seminary president; and Rev. Harold Johnson, secretary.
The AALC, for the uninitiated, is a nominally-Lutheran Neo-Pentecostal group. For the Missouri Synod to declare fellowship with them would be the final nail in the coffin of the myth that the Missouri Synod is in any sense an orthodox Lutheran church body any more.
The Lutheran Ministerium and Synod-USA (LMS-USA)- the church body on whose clergy roster I presently am- consist of people who left the AALC because they wanted to be Lutherans rather than Schwaermer.
Personally, if they do this, it will be the last straw for me. I will go ELS, whether I have any possibility of entering its ministerium or not.
April 11, 2005 ................... LCMSNews -- No. 25
AALC, LCMS plan talks to explore fellowship
Following a March 22 meeting in St. Louis, representatives of the American
Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC) and The Lutheran Church--Missouri
Synod have set dates for official theological discussions that could lead to
the establishment of altar and pulpit fellowship.
The meeting was the latest between the two church bodies since the formation
of the AALC. The AALC is made up primarily of congregations that chose not
to become members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when it was
established in 1987. The AALC has 83 congregations and a baptized membership
of 11,732. Its headquarters are in Minneapolis.
In 1989, an agreement with the LCMS allowed AALC students to study for the
pastoral ministry at LCMS seminaries. The AALC established its own seminary
in 1991 and has talked with officials at Concordia Theological Seminary,
Fort Wayne, about relocating its seminary to that campus.
"We had a very positive meeting with the AALC representation," said LCMS
President Gerald B. Kieschnick. "Each of our church bodies accepts the Holy
Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and both accept the
Lutheran Confessions without qualification as the correct exposition of the
Scriptures."
The AALC Presiding Pastor, Rev. Thomas Aadland, agreed, adding, "The basis
clearly exists for discussing our respective positions on a number of
specific issues such as church and ministry, communion practices and
charismatic issues."
The next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 6 at an AALC congregation in
Albuquerque, N.M.
In addition to Kieschnick, LCMS representatives included Rev. William
Diekelman, first vice president; Dr. Raymond Hartwig, secretary; Dr. Charles
Arand, chairman of the systematics department at Concordia Seminary, St.
Louis; and Dr. Samuel Nafzger, CTCR executive director.
AALC representatives included Aadland, Rev. Darell Deuel, chairman of the
Commission on Doctrine and Church Relations; Rev. Frank Hays, interim
seminary president; and Rev. Harold Johnson, secretary.
The AALC, for the uninitiated, is a nominally-Lutheran Neo-Pentecostal group. For the Missouri Synod to declare fellowship with them would be the final nail in the coffin of the myth that the Missouri Synod is in any sense an orthodox Lutheran church body any more.
The Lutheran Ministerium and Synod-USA (LMS-USA)- the church body on whose clergy roster I presently am- consist of people who left the AALC because they wanted to be Lutherans rather than Schwaermer.
Personally, if they do this, it will be the last straw for me. I will go ELS, whether I have any possibility of entering its ministerium or not.
Comments
I based my decision- and my opinion- on the AALC's public doctrine, to a much greater degree than on my later conversations with Rev. Spears and the others driven out of that body by its heterodoxy. It characterized itself, among other adjectives, as "charismatic" from the beginning. It tolerated- and unless I'm mistaken, still tolerates- that denial of the sola Scriptura as a cardinal point of its founding doctrine, permitting the teaching that God can be expected to speak to us apart from the external Word.
Rather than calling people uncharitable or accusing them of violating the Eighth Commandment, Kristofer, why not show how they are wrong? How about it? Has it expelled the charismatics, Kristofer? Has it stopped practicing open communion with those who deny the Real Presence and other clear teachings of Scripture and the Confessions, or permitting its congregations to do so? Has it stopped openly characterizing itself as "charismatic?" Believe me, if all these things are true, and the AALC has become the paragon of orthodoxy you suggest, not only I but a great many others in the Missouri Synod might be interested in joining it.
How about it? Has it done these things? Please enlighten me!
The public position of your church body has been a matter of public record. If it has changed, please direct me to the documents in which these changes are officially and publically enumerated. Otherwise, I think you are the one who stands convicted of violating the Eighth Commandment. And from your use of the term, I have my doubts about your understanding of the term "Pietistic." Neither does the silly (if all too familiar, precisely from the Pietists!) suggestion that those of us who stand for the doctrinal content of the Confessions are purely negative in our theology, and "don't stand for anything," do much for the credibility of your case.
Further, your comment about those of us who might consider leaving the LCMS does not do credit to your thoughfulness. You seem to be unaware of the doctrinal crisis currently taking place in the LCMS, and the context of the remark to which you object. To declare fellowship with a church body whose public position is that with which it has founded (and in
important respects seems not to have moved) would constitute a step further step away from the Confessions than we have already gone in the past few years.
Please, Kristofer. If I have misrepresented the position of the AALC, correct me and document the change- or admit that your objection is without merit.
Frankly, I'd rather be shown that I am wrong.
