On Being a Reactionary Theologian: Part Two

In my last post, I talked a bit about the concept of being a reactionary theologian, one who establishes his doctrinal identity not based on the Truth, but in reaction to someone else's errors. To summarize my point in all of this: Don't be a reactionary theologian. It's bad.

That being said, that post concluded with a little parenthetical paragraph arguing that there is, in fact, a proper way to be a reactionary theologian - a good, right and salutary way to do your theology in response to someone else's silliness. So here we go.

As I said last time, some of our greatest theological treasures are works that have come as a response to error. Take, for example, Paul's letter to the Galatians. This epistle essentially came about because the Judaizers, a group of Jewish pseudo-Christians, wormed their way into the ears of those in Galatia, seeking to convince them that salvation came not merely through faith in Jesus Christ, but also through obedience to the Mosaic law. To put it simply, the doctrine of the Judaizers was that "he who believes and is baptized and is circumcised and refuses pork shall be saved but he who does not believe or have his foreskin removed or who eats a bacon cheeseburger shall be condemned."  (P.S. If you've ever wondered how desperate the sinner is to earn his own salvation, Galatians proves that he will even choose cutting off part of his penis over not cutting off part of his penis if cutting off part of his penis gives him the title of "co-savior" on the Day of Judgment.)

And in response to this, in reaction to this woeful false doctrine, Paul gives us one of the greatest meditations in all of Scripture concerning how salvation works - how it is only through the grace of Jesus Christ that the Kingdom of God becomes ours, how it is only through faith in Christ's death and resurrection for us that we receive the benefits of that death and resurrection, how "no one is justified before God by the law, for "The righteous shall live by faith," (Galatians 3:11).  In response to these false teachers, Paul paints for us in full, glorious detail the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  In reaction to the theology of other men, Paul enables us to grasp in even more wondrous ways the comfort that comes from possessing the utterly free and eternal salvation of our Lord.

So does this undo everything I said before?  Does the fact that some of the most glorious theology in the Scriptures comes to us as reactionary theology mean that I ought to delete my last entry.

No!  Absolutely, positively not.  And why is this?  Let's return to the asking-out-the-pretty-girl analogy.

As I argued previously, when it comes to convincing the pretty girl that she ought to go out with you, that she ought to cling to your teachings and your confession of faith, you should be able to handle that conversation on your own.  You shouldn't need to point to some dumb frat guy a few yards away in order, by comparison, to establish how attractive you are.

But if that dumb frat guy comes over and butts into the conversation, you need to respond.  In particular, you need to respond in a way that essentially drives him out of the conversation, sends him running out of the room, and enables you to get back to wooing the lady who needs to be wooed.  And while the presence of said idiot may be a nuisance to you, when you have to respond to the intrusive presence of his lies and tomfoolery does, it does result in the nice benefit of explaining in greater detail the awesomeness of your confession of faith.

Getting back to Galatians, this is precisely what is going on there.  Clear from the early words of the epistle (1:6-8) is the fact that Paul had already begun the conversation, that he was already talking to this woman and had already made a solid confession of faith before the drunk moron Judaizers stumbled over and started slurring, "Hey, baby, is he talking to you about the Gospel?  That's cool and all, but he's not giving you the whole story...But you know what?  You should let me take you out some time and I'll  give you the whole scoop.  I'll tell you all about how Jesus isn't your savior until you disavow yourself of pork spare ribs forever."

And while the presence of this guy clearly drives Paul nuts, his pure confession of faith is amplified and expanded in even more glorious detail when he's able to point to that guy and say, "you know what?  This guy is telling you that God is only happy when you leave a pile of dead foreskins on His altar.  Let me tell you what has truly made God happy..." 

So to sum it up briefly, here's the right way to be a reactionary theologian: You confess the faith.  And when someone butts in and tries to hijack your confession in the wrong direction, you expand your confession of faith to reveal those lies for what they are and to drive the false teacher out of the conversation.  This is, I would argue, how the Church has always done this.  When the Gnostics tried to use the Gospel of Matthew to steal the divinity of Christ, John responded with his Gospel.  When Arius wormed his way beside the pretty girl after the Church confessed the Apostles' Creed, Christ's Bride shove him out of the conversation by confessing the Nicene Creed.  When the Crypto-Calvinists started yapping after the Lutherans recited the Small Catechism, we moved on to the Formula of Concord in an effort to stop the purveyors of lies from controlling the conversation.

And because no false doctrine has ever brought about greater truth than the pure doctrine, because no perversion of the Gospel has ever yielded greater comfort than the comfort yielded by the actual Gospel, you win.  Every time.  Maybe not in the eyes of the pretty girl at the party, but certainly in the eyes of the Lord who has poured out His Truth upon us.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene.  Thanks for reading.

On Being a Reactionary Theologian: Part One

Imagine you're a dude interested in scoring a date with a fine looking dudette. 

So you spy her from across the room at a crowded party.  You take a deep breath, stroll through the mass of revelers, lean up against the wall a few feet away from said smokin' female.  You look deeply in her eyes.  You introduce yourself and tell her you'd like to take her out for dinner.

She, in return, asks why she agree to go out with you.  She wants to know what makes you so special.  And, in response, you spend the next half hour detailing all the faults of her ex-boyfriend and assuring her how much more you have to offer in those specific areas.

How likely do you think it is that you're going to score that date?

The answer, of course, is "not very likely at all."  And the reason for that is because you have established yourself as a reactionary suitor.  Instead of presenting yourself as a guy who can stand on his own two legs, you've presented yourself as someone who can only stand by propping himself up against the failings of someone else.  By trying to make yourself interesting, you've only succeeded in making yourself the second most important guy in the conversation because your identity is entirely dependent upon the guy you're trying to tear down.

This scenario is, I believe, what ultimately ends up happening when people establish themselves as reactionary theologians, regardless of what they're reacting against.  And whenever you try to convince people that they need to pick up the doctrine you're laying down by convincing them that you're a better option than the guy across the street, the only thing you might succeed at is convincing the girl that she shouldn't go to that guy's church either.

Take Baptist theology, for example.  Granted, I am not the world's leading expert on the modern leaders in Baptist theology.  But talk to your average Baptist pastor about why you should join his church and you'll hear very little about his church.  But you will hear a whole bunch about other churches.  

Me: So, Pastor Smith, why should I become a member at First Baptist Church?

Pastor Smith: Well, for starters, we're not like the Roman Catholics, those people who worship Mary and don't read their Bibles.  And we're not like those Lutherans with their written prayers and their old fashioned services.  You can really tell that the Spirit is with us because we don't do things the same way each week.  Plus, we're all committed to the Lord.  Unlike all those other people, we're all about serving Him.

Me: And how exactly do you serve him?

PS:Well, for starters, by not being Catholics or Lutherans.

Now, if you think I'm being to hard on the Baptists, do a little exercise for me.  Just glance through the Yellow Pages and see how long it takes you before you find a Baptist Church with a name like Real Gospel or True Bible Baptist Church.  If the name of your church indicates your belief that everyone else follows a fake gospel or a false bible, you might be a reactionary theologian.

The same is, of course, true on the other side of the theopolitical spectrum, which we all saw clearly in the UCC's controversial ejector seat ad from a few years ago.

Me: So, Pastor Jones of First United Church of Christ, why should I become a member of your congregation?

Pastor Jones: Oh, well, you see, we're not like those mean, close-minded, hateful, racist, homophobic churches.  We're welcoming.

Me: Ok, well, that just tells me that I shouldn't attend one of the numerous (non-existent ) congregations where people will pee on my leg, punch me in the eyeballs and tell me to stick a hose in my tailpipe.  But why should I go to your church?  What will you welcome me into?

PJ: Um, we have life-partner scrabble night on Wednesdays.  You can come to that, if you like.

I say all of this because my fellow Lutherans and I often have a tendency to approach our theology in this kind of reactionary manner.  Instead of telling the pretty girl how awesome we are in, oh, say six chief ways, we frequently begin the conversation by telling her that we do salvation better than Benedict and the means of grace better than Osteen.  

These statements are, of course, true.  But those statements are only true because we're right, not because everyone else is wrong.  We baptize babies, for example, because Christ wants them baptized and not because the Baptists don't.  Truth isn't truth because it deviates from error.  Error is error because it deviates from truth.  And I think that we Lutherans do ourselves a great disservice whenever we can't justify our existence without the foils of popes and Promise Keepers®, whenever we don't have the guts to look the girl in the eyes and convince her that nobody else in the room matters.

So, sure, it's true that the Lutheran confession of faith is better than that of Rome or Geneva.  And it's also true that I am cuter and funnier than most of Katie's exboyfriends.  But I can assure you that, had I made my sales pitch to my beautiful wife in such a fashion a few years ago, she'd still be beautiful.  But she sure as sunflowers wouldn't be my wife today.

(Granted, I recognize that some of our greatest theological treasures came about in response to false doctrine.  But there is, I would certainly argue, the right way to be a reactionary theologian and the wrong way.  More on that later...)

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene.  Thanks for reading.

Enjoying the Miserable Stuff

If you are a surgeon, people are bound to die on your operating table.  And when that happens, you're gonna hafta tell their families that those people are dead.  It's a part of your job.  And it needs to be done.  But if this is the part of your job that you really enjoy, you should probably not be a surgeon.  If you burst out of the operating room, excited to tell Harriet about how you watched Merle's heart stop beating with your own two eyes, you don't really understand what it means to be in the business of saving lives.  If you went to medical school because your heart was warmed by the thought of telling people that their loved ones have kicked the bucket, you are messed up in the head.

And the same thing goes for being a pastor.  When it comes to being a pastor, people are bound to sin.  And when that happens, you're bound by God to preach the Law.  You are required to preach His word of condemnation, His word of wrath.  When people turn away from the One who bled for our salvation, you must tell them that they will not taste an ounce of that same salvation if they do not repent.  This is part of your job.  It needs to be done.  But if this is the part of your job that you really enjoy, you should probably not be a pastor.  If you ascend into the pulpit and just can't wait to tell people what rotten piles of excrement they are, you really don't understand what it means to be in the business of forgiving sins.  If you went to seminary because your heart was warmed by the thought of looking a guy in the eye and telling him that he's no longer a Christian, you are also a bit messed up in the head.

As pastors, we really shouldn't take delight in the alien work of God.  If you haven't heard this term we theologians use before,  the alien work of God essentially refers to God's wrathful reaction to sin, His proclaiming judgment upon those who won't turn from it, His punishment of those engaged in it.  God performs this alien work when He sends the fiery serpents among the grumbling Israelites in the wilderness, when He crushes unbelieving Judah through the means of Babylon, when He takes the breath out of Ananias and Sapphira. 

We call this God's alien work because it is, in fact, alien or foreign to His nature.  God did not create us to smash us into pieces.  He created us to love us.  God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world.  God is love.  He's all about love.  And whenever He deals in judgment and condemnation, He does this only to pave the way for the proclamation of mercy and salvation and not because He enjoys those rather nasty things.  To put it quite simply, God only does the miserable stuff (preaching the Law) in order to get to the good stuff (preaching the Gospel).

And if God didn't enjoy banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden or destroying Sodom, neither should we.   Just as a surgeon shouldn't enjoy telling people that their relatives are now dead, so we shouldn't enjoy condemning people for their sins.  Just as a teacher shouldn't enjoy telling a student she's failing, so we shouldn't enjoy telling people that they are sinners.  Doing so is absolutely necessary.  And we should always view it as such.  But we should also view it as uncomfortable, awkward and joyless.

But I don't know that we always feel this way about preaching the Law.  I know that I  often haven't.  There have been many times, far more than are excusable, that I have enjoyed proclaiming the word of condemnation, that I have relished speaking of the wrath of God.  On numerous occasions, as the words have poured out of my lips from the pulpit, and as as I have watched people squirm a bit in their pews, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

But I shouldn't have enjoyed myself.  And the reason I shouldn't have enjoyed myself is because God didn't enjoy it.  Even though He has called me to break the legs of the sheep who wander in order to heal them and bring them home, He hasn't called me to get a thrill at the sound of the bones snapping.  It's the Pharisees who smile when this happens.  It's the Lord of life who weeps.  

And whenever we're preaching the Law like the Pharisees, we'll inevitably preach the Gospel like the Pharisees.  Which, of course, means that we won't really preach the Gospel at all.  Because whenever we feel like we've nobly finished our work for the day after we've condemned sinners, the Gospel will always be an after thought, even if words about the atonement make up 75% of the sermon.  Whenever we get our thrill by ripping people to pieces, we'll never feel compelled to find peace by piecing them back together with the blood of Christ.  Whenever the surgeon wants nothing more than to tell the next of kin that the guy on his table is dead, he'll never be terribly motivated to save the dude's life.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene.  Thanks for reading.

Of Websurfers and Creeds

Despite the gaggle of issues that causes disagreement in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, I think it's probably perhaps somewhat relatively maybe safe to delicately assert that most of us agree that a congregation's website is an evangelistic tool. I don't know if anyone has done research on this, but I would be very surprised if the majority of IP addresses that look up a church's domain name could be traced to computers owned by members. For the most part, I would presume that your average viewer is either someone interested in attending your church or someone who recently has attended. But, in either case, he or she is someone looking for a bit more information about all y'alls.

So if this is the case...if, in fact, a congregation's website is an evangelistic tool, then it really ought to be used as one, in particular with regard to the evangel part of the word. If a congregation's website exists for the purpose of bringing people into the actual, physical congregation where the Word is preached and the Sacraments are administered, then the website ought to do the one thing that has actually accomplished that goal long before websites were even invented-that one thing being proclaiming the Gospel.

Now, to be fair, almost every church website that I've ever come across does, in fact, have a section dedicated to proclaiming the Gospel, or at least to proclaiming what whoever wrote the content of the website thinks the Gospel is. It's often found in the What We Believe section.  But, as I've come to notice while doing much ecclesiastical web surfing lately, the What We Believe section of many websites is often better hidden than the Easter Eggs on a DVD.

Creedal statements declaring who God is, what He has done for us and how He works among us in His Church are generally there. Links informing people of what we confess concerning God's reconciling of the world to Himself in Jesus Christ are often present.  But they are frequently buried underneath the mountain of shell-casings that were shed when the writers of the website blasted off a thousand rounds of ammo telling people how they can get involved in their congregation.  And once you finally discover them after clicking Spiritual Journeys then Faith Walk then Holy Experiences then Moments of Reflection then Other then Miscellaneous Information, you come to discover that the What We Believe section often feels like a last minute tag on.  It reads as though we wrote it with no energy or pride.  It's brief and lifeless, effectively giving people the impression that we're just fulfilling a requirement here and that we fully expect them to be far more interested in knowing how to get their kids involved in the 'Lil Praizers Youth Group than knowing how salvation works.

And, from the young to the old, from the unbeliever to the retired pastor who spent 168 faithful years in the ministry, all those looking for a congregation to call their own deserves better than this.  When the devil breathes on their throats every day of their lives, seeking to devour them in the jaws of unbelief and despair, they deserve to know exactly what we teach that can seal shut the mouth of the beast forever.  When the world is daily telling them that eternal life must be achieved through the works of their hands, they shouldn't have to work their hands to the bone by navigating our web content for an hour before we finally tell them what it means to be justified by grace through faith.  When their sinful flesh is pulling them a thousand steps backward every time they try to take a single step forward on their faith walk, they deserve to have us proclaim to them that the Church isn't just the Rec Center with pictures of Jesus on the walls, that Christ didn't die on the cross and rise from the grave to gather His people around casseroles and puppet shows, but that Christ will always breath faith into them through the Word and Sacraments given within our walls, that He will forever pick them up and place them right where they should be, right beside Him, through the forgiveness that He gives at our precise geographical location every single time we meet.  Those searching for a church to call their own deserve to know, and deserve to know immediately, that if they want to find Heaven on Earth, they can find it by sticking our address in Mapquest and hitting enter.

Or, to summarize the entire contents of this post a bit more precisely:

Look at our websites.  Is it easier for people to find our mission statement than our creed?  If the answer is yes, fail.  Let's try again.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene.  Thanks for reading.

Self-Righteousness and the Third Article

"I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but that the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel..."

For those of you who don't know, these words commence Martin Luther's explanation of the Third Article of the Apostles' Creed in his Small Catechism.  And these are words that we Lutherans hold dear.  We love them.  We memorize them.  We quote them.  We cherish them.  But do we always believe them?

Certainly we believe them in an academic sense, in an official-statement-of-belief kind of way.  After all, it's these plain words that hold fast to the doctrine of divine monergism that so frequently gets gobbled up by Arminian jaws before the Christian's eyes.  It's these simple words that remind us that the Holy Spirit is not some insecure, fumbling ninny who can only dare to linger 50 yards away from your doorstep, hoping that, one of these days, you might finally invite Him in.  We confess these words because they confess what the Scriptures teach about salvation-that the Triune God is not only solely responsible for willing and winning our salvation, but that He is also solely responsible for delivering that salvation to us through the call of His Spirit.

And yet, while we certainly believe these words, do we really believe them?  Is our love of these words confined to using them as endless ammo against the endless onslaught of decision-theology marauders or do these words actually have a formative impact on how we deal with unbelief, false doctrine and error in our daily lives?

I ask this because, despite how loudly we declare that we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord, our behavior often makes it clear that, somewhere in the rotten corners of our hearts, we don't really believe this.  Despite our claims to the contrary, our fruit often reveals how the old man, the hidden Pharisee within us won't give up the notion that faith is our noble accomplishment, our glorious work, our great achievement.

Because if we truly did believe these words, we simply wouldn't do the things we do.  If we really believed that we could very well be communing cats and dogs if it weren’t for the call of the Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t act as though the root problem with those who practice open communion is that they’re morons and not as smart as we are.  If we really believed that our desire to gobble up every word of the Lutheran Confessions comes from God and not us, we wouldn’t set up websites dedicated to smashing into pieces those who let too much dust accumulate on their copies of the Book of Concord.  If we really believed that it was no one but the Holy Spirit who crushed our sinful hearts and gave us new hearts eternally united to our Savior, well, we wouldn’t  think that the solution to the problem of unbelief is to rake people over the coals until they realize that we’re right.

None of this is to say that error/heresy/unbelief are not problems.  They certainly are and they need to be tackled head on.  The aforementioned open communion, for example, destroys a proper understanding of the Sacrament and the One who gives it.  And that will eventually destroy both the congregations and church bodies that endorse it. 

But tackling the problem and ripping to shreds those who perpetrate the problem are not one in the same thing.  And if, as we claim to believe, the only thing that can solve these problems is the Holy Spirit working through the Word, then we ought to act like it.  Instead of castigating, we ought to confess.  Instead of grumbling, we ought to proclaim.  Instead of sitting in our offices, sneering at those who  need exactly the same thing that the Holy Spirit so freely gave us, we ought to at least go to their homes, sit down with them and declare the Truth before we shake the dust off of our feet.  After all, for quite some time, the Lord kept His shoes pretty filthy for our sake.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene.  Thanks for reading.

The "Bad Seminary" Double Standard

Disclaimer: Before you read any of this, you should know that, for the record, I believe both Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, IN and Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis are outstanding schools with outstanding faculties who offer outstanding education and produce outstanding pastors.  I thank God for these institutions always.

Not too long ago, a brother pastor in my area resigned from his congregation and removed his name from the roster of ordained ministers of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In other words, he stopped being a pastor in our church body.

He did this because he no longer confessed the doctrine confessed by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Rather, he now confessed the doctrine confessed by the Eastern Orthodox Church. On account of this new confession of faith, he believed he could not stay where he was. He "went East," as we often say.

When this happened, I felt rather sick to my stomach. In part, I felt sick because I believe that this brother pastor was ultimately sacrificing a higher regard for the Gospel in favor of a higher regard for chanting. But even more so, I felt sick because I feared the effect his departure would have on the congregation. I feared that his congregation would see this as an indictment on the school that had trained their now former pastor, Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, IN. I feared that his departure for the Eastern Orthodox Church would amplify in their ears the phantasmal rumor that LCMS Lutherans always seem to hear wafting through the air-the rumor that Fort Wayne is the "bad seminary" because they keep producing liturgical wackos who end up leaving for Rome or Constantinople, unlike Fort Wayne's sister seminary in St. Louis.

It would be dishonest of me to pretend as though this is not a problem. Lutheran pastors or seminarians departing our church body for other confessions of faith is a problem. It is bad. It is scandalous. And, as I alluded to before, it is clear that there is something going profoundly wrong when men aspiring to or possessing the office of overseer deliberately choose to sacrifice the doctrine of justification on a heterodox altar simply because it has more candles and smoke.

But let's be honest about something. Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis has the same problem. They're struggling with the same beast. It's just wearing different stripes on the Clayton campus.

The real problem that we are struggling with isn't, at its core, about patriarchs or popes. It's not about smells and bells. At its core, the real problem is that men are graduating from our Lutheran seminaries but are not Lutherans. And while Saint Louis may not have the problem of placing men into Lutheran pulpits who confess the theology of Rome or Constantinople, they do have the problem of placing men into Lutheran pulpits who confess the theology of Geneva or Mars Hill, which may not be a geographical location, but sounds like it. (Side Note: Fort Wayne certainly has this problem too.)

This is, of course, a textbook double standard. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is not Lutheran. Neither is The Purpose Driven Life. But teach one of those to your congregation and you'll get invited to lead outreach workshops at district conventions. Teach the other and you'll get impaled on a makeshift pitchfork fashioned from banner poles and pew pencils during the Prayer of the Church. Can you guess which is which?

Encourage your members to kiss icons of the saints during the Divine Service and you're a nutjob. Encourage them to kiss their children goodbye at the start of the Divine Service as they send them off to "kid's church" and you're a man of the people (well, adult people, at least). Encourage your members to say a quick "Hail Mary" before receiving the Body and Blood of Jesus and you're a rabble rousing, divisive heretic. Invite your members' friends to eat and drink the Body and Blood that they laughingly deny are present and you're a welcoming, inclusive peace maker.

For whatever reason, we can always see right through the sheep's clothing fashioned by pope-ish hands. The wool that covers those on the other side, however, manages to do a much better job of fooling us. And herein lies the self-perpetuating circle of the Fort Wayne/St. Louis double standard. Confess Roman or Eastern doctrine and you must leave. Immediately. Confess Reformed or Evangelical doctrine and you can stay put until the Second Coming. And as long as this is the case, Fort Wayne will always look worse than her Show-Me-State counterpart because it's only the ones forced to exit who end up leaving a dust trail behind them for everyone else to see and lament.

But just because we can't see a track of footprints leading to Geneva doesn't mean that there isn't a whole mess of Lutheran pastors wearing Calvin's shoes. And, truth be told, I have more respect (though equal parts pity) for the guy who leaves because he can't, in good conscience, stand by his ordination vows anymore than I do for the guy who had no problem lying when he made them and continues to have no problem lying every time he gets near a Lutheran altar, font or pulpit.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene. Thanks for reading.

And. Here. We. Go.

So, this is my very first blog post. Here we go...

When it comes to worship, I am anti-distraction. I do not like to see pastors doing things that draw my attention away from the Word. This goes for things on both sides of the liturgical spectrum--both things like this:

and things like this:

And then, whatever category this falls under:

In picture number one, if I were trying to listen to what the pastor was saying, I would not be able to. I would be distracted. I would be thinking to myself, "if this man is telling me about the most important thing in the world, why is he dressed like he's auditioning to be an L.L. Bean model? And why do those people behind him look so bored? Is that bass player just too embarrassed to look up because he forgot to wear shoes to church?"

In picture number two, if I were trying to focus on the words spoken at the altar, I would not be able to. I would be distracted. I would be thinking to myself, "why are those men lying down on their faces like they are suntanning? That must not be very comfortable for them. I hope someone cleaned the floor this week, because if no one did, their robes are going to get dirty."

In picture number three, well, in all honesty, I would just leave. The three year old child in me has never quite gotten over a similar scene in Poltergeist.

I recognize, of course, that "distraction" is a relatively subjective concept. One man's chanting is another man's praise band. But somewhere in the supposedly irreconcilably subjective, taste and culture driven formless blob that is the worship wars, there must the anchor of this simple, objective fact: The Church is the place where the sheep hear the voice of their Shepherd. And because of this, pastors ought to be careful not to get in the way of that happening.

My goal with this blog is to explore this issue. And any others that may come up in the process.

My name is Pastor Hans Fiene. Thanks for reading.