Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Where Do They Need Us?

Two things primarily shape this post. 1 - I was getting ready to post some Sasse quotes. 2 - The looming shortage of calls, where pastors cannot find pulpits to fill.

Hermann Sasse was a great theologian. He was German. He ended up in Australia. I read him here in American. The world is more interconnected than we thing - the Church spreads throughout the whole world.

America is turning her back on God, as was Europe and Germany in the mid 20th Century. Sasse left. He was needed in Australia.

Where do they need us now? Where do they need men who long only to faithfully preach and baptize and commune and teach? It is looking less and less like it is America - or at least where we are right now. There are places in America that need pastors, and places around the world. Where do they need us?

And I'm not speaking simply of some board in the LCMS organizing missionary plants (either home or abroad) - we've done that for far too long.

No - raid us. Call our pastors to be your own. If there are a few of you in some city who want to be Confessional Lutheran - form a congregation and call someone - either a single guy who isn't afraid to be a boarder, who like Christ shrugs when he sees that he has no place to rest his head. Call someone whose wife can support - and see what growth comes - call one willing to be a worker-priest -- but let the Word and Sacraments be there!

To those overseas and in need - call our pastors to be your own. We have a glut - surely there are some here who would go, for men in every age have forsaken home and family to go and preach the Word. Call, ask, request. There are those eager to preach, those who have no parish - perhaps they will come.

Just as a dandelion bursts into a bunch of seeds as it dies - well, if this sad, greedy Church dies, let it send forth the Word of God to the four winds, and let new growth take place.

Where do they need us?

(And somewhere Jay Hobson mother vows that if her son ends up in Africa, she will hunt me down and beat me)

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