So I've emailed my questions to The AALC instead. Be assured that if I am informed that the public doctrine of your body has changed, I will withdraw
any statement which proves to be inaccurate.
by Pastor Mark Dankof for Christian News
The July 31st Christian News reports on page 14 that "Reps at AALC-LCMS talks recommend altar, pulpit fellowship." The text of the article indicates that the proposed arrangement has received the preliminary imprimatur of the significant intelligensia of the Missouri Synod, including President Gerald B. Kieschnick; First Vice President Rev. William Diekelman; Secretary Rev. Raymond Hartwig; Dr. Samuel Nafzger, the executive director of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR); and Dr. Charles Arand, professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
Make no mistake about it. If this altar-pulpit arrangement receives the formal approval of the national convention of the Missouri Synod in 2007, it will mark the official end of any credible commitment in the era of the Kieschnick Administration to the brand of confessional Lutheranism known in the Missouri Synod since its inception. The vanguard dedication of the American Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC) to the charismatic renewal movement and the Fuller Seminary Church Growth Movement (CGM) is a matter of public record. Notably, the subsequent departure of many traditional Lutheran pastors from the AALC in the very early 1990s was directly linked to this reality---and will prove to be a historical precursor to the departure of orthodox, evangelical pastors from the Missouri Synod after 2007, if the LCMS--AALC arrangement reported on July 31 becomes official next year.
Orthodox Lutherans in the Missouri Synod unaware of the history of the American Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC) will want to read my letter to the Metro Lutheran of the Twin Cities on the subject, which appeared in the latter publication in the summer of 2005, after the AALC closed its fledgling seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. The text is as follows:
Letter to the Editor
Metro Lutheran
122 West Franklin Avenue
Suite 214
Minneapolis, MN 55404-2451
FAX (612) 872-1724
http://www.metrolutheran.org
Dear Sir:
It is with great interest that I read your article on page 5 of the June 2005 Metro Lutheran entitled, "Fate of AALC Seminary Up In The Air." Your article notes that the AALC [American Association of Lutheran Churches] has 15,000 members nationwide, 70 congregations, and has maintained its own theological seminary from January 1993 to January 2005. In this last regard, you duly note that the AALC spent $2.5 million dollars on its seminary for 14 graduates in this endeavor--only 5 of which continue to serve AALC congregations.
I was on the original Board of Higher Education of the AALC in the 1987-89 time frame. At that time, I advised the leaders of the Board that the AALC could not possibly sustain its own theological seminary for the foreseeable future, and should utilize its available monies for the development of mission congregations. That advice was systematically ignored, with the sad result that your publication now reports 18 years later.
Even more significantly, the AALC ignored legitimate proposals at the time to develop a formal relationship with either Concordia Fort Wayne Seminary (LCMS) or a Lutheran House of Study in conjunction with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. In the short term, these viable proposals were jettisoned in favor of an ill-fated attempt at the development of a program of theological education in conjunction with Fuller Theological Seminary in California--(an institution which repudiates the very position on Scriptural authority which allegedly led to the formation of the AALC in the first place). This was then followed by the tragedy of beginning a school that the Association never had the constituency to maintain financially.
What was really behind all of this in the late 1980s, and behind the current remarks of founding AALC Presiding Pastor Duane Lindberg of Waterloo, Iowa, that the Association should now reject the current recommendation of its Secretary, Pastor Harold Johnson, to choose a program of formal affiliation with Concordia Fort Wayne Seminary? Metro Lutheran quotes Dr. Lindberg as saying that the Fort Wayne seminary is "inbued with an extreme 'authoritarian' view of the pastoral office" and that the kind of "pietism" fostered at Fort Wayne leads to an "unhealthy legalism."
The answer is clear to anyone familiar with the history of the AALC. The decision to reject the Fort Wayne school years ago, and the development of a Lutheran House of Study in conjunction with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, was rooted in the affinity of Duane Lindberg and other top AALC leaders at the time for C. Peter Wegner's Church Growth Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary. This affinity, even more significantly, was linked to the enthusiasm of Lindberg and other key figures in the AALC for the influence of neo-Pentecostalism and the charismatic renewal movement within the auspices of this church body--begun allegedly to continue the theology and practice of the old American Lutheran Church (ALC). The adoption by the AALC in 1990 of its so-called "Statement on the Holy Spirit" reveals this to be provably true. The formal adoption of that theological statement 15 years ago subsequently resulted in the departure of a plethora of traditional evangelical Lutheran pastors from the AALC for bona fide orthodox Lutheran synods, including the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS), the Association of Free Lutheran Churches (AFLC), and the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod--USA (LMS--USA).
Delegates to the AALC National Convention on June 22nd at Bethel University in Minneapolis now have an opportunity to begin the reversal of this tragic history by voting in favor of Pastor Johnson's proposal to develop a program for honest theological education for pastors in conjunction with Concordia Fort Wayne Seminary. This will not only rectify the pathetic financial management of an AALC leadership that poured $2.5 million dollars in faithful contributions into an endeavor that diverted resources away from the development of a broad-based congregational constituency--it will also begin the process of expelling neo-Pentecostal theology and practice from that Association in favor of a traditional Lutheran theology and practice rooted in the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture; a Biblical understanding of Law, Gospel, and Sacraments; and the re-affirmation of the importance of historic liturgical worship which affirms the Lutheran heritage of Confession, Absolution, and the 3 Ancient Ecumenical Creeds as essential to the ongoing maintenance of the Confessing Church Catholic and Militant.
Pastor Mark Dankof
Philadelphia, PA
I remind Missouri Synod pastors and laity of this situation for the purpose of providing a benevolent warning. The entrance of the LCMS into a formal altar and pulpit relationship with the American Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC) would be nothing less than a blowtorching of confessional Lutheranism in the historic church home of C. F. W. Walther, Franz Pieper, J. T. Mueller, Dr. Walter Meier, Dr. Kurt Marquart, and Dr. Robert Preus. This proposed Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) represented by this latest brainchild of Gerald Kieschnick is a projectile that cannot be recalled once launched in the summer of 2007. It must be stopped by traditional Lutherans in the Missouri Synod in coming weeks and months, or the essential historic character of this once-great theological Leviathan will have evaporated. The clock is ticking.
Mark Dankof
San Antonio, Texas