Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is interviewed by Pastor Todd Wilkens on the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod radio program “Issues etc.”
You can listen to her conversation here.
After the interview is over and after Jefferts Schori hangs up, Wilkens does a something interesting: he says something like “Don’t even think for a minute there’s any way she can ontologically incarnate the office of the bishop” because she is a she. But he assures his listeners that he calls her “bishop” only to be polite.
This is polite? To interview her, let her go, and then discredit her by virtue of the office she holds?
The other thing he does is categorically discredit the entirety of the Episcopal Church by holding out their “orthodoxy” by comparison. In a question Wilkens posed about the divisions of the Episcopal Church, the Presiding Bishop could have mentioned all those other Lutheran Churches that separated from the LCMS as examples of this kind of history not being restricted to the Episcopal Church, but then she was, I think, trying to be polite as well.
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There’s a reason Garrison Keillor calls the LCMS the “Misery Synod”! ;-/
JC Fisher
[But you would think Pastor Wilkens might be aware of the several passages in the Bible condemning speaking ill of someone behind their back? Poor show!]
If we can recall how brittle some folks in LCMS can be about such issues, I can well imagine that the interviewer had a reasonable and realistic concern that his own license and orders might be at risk had he not given that disclaimer. Remember that an LCMS pastor was charged with violation of his orders simply for sharing the stage with (among others) an imam at an event remember September 11 and calling for peace. The event was not styled by the designers as “worship;” but he was formally charged with worshipping with a non-Christian for his participation.
Marshall Scott
As an ex-LCMS member who still has family in that church, the fact that a Missouri Synod pastor engaged in a somewhat respectful dialogue without insulting the PB is amazing.