Need for Evangelism in the LCMS with Rev. Dr. Adam Koontz

Each podcast confronts real-time struggles facing the local church and a post-Christian culture . Step into the action with the ULC at uniteleadershiporg . This is Leigh Time .

He is a pastor and evangelist at Trinity Lutheran Church in Denver , colorado . I love Denver that's my hometown and these pastor and planted congregations in Pennsylvania . Taught in the New Testament at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne for three years before going to Trinity in Denver .

He is also a well-known writer , speaker , podcaster here in the LCMS and a shout out to his podcast , a Brief Power of History To my long time ago basketball A Brief History of . Power .

five fewer LCMS churches than we did before . So we don't have twice as many . We don't have a quarter Again as many . We have four to five fewer . So that's one part of it .

Another part of it is just in traveling and lecturing and helping congregations is to foster church planting in the United States , because Trinity has sort of a big vision for that and I was brought on to be part of that . So that's why evangelists so locally .

That's a big part of my focus here at Trinity , but it's also part of my focus , I guess I would say , generally , Do you ?

We're a very young congregation and as far as average Sunday attendance goes , we're almost at the point God willing I mean , it's only been a year and a half that I've been here we're almost at the point where we can begin to think about where we're going to put something else , so good .

So I think that threshold is maybe a little bit lower , in that we are getting people who are highly committed that are coming to any church of any kind . Just talking to other guys in the area who are a Reformed Baptist or Anglican or whatever , is that our people are all pretty high commitment because you have to be to go to church .

You guys probably have something similar right , and so that threshold of how many people do we need to where we can form a nucleus as we begin to form another church ? I think that number is actually kind of lower here than it is in other places because if my people are coming at all , they're pretty committed .

So I don't need 400 people the first Sunday in order to get a committed congregation , because those people aren't going to all drop off the next Sunday . Yeah , no .

But also a team of really functional people still needs to be led . So there's going to be a combination here of pastoral leadership , along with that team of people who are really gifted or who have been here a lot longer , or whatever the case may be .

It's like a regular church that way . I mean , I think sometimes we make it a little too complex , like you just take a regular church that's actually functional and you just reverse engineer it and say , ok , how do we get these pieces together ? Over time ? Church planting wasn't always so difficult , I think , as we now make it out to be .

worship , still with a liturgical framework and all of that , but you know , maybe some different , different values , but you still have , and we share that same value for reaching lost people with the gospel and starting new Word and Sacrament centers . I think that's a point of commonality , man , that our church buddy needs to rally around .

But as I listen to the wider conversation in the LCMS , I don't hear as much around not just the what of church planning , but then the how of church planning as well . How did you develop that love for church planning , bro ?

So if you have the absolute truth , then you should go tell that to people , right ? That's like it sounds dumb , but that's just my basic . I mean , it's always been like that for me . So the church that I came into the LCMS through is no longer a functioning congregation .

The building's still there , there's a different congregation there , but that congregation is gone . So I think a combination of if I had wanted to grow up LCMS , I couldn't have , and where I became LCMS no longer exists .

So there's just a certain , I think , an urgency that you know and I just because your question was kind of about how I came to it I mean this should be evident from the scriptures , but it's a little easier to see sometimes when you didn't used to have it . And you know it doesn't necessarily just maintain itself . It's not going to be around forever .

Like I became a Lutheran for a reason , then it seems obvious to me that we would plant them .

LCMS guy and if you listen to our podcast , I try to be , I try to be chill about it , like I don't try to comment and be like here's why you guys have always been wrong , like listen to me now you know , but but there is a lack of urgency , there's a cultural lack of urgency .

If you're reading Francis Peeper's Dogmatics , which center on the vicarious satisfaction Christ has made for the world , and that doesn't fire you up like I can't do anything for you , right ? So in that sense , no , there's no theological reason no , Got it In another sense .

practically , I think we often are training towards a situation of an imagined stable congregation .

