I finished my adult education class last night. The majority of the time we spent reading The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals, a quite excellent book outlining what Confessional Lutheranism looks and feels like. I have some minor quibbles with the book as far as his take on Lutheranism and Lutheran doctrine, but all in all, if one wants to get a feel for what the LCMS is/could have been, it’s pretty good. What worked well about the class is that I intentionally structured it as an information class, not necessarily as a catechetical/membership class. It made the non-Lutheran participants more comfortable and took the pressure off “buying it” and placed it on understanding it. What didn’t work so well is that now the class is finished, … Read entire article »