Monday, October 1, 2007

Rev. Ash's response to a letter Pres. Schroeder sent to all WELS pastors

from the Church and Change discussion forum:

President Schroeder asked us to especially pay attention to a resolution which was passed at the lastest synod convention. One of the resolves reads: "that we commit ourselves to expand mission efforts at home and throughout the world, using both traditional and innovative means of Gospel outreach, as God provides the resources..." We believe our Church And Change convention on October15-17, 2007, is one of the resources which the Lord is providing to help our people learn about "innovative means of Gospel outreach" which they might employ in their own congregation. Each devotional service will include a different format which will allow you to discover various new ways technology can be used such as powerpoint, video clips, etc. You can to go our website for information concerning the convention and to register online www.churchandchange.org

Rev. Ash

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog heading could be a little misleading. President Schroeder's encouragement did not come in a letter to Church and Change. It was in his initial letter to all the pastors, directing them to the entire resolution passed by the convention in which the direction of the synod was set. That direction featured a number of important things, including a restatement of the synod's core priorities (missions and ministerial education) and a commitment to expand efforts in those areas. Hopefully Pastor Ash was aware of the rest of the resolution and is not remembering only this one small phrase. The convention resolution's use of the term does not appear to be a blanket endorsement of any and all means that some may label "innovative." Some innovative ways of approaching mission work (such as working with congregations to plant daughter congregations or new ways of working with national churches) are good; some are not.

John said...

I have revised the title. Rev. Ash's note was a bit confusing because he uses the pronoun "we" without an antecedent.

John said...

Isn't it odd that Rev. Ash directs you to the church and change website to register. You go there and then you are redirected to the wels.net site to complete your registration.

I will anxiously await a review of the convention. Are any readers out there innovative enough to say that "yes" I am going?

If you do go I will post your unedited thoughts on bailingwater.

Norman Teigen said...

An ELS pastor was going to attend the C & C conference but cancelled when another ELS pastor accused him and the WELS of false doctrine re C & C.

Isn't this a little bit crazy? It seems so to me. I wrote in my blog that I was getting false doctrine fatigue from all of this.

Norman Teigen
ELS layman

John said...

For those of you wishing to purchase the DVD collection of the Church and Change conference, Rev. Ash has announced that for "a variety of reasons we will not be taping the conference."

Anonymous said...

And apparently, C&C is not technologically advanced enough to do online streaming. According to Ron Ash: "We are not that high tech yet."

That seems strange for a group that is advocating "innovation in ministry methods" and that promotes itself as a "home room" for WELS innovators, "who are interested in pushing the envelope of "gospel delivery systems."

Even the last couple of WELS synod conventions were streamed online or otherwise made available to those who were not in attendance. Is C&C really that technologically illiterate? Or perhaps there are there other reasons that C&C doesn't want its conference presentations recorded?

Anonymous said...

"Is C&C really that technologically illiterate?"

From someone that is technologically literate-- online streaming requires a lot of bandwidth, which can be expensive and requires a fair amount of infrastructure to do it right.

WELS has apparently invested to be able to do that through their "streams.wels.net" website and has covered convention, MLC & WLS graduation and call services, and perhaps other events.

For C&C to do it, I assume it would be quite costly, unless they worked with synod to do it... which I'm sure you guys would look down upon considering the amount of flack given for the C&C application page being hosted on the WELS website.