Right , and the one way to see that is to look at our pastoral theology books is that they generally just assume there's a congregation , there are people there , and then some of those people come to be baptized and then a certain percentage of them need to be confirmed and that's all true , but it assumes a certain stability .

That is really hard to assume in many places and increasingly , especially the lower the demographic window you're going like you go down to teens , I don't think you should , in rural Wisconsin , be assuming they're just going to turn into Lutherans by force of social pressure or something Right .

So if we're understanding faith as a gift from the Holy Spirit , then I'm not really putting it on my shoulders whether or not somebody is being converted or not . That makes sense .

You missed the heart of what is being said there about Christ's intention for every human being , and it's out of that that the desire to proclaim the gospel comes .

And then we flip then out of that Christology and Missiology and then we get Ecclesiology , just the life of the church . And this is where I think some of the rub today is , if you get that order wrong Christology and why did Jesus come ? Because the Missy Odei the mission of God .

And then the mission of God as a clear confession of Jesus Christ as King and Lord , through and how was that distributed ? Through the means of grace , through the office of Holy ministry . Hearing the word , believing the word , trusting the word and then being mobilized for life and the life of the Christian is continually this sending and this being drawn back .

This sending and being drawn back , what to be reformed , restoryed , this is what the historical liturgy is being incorporated into the baptismal reality from the very beginning through the ending . The blessing of God sending you out . That's the best part of our , of our Lutheran liturgy centered in the word of God proclaimed , rightly , but .

But it seems like sometimes we get it , we get it backwards and pastors can so be drawn toward ecclesiology just under our Christian tent , and and we miss that , that just wide open heart , the vicarious atonement of Christ , the justification of Jesus , came for me and through me .

This is a mystery of faith right Now , through me to the world , through us , not just me , through us as the church . The church is the plan , a right Of God to seeking to save those who are lost . So yeah that , how did you kind of come to that , that kind of awe and wonder ? And how are you kind of bringing that ?

Hey , let's keep the main thing , the main thing which is , which is reaching the loss and how , through the , through word and sacrament in the local church that kind of developing you , adam , and any response to what we just said to .

it is , that not only that you are believing but also what you are doing as a pastor .

And what that does is that it rearranges your priorities vis-a-vis other people , because you begin to see them in the light of what Christ has done and is doing , through the Holy Spirit , for them , on their behalf , and then you need to align what you are doing with his intention , his priorities .

You know , that's the reason that you try to preach sermons that are scriptural sermons , because they need to hear from him . They don't need to hear , you know , adam's stupid ideas . So that that was a place that the light bulb went on for me in a way that it hadn't before I had gone to seminary .

But I think I think some of that background that I talked about before also just pushed me in the direction of thinking of these things as obvious rather than needing to plead for them , and I will say that I haven't read that survey , but that aligns anecdotally with what .

What I get as I talk to people is that the LCMS per se as an organization is much more interesting to the clergy than it is to the laity , and there's that's totally understandable from like a professional point of view . Like I don't know anything about the National Association of Realtors because I'm not a realtor .

On the other hand , I'm very interested in realtors actually being able to buy and sell homes . I don't really care what's going on .

And what I wrote the dissertation on and I'm now revising it and then I'll submit it to somebody for publication is specifically when Paul said imitate me . Who did he say that to and why did

he say it and what did he mean , which is a question that I came to through planting a church is what , what actually has to exist in every church . The way Paul insists on this is done in all the churches of Christ , like in 1 Corinthians .

Those are all about their ways of life , probably especially about how they eat and where they live and who they hang out with . What is not adaptable and what has to be brought forward in the churches are what Paul calls the ways of Christ , and that's just .

He's just using an Old Testament word for what we might call a way of life or a way of being or a way of existing , your walk , how you are , what kind of a person you are . So that has to do with personal modeling , both in Paul .

But also he says , like in 1 Corinthians , he's like well , I can't come , so in order to remind you how to be , I'm going to send Timothy because you need to , you need to be recalled to how to be . That that's , that's part of the Christian profession , is not just things that you know , it's also how you are as a human .

You need to turn into me before you can be a Christian . It means that he's going to take the substance of the faith , once delivered to the saints , and then proclaim it where those people exist .

And that's easy to see , I think easiest in acts , because he goes to synagogues to find Jews and Godfors and he goes to other places to find Gentiles and where he doesn't know their language , like with the Lyconians , gospel proclamation just doesn't happen in that chapter they try to sacrifice to him and he , you know , has to try desperately to stop them .

Godfow , as much as you can cross those barriers that don't have to do with the substance of the faith . That's what you need to be shooting for , and Paul puts aside a lot for that sake . I mean he says I didn't get married , so I , and I think he's doing all that so he can go faster and farther , right , so he can go faster and farther .

What he's really saying is like I am just gonna be absolutely clear about there's like a whole bunch of things that are cultural things . We're just not gonna let that be the thing that gets in the way of proclaiming the gospel to people .

So he puts the burden on himself to cross the cultural barrier , rather than the people in the local community , for them to have to conform themselves to cross a cultural barrier to be able to hear the gospel .

There's nothing about the only worship being discussed in 1 Corinthians 9 is meat sacrificed idols . It has . Okay , the worship stuff is chapter 10 , chapter 11 , chapter 12 . Okay , it's way harder than the music you're using . It's way harder than you stuck with TLH or you believe that Lutheran service book fell from heaven .

It's how you live with people and that you're taking this attitude of service toward them so that the gospel can by any means get to them . And that's a lot more to ask . It's a little bit more if this makes sense to the audience . It's a little bit more like what we have thought of .

We're asking a missionary to a foreign country to do , but you just have to apply it to this culture , that culture , this region of the country , this city , whatever . Then it is like oh , I changed the music , so we're good to go .

We tend to not think of it that way , because America has been culturally Christian for so long , but it's not really that anymore , or rapidly moving away from that , and so it's interesting that we give a lot of freedom to people that serve in a foreign manner , in a missionary role , and we're a little bit more hesitant to do it in our local context .

Sometimes It'd be delightful , yeah , yeah .

How am I gonna think about what needs to be accomplished ? Behind all of that is the assumption that this will be here . Therefore , the place for endeavor or difficulty or being like you know he's trying to do something good , like let's help him , whatever the realm for that , is put overseas entirely because we're assuming that this will be here .

And you know , there's obviously a time when that wasn't true . There were zero LCMS churches in the United States in 1830 .

supported , versus a situation where you have the support that you have raised up through the proclamation of the gospel . Those are your supporters . So if you talk to more people , that's more support that the Church of Jesus Christ has .

And so I think that they understood in a culturally and people denigrated and they're like well , germans aren't magically Lutherans either , any more than Americans are . So they put a ton of work in because I think they understood in our situation we can't assume things . We can't assume it's gonna be there .

We need to look at the apostle Paul and say , especially under the cross of Jesus Christ and the free gift of faith and the waters of baptism , it wasn't a legalistic thing , it was just like the best thing ever was to follow after the way of Jesus . So how do we speak about discipleship ? Gospel-y Adam .

That's just a reference back to all the stuff that he already taught , which includes not only things to do in your life , like do not be anxious . It also includes pondering the fact that the Father takes care of the sparrows , right .

So contained in discipleship is always both the mystery of salvation as well as the way of life that Christ has marked out for us .

It's not separable purely into law or purely into gospel . It's both .

The less simple place , and especially for pastors , is to start to read 2 Corinthians alongside 1 Timothy and Titus as a pastoral epistle , and that what Paul is describing , particularly in the first roughly half of that letter , is both his activity , which I think should be inspiring , like what are you doing ?

Some guy got up and thought a lot about cattle futures at the Chicago Board of Trade today . Did you put anything like equivalent energy into heavenly treasures today ? Like , okay , so there's like your law , right . Why is Paul so energetic ? Because he actually thinks it matters .

