The clock is ticking for the LCMS as a confessional church body

The following has been submitted as a comment on this post:

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

I have considerably more respect for Pr. Dankof than for the Christian News, whose muckraking, routine violations of the Eighth Commandment, and espousal of holocaust revisionism have brought confessional Lutheranism into such disrepute among so many decent people who ought to be its allies. But in any event, Pr. Dankof's comment is right on target.

The AALC is a church body which has apparently made at least a beginning of cleaning up its image as a refuge for synergism, Pietism and Enthusiasm (the Charismatic, as well as the Church Growth Movement varieties) recently. But alas, the problem remains- and unless I'm mistaken, the AALC still refuses to adopt close communion as a binding policy!

If the proposed pulpit and altar fellowship between the Missouri Synod and the AALC is comes to pass next July, it will mark the formal end of Missouri's long history as an orthodox Lutheran church body. Membership in an LCMS congregation will be come impossible for me, and to the extent that its historic doctrinal stance is important to them. LCMS pastors and laypeople will abandon Missouri in droves. Whether this will lead to a new body that will continue the theological heritage which Missouri will have abandoned, or a scattering to the various smaller orthodox bodies, remains to be seen.

But make no mistake: the 2007 LCMS Synod Convention, if not Armageddon, is the next thing to it. At that time, the LCMS will decide whether to complete or delay its slide into the status of merely another generic "evangelical" denomination, though one which happens to have an unusually high view of the sacraments.