It is Time to Say the Quiet Part Out Loud
This statement, “It is time to say the quiet part out loud” is the one line in this video that I agree with. We have been far too accommodating and far too interested in “Peace, peace, when there is no peace” instead of saying the hard truths.
We all need to start speaking out publicly and boldly, pastors and laity, and acknowledge that we are not walking together. We do not believe the same things. Guys like this pastor, the Rev. Matt Popovits, from Houston, and others like him, want to change our synod. They want to change us. They want to change our formation practices.
We need to say the quiet part out loud: we’re tired of these guys, their effeminate “worship songs,” their wannabe-non-denominational variety show worship, the unmanly way they carry themselves, and their abominable preaching. They bring shame on all of us. And now, they want to revolutionize the way we form pastors. They want to exert power over us. Well, let’s say the quiet part out loud: they can pound sand. If this pastor and his fellow crybaby podcasters are so unhappy with being shackled to the rest of us, to having to have seminary trained pastors (the horror!), if they want to continue to practice open communion in opposition to our synod’s practice, if they want to reject our hymnal and our authentic Lutheran liturgical practices - then they should leave. We should not have to put up with them. They are an embarrassment. They make all of look bad with their monkeyshines.
We don’t need “conversations.” We need our pastors - preachers and celebrants, teachers and Seelsorgers - to be manly. We don’t need to sit around with a pot of herbal tea and a box of Kleenex and talk about our feelings. We’re done with “conversations.” You are not going to talk us into what you want. We get it. You want to bypass seminary. You want non-liturgical worship. You want airy-fairy pep talks instead of sermons. We already know what you’re going to say. You want to be casual and nonchalant around what we believe is a miraculous manifestation of God breaking into space and time. But you can’t be bothered to even put on so much as a surplice in the Holy of Holies. That’s too much of an imposition for you. You can’t be bothered to walk with us and use the synod’s (you know, that word that means “walking together”?) hymnal. But we are the ones guilty of divisiveness. What you really want is our acceptance, our acquiescence. Well, you’re not going to get it.
We’re tired of your whining and gaslighting. You want to fight us, then expect a fight. We’re not going to roll over and let you change the way we train our pastors. We’ll fight you at convention. We’ll fight you on social media. We’ll fight you in blogs and journals. We are not going to be bullied by the likes of you.
We need to say the quiet part out loud: pastors and laity are embarrassed by pastors like you and your congregations.
I went to Pastor Popovits’s congregation’s YouTube channel to see how they treat the holy things. The video is below. Of course, what dominates the picture is a jumbotron, as well as a pop band on stage. The pastors are, of course, in street clothes, because why would you not be casual in a holy place, right? You can start at minute 20:55 for the rambling confession and ex corde prayer followed by the absolution pronounced by the vicar. At minute 24:54, the celebrant comes out, introduces himself as “T.J., one of the pastors here.” At least this guy is ordained. There is a ciborium and a chalice on a scant altar. The celebrant more or less says the Words of Institution correctly (although with the good old Reformed fractio panis) as the guitars play in the background. After the consecration, he explains who should commune:
This is the Lord's table and all are invited. But if you're not sure what you believe or maybe you've got a student or a child with you who hasn't been instructed in the faith, we still invite everyone to come forward. But for those who aren't sure or haven't been instructed to merely cross your arms and we'll be happy to give you a blessing. If you have any dietary restrictions, we have gluten-free wafers available or grape juice. Just ask the communion attendant.
Where are all of these elements that were supposedly consecrated? This is a large congregation. I’m assuming that they have individual glasses. Where are the “towers of power” (the stackable trays that we typically see in large churches)? Where are all of these supposedly consecrated grape juices and gluton-free wafers (not to mention the gluton-laden ones)? They are certainly not there on the altar. And why are the people self-stewarding the mysteries? It’s up to them to figure out if they should be communing or not. There is no mention of our walking together in Holy Communion, that we are in fellowship with other LCMS churches and other church bodies around the world who are in fellowship with us. No, unless you’re “not sure what you believe,” you can commune there. And this is especially ironic, because Pastor Popovits shot his video in Finland, where a Lutheran pastor’s wife and a Lutheran bishop are being persecuted by the radical wing of church and state that insist on “ordaining” women and recognizing homosexual “marriages.” But Pastor Popovits’s congregation in Houston would admit such people who are persecuting these Christians to their altar, including ELCA members, Episcopalians, and pretty much any and all who want to commune. In fact, here is their communion statement from their website. Is this what they consider walking together?
What an insult to the many of our brethren around the world who have suffered for the sake of a pure confession, who courageously refuse to be in fellowship even with those who claim the title “Lutheran” if they don’t believe as we do. St. Mark’s in Houston just says, “Y’all come.” They don’t care whether your church is in altar and pulpit fellowship with us or not. They will be in fellowship, and walk together with, anyone they want to.
Anyway, here is the worship service:
And Pastor Popovits claims the moral authority to lecture and scold the rest of us. Who is not walking with whom here? Why is a vicar doing the absolution, when we confess in our Small Catechism that the administration of the Office of the Keys is the pastor’s vocation? I’m assuming this congregation teaches the Small Catechism. How do they work around that little inconvenience? Even the hymnal has a rubric that assigns this responsibility to the pastor (that’s what that red P means before the absolution on page 185), as well as in the language itself: “by virtue of my office, as a called and ordained servant of the Word, announce the grace of God unto all of you, and in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It’s pretty easy to conduct a faithful, authentic service, walking together with all of us, just by following the hymnal.
Oh, that’s right. They don’t use the hymnal. They don’t use any of our synod’s Divine Services. They don’t sing the same hymns as the rest of us. They are not walking with us. But we are the problem.
And if you keep going to minute 44:00, you get to hear what they consider to be a sermon. It’s a train-wreck. Don’t take my word for it. Go ahead. Play it. It’s an embarrassment, complete with pictures of toys flashed up on the jumbotron, along with stills from the TV show Duck Dynasty. If my seventeen-year old self had read the Augsburg Confession, and then come to a service like this, I would not be a Lutheran today. I would have concluded that these are not serious people, and that they don’t really believe this stuff. Thank God that didn’t happen.
But Pastor Popovits says this in his video (3:29): “We want to safeguard the teaching of the church. So do I. We want to protect against heterodoxy. So do I. We want to ensure a clear confession and unity in practice. So do I.” Unity in practice? Has he lost his marbles? They don’t use our liturgy or our hymns, we have no idea whether the elements they’re giving people were really consecrated, the vicar is doing the absolution, and the sermon is like an extended informercial. Unity in practice?
Do you really want this guy telling the rest of us how to do things?
And listen to Pastor Popovits harp on unity (of all things!):
Their fear is that forming pastors locally within our already fragmented landscape will only increase the fragmentation, especially in worship practice. And yet the solution that they offer is to double down on the one system that hasn't produced the uniformity that they're insisting on traditional residential seminary formation. In other words, the very approach that failed to unify us is now being presented as the only way to prevent further disunity. Make it make sense.
Yes, he really said this (minute 4:14). You cannot make this stuff up. What has failed to unify us is the fact that we have pastors like Pastor Popovits who refuse to walk with us. It’s no wonder he, and his fellow crybaby podcaster scolds want to short-circuit our seminaries. Does he really think we are all that stupid? And he has the gall to accuse “our leaders” of not caring about our “confessions” (6:31). I’m not a leader, but I agree with their emphasis on forming pastors at seminary, and I disagree with Pastor Popovits. Therefore, according to Pastor Popovits, I don’t care about our confessions either.
Well, Pastor Popovits can go pound sand. And that’s the family-friendly version.
I became a Lutheran because I read the Augsburg Confession when I was seventeen years old, and was baptized a year later. I love our confessions. Sixteen years later, I moved to Atlanta, went to the local LCMS church, and was shocked and appalled by what went on there: a skit performed at the holy altar, lounge-singers, crappy “praise” music, a joke of a sermon, no liturgy, and a pastor cracking jokes while administering the Holy Sacrament. And before the service, when I asked an elder about communing (presuming closed communion), he told me no worries, “Pastor is cool.”
Maybe this is the problem. We don’t want “cool” pastors. We want faithful pastors. We want authentically Lutheran pastors. We want manly pastors who take their callings seriously. This is why lay people will drive an hour or two to attend a liturgical service with solid preaching instead of the happy-clappy LCMS congregation that is ten minutes away.
This service in Atlanta that I attended was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was gross. It made a mockery of Article 24 and of our Lord Himself. In the skit, one of the actors sat right in front of the altar with his back to it, ballcap on backwards, acting like he was picking dirt out from his nails. And the worshippers laughed. They laughed at the show. And that was the point. It reminded me of when Jesus went to raise Jairus’s daughter, and the crowds laughed at Him. He came to raise the dead, “and they laughed at Him.” It reminded me of the golden calf worship, where the people “rose up to play.” And the advocates of this kind of frivolous spectacle inevitably justify it by appealing to Formula 10 , you know the same article that condemns “useless and foolish spectacles, which serve neither good order, Christian discipline, nor evangelical decorum in the church” (FC SD 10:7) and that changes in ceremonies ought to be done with great caution “without frivolity and offense, but in an orderly and appropriate way… salutary for good order, Christian discipline, evangelical decorum, and the edification of the church” (FC SD 10:9). Yes, that Article 10. Maybe they’re counting on you not actually reading it for yourself.
My poor wife was a new Lutheran (and former Roman Catholic), and she was beyond confused. I called our former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Fred Baue, and asked him what the you-know-what was that? He said it was called “church growth.” Yeah, it’s a growth all right. And it’s malignant. In the parking lot after this abomination, my wife said, “Maybe you’ll just have to do it yourself.” Shortly afterwards, Dr. Baue asked me if I had ever considered going to seminary. Two years later, I was a seminarian - as a residential MDiv student. And yes, that really is the gold standard. And like many of my classmates, I gave up a lucrative career, never looked back, moved all of my possessions into a single-wide trailer in Fort Wayne - and it was so worth it. At age forty, I was ordained. I took ordination vows mentioning these beloved confessional documents that Pastor Popovits says I must not care about, and dedicated the rest of my life to proclaiming Jesus: to preaching, teaching, and administering the Holy Sacraments according to the Bible and the confessions. What pastor has ever said this to Jesus: “See, we have left everything and followed you” (Luke 18:28) with regret?
So the suggestion that people who support our seminaries don’t care about the confessions is one bodacious false accusation - especially coming from a guy who thinks the services at his church confess that: “In our churches Mass is celebrated every Sunday and on other festivals when the sacrament is offered to those who wish for it after they have been examined and absolved. We keep traditional liturgical forms, such as the order of the lessons, prayers, vestments, etc.” (Apology 24:1), and that “the priest stands daily at the altar, inviting some to the Communion and keeping back others” (Augustana 24:36-37). Really?
We’re tired of being embarrassed by these guys and their congregations, and we’ve really had enough of their scoldy false accusations, gaslighting, entertainment worship, and ruining our reputation as a church body. If they’re so unhappy, they should leave. If they know so much about how to train pastors locally, then they should go away from us and train their own pastors in whatever way they want. Show us rubes (who don’t care about the confessions, by the way) how it’s done. If they know so much about how to grow the church in a post-Christian culture, then they should have at it and sever their ties to the rest of us who are only holding them back.
Yes, we need to start saying the quiet part out loud.