But there's also his description of the mysteries of suffering and endurance and God pushing you to a point where and this is the back half of the letter in your weakness , in that work , in that suffering , in that preaching , his strength is made perfect . So that's a mystery that , like any way of life that he marks out for us , we enter into .

And , yeah , there are things to do , but the overwhelming mystery and I feel this way about being a pastor , like being a father , like being a husband is that the overwhelming mystery is really just gifts , and the amount that I do is tiny , minuscule in comparison to the gifts that I experience as I go along those paths .

You know I used to be like , oh yeah , that sounds good , thanks , and now I actually believe it .

The other part of it is that in following the way of life that he's marked out whether you're talking about service to other people or family or whatever you're talking about that what I mostly experience on a day-to-day basis is an overwhelming sense of givenness to my life , rather than my seizing it or striving for it .

So the strange thing here is that the more you strive , the more you're resting , to be honest with you , and if you're striving in a way that is not restful , then it's not the striving that the Lord has in mind for you that he gives rest or he gives to his beloved sleep , and those kinds of things are what Paul's trying to explain in 2 Corinthians , which

I think notably too , is in some ways this is his most personal letter , and he's writing to a congregation that is kind of ungrateful and doesn't really understand the things he's trying to talk about , and that's okay too , like that's also part of this life , right , and you can say it's a cross .

But I guess what I'm saying is the crosses all turn out to be blessings too , in addition to the things that feel like blessings at that moment .

And as you look at our American culture today and what we walk through during COVID I listened to part of your lecture on the future the American Christian Church what parts of Paul's story should shape our posture toward whatever the future looks like here in the American church ? For many it may look like a fair amount of suffering .

For us as the people of God , what words of wisdom come from the life of Paul that shape us today ?

The idea is always that Paul think about what Paul asks for .

He asks that by any means , a door may be opened , a door may be open for the gospel , and whether that comes via my suffering or whether that comes because , no , I have to have in-person church services because Jesus is himself in-person , like he's alive , so it's gotta be in-person , or whatever , whatever the issue is , then that's my priority .

My priority is not how I feel about it , and I think that a lot of the discussion around COVID was either about Romans 13

just means you do whatever they say , and that just seems obvious from Acts 4, . It's not true . You can't do everything . They say like sorry , obviously , because their power is limited , because they're not God . On the other hand , people are like I can't believe this is happening . Why can't you believe it's happening ? You know ? like right , what did you like ?

Where did you think this was headed ?

And so I think one way to look at what happened during COVID and the way that I hope I look at it now on the backside of it is that it was a great blessing because people began to think they had time , to think they weren't caught up in their busyness , but also that the church woke up to the reality that things can just go away because you guys had

stats earlier . I just have the anecdotal thing that I read the Missouri Synod newspaper and it used to be that before COVID , maybe in that issue , there would be a congregation that was closing , and now there's always at least one congregation that's closed that month .

So it's like , okay , if that doesn't wake us up , then we don't deserve to be woken up , but it does wake up some of us , I think .

But I think a point of agreement right now is people need Christ , people need community , people need the body and blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins . People need that communal , because that's what a communion is . It's our common union , our common confession of Jesus's Lord . We need the gathering of the saints .

I had a guy right here in my office just yesterday and he's been watching us online . He says for like a year and a half and he's come like two times and he's like can a guy and he's talking about himself , he's this kind of gruff old guy Can a guy be saved , pastor , if he doesn't really go to the church ? And I'm like , well , why ?

I've also said before I let you kind of go on the COVID rant I've said publicly numerous times and whenever I get the loudest cheers in a sermon and I'm not hunting for cheers , you don't have to say it but you want to say what happened two years ago will never happen again in this congregation .

I don't think that's true , and so I think that some of this has to do with a cultural squeamishness about critique of any kind , like in discussion , and I've talked to guys that did online communion . I know guys that are still doing online communion and but it's like dude , do you actually think like that's ? Are you like , is that actually gonna work ?

And it's like they know it's not . They know no , because here's my proof is that every Gen Z kid wants to be less online . So , absolutely right , so they've been . They've been doing online life their whole life . Yeah , and they're sad and and they come and they do .

You know all the lethargic bells and whistles we're running over here , let's get real because , yeah , because it's their body , it's in person . There's other people here and you know , and it's like , look like Jesus doesn't want to be online with you , like he wants something more than that .

That's why there is the Lord's Supper , because he would be right and this is very beautiful . Paul strings together in Romans 10 All these passages about , like from the Old Testament , about the coming of the word of God , and he says the word is very near you .

You know it's not , it's not distant , it's not piped in , it's it's very near you , like he's right here . And this is a very beautiful thing that we give to people when we serve them Lord Supper . So I want that for them . I don't want online for them , like they could be online with anything anywhere . I think Jesus wants more for people .

And I think what you hinted at was the ability , if we see our brother or our sister , especially with a relationship of trust over time and this is the power of , I think , a circuit , a group of pastors in an area who love and care and respect one another to just having a brotherly word rather than , you know , tweeting or putting something out online about

that church down the road . No , no , no , I just just go and say , hey , can we have a conversation ? I had , I had a brother pastor do that with me early on . He listened to my God bless him for listening to one of my first Sermons .

But I'm one of my , one of my first sermons on on generosity and instead of sounding Gospely , it sounded a little legalistic . He and that's the easy thing to do is we're talking about resources . Right and yeah and he took me out to , took me out to lunch and had our and he shaped , he helped shape me . I was discipleship right , yeah .

And and what I know about the traits of pastors right now and in some of my research for my Doctorate , it are many pastors are super agreeable and don't don't handle conflict very well .

They go along to get along and , and and you know that , that handling conflict while unmanaging stress , while these are pretty low scores For many pastors , and I think this may shape some of the some of the divisiveness within our church body , around Any we could go down , all you know could be worship , it could be women and you know all these types of things

. Yeah , we don't . We're not relating well to one another , developing deep relationships of trust , and it's kind of cascading For us .

I know you've heard of rings , I'll let you dig into this , but this like rings of relationship , and hopefully the inner ring is Christ at the center , and then he's placed me in a family , he's in place me in a church , a group of about a hundred , and then there's this like wider group of people , and I think this is when our churches and our circuits can

kind of work together . Yeah , those relationships Sociologists and that kind of middle ring , those relationships are not deep at all . What used to be spending and deepening those relationships is now displaced by time on our phones etc . And then on our phones , what do we get , we social media ?

What we get is this outer ring of activity , what's going on in politics , geopolitical , all of that kind of thing , and we are losing that sense of the village that tethers us Together , where there are elders , you know , women and men who speak words of wisdom and love and challenge to me and I receive it , I'm sharpened , I'm pruned and then in turn , as I ,

as I grow up into Christ , I do the same for the next generation . We've kind of lost that today and I think it's insidious and it comes out even in the way pastors Do not disagree in an agreeable fashion . Anything to say about building that disagreeing , agreeable muscle in the church ? Adam .

And that's kind of true , regardless of what your position on wine , women and song , as it's sometimes called you know , that's what every call committee wants to talk to you about in an interview , and blah , blah , blah . It's kind of true regardless .

Is that you feel either well , I'm supposed to , this is supposed to be fine , or this is not supposed to be fine , or why aren't you doing what I do ? Like it's supposed to be a high-trust culture and it's like we , we just have difficulty admitting that it's at best , medium trust and usually it's low trust .

And if you know it's low trust but it could be better , then yeah , you'd be willing to work on something right . But I think part of the reason that we're not working on it , or we don't care or we just want to continue being outraged on the internet is because that Building of trust doesn't actually seem like a priority right .

So this is kind of the same thing that we talked about with Church planting is that , in a way , you really have to go a lot more by what people actually do , then by what they say , and if it's like , okay , yeah , this guy is like actually , like he will actually talk to me , or or he's getting you know , he's proclaiming the gospel or whatever , then that's

something to pay much more attention to . I mean , this is just kind of the litmus test that , like a James lays out or a John lays out , let us not love and word or in talk , but indeed or in truth , and Because it's like , look like , get over it , like the LCMS is not high trust , it's just not , it's too big . We don't know each other .

And then , even when we do know each other , we often don't trust each other , and that's just the way it is . So we can either work on that there's camps and yeah , obviously , just obviously like why pretend like there's not . It's fine , you know , and Either work on that or don't . But like don't , don't be angry , that right doesn't exist .

But you're also not doing anything about it . Like Like I don't care what happens to the Kansas City Chiefs . I want to stop seeing Taylor Swift on TV . That's my , you know what I mean , right , but I think a lot of guys are there like they're just like I'm so sick of seeing too . Well , why are you watching if you don't care ?

I love the way you talk about history and one of your presentations that we should have a remarkable amount of humility . As we tell . It's not a black and white story , per se . And there's , you know there's , there's villains everywhere and there's probably everybody has a little bit of darkness Kind of in them in that story .

So we should come at it with a lot of humility . You know , I hear a lot of people talk about Seminex and and it's almost like a curse word , right and on both , on both sides of whatever

it is . They just blame everything on on Seminex rather than just working on 2023 and what is what is right now . So , as you look at that story , what is some of the wounds that are still in your perspective Very , very raw in the LCMS ?

And so the existence of low trust in the LCMS isn't solely traceable to Seminex , but something you'll notice if you look at the history that generally has not been written about because too many people are still alive .

Basically , but that played out in the 70s , 80s , 90s , is that the people who were united on the doctrine of Scripture , that that obviously were still here after the walkout , didn't agree on a lot of other things Theologically and practically , especially practically , and that was never really handled , because Seminex was , was in a certain sense simply an administrative

problem . That our issue on the doctrine of Scripture was handled vis-a-vis the faculty , mostly of St Louis Seminary , although there was , there was something , there was sort of an exodus when Robert Price took over the other Seminary , somewhat similar and even I'm sorry , jack before that . Okay , so I'm getting my prices mixed up here . It happens sometimes .

And so so those , those , those were administrative problems and they were handled administratively . That's fine , but that didn't provide a way to figure out . Okay , it's the 70s , here comes the church growth movement . What are we gonna do about that ? Well , we didn't really talk about that , we just kind of did a variety of things right .

So that's where the capacity to build trust or to maintain trust , which depended both on how much guys from the system that existed , especially running through St Louis before the walkout they had .

They had been playing basketball together since seventh grade , so that that just creates a totally different atmosphere and that's gone right , that's just gone and I can't see it coming back .

But in addition to that , the capacity to solve problems Other than administratively , which in the LCMS is gonna , is gonna have something to do with politics and election cycles and fundraising . Does not create more trust . No , it doesn't . No , it doesn't . I mean you can .

You can if you're like , okay , I need to take care of business , I need to get my guy into this position . You can do that , right , you can win , but you can't .

You can't necessarily win the brother in some leaf , right , yeah , you , you you can win , you can't necessarily win the brother , and and we might not be trying , let's , let's be honest , right , okay , so there's that , the other .

The other thing and this is kind of more my observation than something that I hear is that we had a lot of other issues going on in and around the time of Seminex , and because we don't necessarily have a way of solving problems Collectively , those are not things that we solved . So I brought up church growth .

But I mean just you could think about , something that I've tried to maintain is that we basically kept the same preaching method we had learned before Seminex , which is just Goalmality means classically . But it's like you do law for however long in the sermon , then you do gospel . That's every sermon .

So as far as discipleship goes , that's really all your people know Is that there is sin and that Jesus is the Savior from sin . All other Bible topics Don't really make it into the sermon , except usually to make people feel bad . So you're not gonna talk about giving , unless you , unless you make it sound like they don't give enough .

But Jesus came to save them from giving enough or something right . And so that very flattened out preaching method , that that was taught by a guy that that left during the walkout , richard Kemmerer , that didn't go away with Seminex .

So , and so my issue with with that as , like , the high point of something is that it didn't really handle a lot of other things that in the years after Seminex , as America becomes increasingly secular , our people need more instruction , more training , more help , better sermons , and there were things that we were doing before Seminex that we just basically kept

doing in a very practical sense , and I think preaching is the primary example of that .

And I , and at the same time , the ULC , is an organization that's running some experiments , especially along the topic of formation . We were talking about that just briefly before we got on here and I think we're basically running what you termed a gmalial test a gmalial test .

Gmalial lays out , because gmalial is one of your more open-minded , sanhedrin kinds of guys and I think I think that that's something , and I know you're talking to , you know whatever , like you're taking it straight to the top .

So I'm not going to get in the way of that conversation , but I think that this is this is an instance where it's like I was a catcher in baseball and the primary reality of being a catcher is that you always know better than the guy that you're working with , right , so you call the pitch and then he either he either follows your wise advice or he ignores

it or whatever , and you have different pitchers , they're all on your team and you just have to handle it that way . So I think that this is part of a thing . You know . It's like if you're in a low-trust environment , like obviously you guys are going to get a ton of flak .

I'm glad that you're also getting some productive discussion , because it's a situation where I think that we need to start looking at the way that the church carries out its mission .

Whether you're talking about training pastors , or you're talking about planning churches , or you're talking about keeping churches running whatever you're talking about , where we start looking at as a matter of wisdom , in which we need advice and we need counsel , and sometimes we try something like we leave John Mark behind and maybe Paul thought that was a really good

idea . What God used that to do was to get the gospel preached in two places at once . If you take a look at what actually happens there in Acts , so there's always a reality going on in church life where things are happening through us , but our grasp of them , I think , is pretty low .

And that's what I like about the Gamaliel test is that it leaves all the room that it should actually be there for God to use things or not to use them and for us to have a humility about what we're looking at that's happening around us .

We really believe that we should be looking in these respective contexts , in these congregations , for a lot of the laymen who could be trained up to be the distributor of Word and Sacrament in time , and this theology is very , very important . The model that we're working through right now is definitely not loose as it relates to the Lutheran confessions .

It's very , very strict and it's a lot of fun . It's a lot of fun and we're working with a partner . Let me just say this For those of you who have hung on with us now there's some traction with the Luther House of Study connected to the ULC .

We are not , as a Lutheran Church , missouri-centered organization and congregation , condoning women's ordination , even though some of the students that go through the Luther House of Study are women in the LCMC . We're just looking at this training model .

The Lutheran confessional teaching , the Reformation teaching , is really , really wonderful and , at the same time , as I have said on this mic , gosh dozens and dozens of times , we're waiting for the theologians the brain trust , if you will of the Lutheran Church of Missouri-Centered to come to the table and help us , because this bivocational , co-vocational training could

have a huge , huge impact benefiting many of our smaller congregations in the LCMS .

But you can order that from Ed Crucham . So that's coming out . That'll be . Should reach you before Christmas , as far as I understand . Awesome . And if they want to just say , hey , I hate what you said or I love what you said , or whatever they want to say , just shoot me an email . That's fine , Rev Koontz , R-E-V-K-O-O-N-T-Z at gmailcom .

All right , Excellent , excellent .

We promise to have we pray , jesus-centered , hope-centered , joy-filled conversations in the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod because we really believe that man , a confessing church body like ours , if we can get out of our way , if we can confess sin , conceive persistently , give absolution and then unite in our various contexts to go on mission , the Lutheran Church of

Missouri Synod is what the world needs , because Jesus is what the world needs and he's the one that we bring , he's the one that we highlight and center . So this is a good day . Go on and make it a great day by the power of word and spirit . We'll be back next week with lead time . Thanks so much , adam , thanks Jack , God bless , thank you .

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