Rev Gregory P Schulz, DMin, PhD
Professor of Theology and Academic Dean
The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya
This is what a seasoned and faithful Lutheran pastor here in Africa told me last week. He asked me to tell the LC-MS, “Leave us to our poverty, and stop interfering with God’s Word in Africa and our Lutheran Seminary in Kenya!” It was a thrill to hear him speak matter-of-factly about The Lutheran School of Theology (LST) in Kimuka, Kenya as his seminary.
It is not a metaphor for this pastor to speak of the Lutheran School as “our African inheritance.” The LST, with its self-sustaining campus, its internationally accredited curriculum and tent-making training for African Lutheran evangelists, deaconesses, and pastors – this seminary is destined to be turned over to the genuinely Lutheran and Confessional churches of Africa just as soon as we achieve a majority of African Lutheran lecturers and professors on our faculty, and the African Lutheran churches are providing the majority of financial support needed to sustain it.
Along the way to fulfilling our mission to hand over the LST to Africans in the near future, we are already a place for the further theological training, and regular discussions of genuine Lutheran teaching and practice for today’s African Lutheran bishops and pastors, as you will learn in a few paragraphs.
But the Missouri Synod is attacking our divinely called Director and Missionary Founder, and they are subverting this African Lutheran Seminary by importing boatloads of money while fostering slander and lies, here in Africa and back in the United States.
I am writing this to you, dear reader in Christ, because I promised that I would see to it that the people and pastors of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod hear this plea from Africa.
“Stop interfering with God’s Word in Africa”
This brother’s plea is an arresting revision of the apostle Paul’s Macedonian call, you see (Acts 16). The New Testament Macedonians called to the apostle Paul to bring the Gospel that he was preaching in Asia over to their country; by contrast, this wise African pastor is calling on the LC-MS to leave his homeland because the Missouri Synod is harming the work of the Gospel on his continent and in his seminary. This is not merely a matter of bad practice. It is also a problem of false doctrine on the part of the Missouri Synod administration, as I will explain.
The Missouri Synod has been doing great harm to the Lutheran churches here in Africa, just as they have been doing harm to the Lutheran churches in Sri Lanka. And it needs to stop, as this pastor says. The LC-MS needs to leave, and to take their money and false doctrine with them.
As documented in our watchdog publication, Christian News, in April, 2025 and online, Missouri Synod Divides Self-Governing “Partner Church” in Sri Lanka. LC-MS officials used financial and ecclesiastical threats to manhandle the local congregations, a fledgling Lutheran church body, and the faithful Lutheran pastors, along with at least one faithful expat LC-MS missionary, in that Asian island-country.
In response to doctrinal corrections from missionary Dr. Edward Naumann, and the native Sri Lankan pastors in council, the LC-MS made financial and fellowship threats to get their way. For example, without responding to any of the doctrinal and practical points made in a letter from the Sri Lankan council, one Missouri Synod official wrote, “Your letter amounts to a refusal to comply with directions from our leadership. Please be assured that the leadership of the LCMS is keenly observing this situation and there will be consequences for any disruption of the organization.”
The LC-MS has been keenly manhandling the Lord’s work in Africa in the same way, although on a much bigger scale. In June 2025, during the convention of the Minnesota South District of the LC-MS in the Unites States, an LC-MS pastor publicly accused Rev. James May, Director of the LST, in absentia of being charged with attempted murder in Africa and of dividing and disrespecting African bishops. One month ago, this same pastor represented the LC-MS here, in Africa, in a meeting of some African bishops—mostly bishops not associated with the Lutheran School in Kenya—repeating his false accusations, sponsoring angry young Africans who hated the School because the LST was “too hard” and would not pay them to attend—young men who were paid to repeat their anger in that meeting.
In reality, that accusation of attempted murder was filed years ago by a former Lutheran bishop who was himself an angry old African. The charge, and a number of other accusations, was dismissed immediately and officially, as soon as the Kenyan authorities began to investigate. In fact, the accuser was officially reprimanded by the government. There are official paperwork and newspaper clippings proving this.
When that LC-MS pastor says that Rev. May was showing disrespect and sowing dissension among the African bishops, he is lying by omission and by equivocation. Some African Lutheran bishops – generally, bishops who have never set foot on the LST campus – claim to be offended whenever we or our well-trained students, on the way to becoming African pastors, correct their false doctrine, and their conduct when their words and actions are contrary to Scripture and our Lutheran Confessions.
For example, sometimes students come to us with recommendations from bishops who have certified in writing, “Yes, this one is Confirmed.” But it turns out that the student (and often the bishop himself) cannot recite even one part of Luther’s Small Catechism. We require the student to memorize and recite all Six Parts with explanations word for word before he can commune in our LST divine services. We also strongly urge the bishop who does not know the Catechism to memorize it himself, and to teach the catechism word for word to all of his pastors and every student whom he recommends for the LST. So, bishops who have never visited the Lutheran School, as well as bishops whom we urge to memorize and teach Luther’s Small Catechism – these are the bishops who tell everyone who will listen, “They are not showing us bishops proper respect and so the LST is upsetting the whole church!”
The problem is that the LC-MS is supporting and endorsing those African bishops who make angry and malicious accusations of murder, disruption, disrespect for church leaders, and what-not. The Missouri Synod is financially supporting men in Africa, Africans and Americans, who are opposed to Lutheran doctrine and practice, but in favor of receiving money. The Synod is on the side of bishops and others who have not yet learned the most basic of our Lutheran Confessions and refuse, so far, even to read the book at the heart of Lutheran education and concord. The LC-MS is supporting, encouraging, and stirring up African Lutherans who do not want to be educated in Luther’s Small Catechism, and who do not want Luther and the Scriptures to be educating anyone else, either.
That self-identified Lutheran pastor from Minnesota may be unbelievably naive, but he is nevertheless in revolt against our Lord’s commandment not to bear false witness. He is also trespassing against the biblical and Lutheran teaching of the divine call, which Pastor May in fact has had ever since he set foot on African soil seventeen years ago.
If the oft-used term “ecclesiastical supervision” means anything, his district president and our Minnesota brethren would be implementing Deuteronomy 19:16-19 against that pastor. This pastor who has falsely accused his brother, Pastor May, in front of everyone in Minnesota and on YouTube, and now, face to face with many people here in Africa in these past two or three months alone, ought to be dismissed for cause. If, that is, “ecclesiastic supervision,” as it is called, means anything biblical in the LC-MS.
If this one individual is not dismissed, all of us in LC-MS congregations will find that such bad actors as this Minnesota pastor – who is causing division among the African bishops – will be undermining the work of faithful pastors in the United States too. If this sort of disruptive conduct – already taking place on both sides of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, mind you – goes unaddressed, we should fear that synod officials such as LC-MS district presidents, mission directors, etc. will find ways to re-imagine our entire doctrine of the divine call. It’s not impossible that they may stoop to inventing special “statuses” that enable them to treat called and ordained servants of the Word however they want…
The False Doctrine-and-Practice of LC-MS in Africa
There are other reasons that Missouri Synod administrators want to interfere with and shut down The Lutheran School of Theology, here in Kenya. Money and accountability reasons. For example, African pastors who have been in the ministry and have lived or served in our area anytime over the past fifteen years or so, can provide tours of various buildings, here and there, in and near Nairobi (just on the other side of the Ngong Hills from our campus) which were built with money originally sent to Africa by LC-MS leaders for social projects, such as an orphanage, for instance, that were never built and used. In so many words, the LC-MS has been financing social justice and church growth projects in Kenya and in a number of African countries, and has been doing it irresponsibly, with the outcome that our mission money has for some time been fueling corruption in Africa.
“Stop interfering with God’s Word…” Setting aside for a moment the problems created in Africa via Missouri Synod money and lies, there is the problem of LC-MS doctrine adversely affecting Christ’s churches here. Remember, my fellow Lutherans, that there is no such thing as doctrine by itself or church practice by itself. