Bold and Brazen
The enemies of confessional Lutheranism in our midst are going full throttle at seeking to train pastors to their liking, at their preferred online institutions, and there will no doubt be some heavy debates on the question of residential seminary training at this summer’s LCMS convention. The reasons they like to give have to do with the need for pastors and the financial burdens imposed upon seminarians, but we know the real reason: they don’t agree with confessional Lutheran theology. Our chief blogger Larry Beane has documented the myriad of problems with their approach, and it bears repeating that their rejection of Biblical inerrancy, their acceptance of lady “pastors,” and their affinity for the excesses of various ELCA sacrilegious tendencies are something with which LCMS members should want nothing to do.
I just received word from our friend Tom Halvorson that he and his assistant have produced and posted legible versions of some reports in the convention workbook (the print had been too small to read easily without magnification), including Report R13.3 (2026), Report on Unapproved Programs Preparing for the Office of the Holy Ministry. This report shows unequivocally that it is utterly unacceptable to permit the alternate routes to seminary education being proposed.
The report identifies the people promoting these alternatives:
Since at least 2020, the Rev. Dr. Tim Ahlman, along with his congregation Christ Lutheran Greenfield and the ULC, an organization dedicated to “connecting the dots between theology, ministry, and leadership to empower you to spread the Gospel in explosive ways,” running what Ahlman on his podcasts, Lead Time and the Tim Ahlman Podcast, has repeatedly referred to as an “experiment.” This experiment consists of enrolling students from Christ Lutheran Greenfield and numerous other LCMS congregations in LHOS to receive a degree from Kairos University, a completely online program for theological study. Students may enroll in an M.A. in counseling or an M.Div.
In addition, in February 2025 at the pre-conference in Phoenix, Ariz., for Best Practices in Ministry, the Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Kloha announced a new initiative through the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) to create an online-only M.Div. program known as the Center for Missional and Pastoral Leadership (CMPL). Earlier, less public, announcements of the launch of CMPL were made by Tim Ahlman and Jeff Kloha at the Large Church Network Conference in San Diego on Jan. 24–25, 2025, and on Facebook on Feb. 7, 2025, respectively. The program confers M.A., M.M., and M.Div. degrees.
The report goes on to document the fact that, in sharp contrast to the Synod’s seminaries, the faculty members for these online schools are not committed to the inerrancy of Scripture or a quia subscription to the Lutheran Confessions, and, to the contrary, the curriculum’s reading list “is utterly dominated by Steven Paulson, Gerhard Forde and James Nestingen, ELCA and former ELCA theologians. With their well-known problems in the areas of scriptural inerrancy, the atonement and the third use of the law, and their Barth-inflected proclamation theology, the preponderance of these authors in the secondary literature that makes up so much of the curriculum represents a significant divergence from confessional Lutheranism. According to one student, LCMS theologians and teaching are often used as a foil.”
It turns out that these people are garden variety liberals, such as infected the St. Louis seminary in the 1960s and early ‘70s.
The report is worth a careful read, especially by delegates preparing for the convention, and it ought to make us willing to be as bold about our confession as these people are about their subjugation of it, to the point of initiating effective means of cleansing our Synod from their menace.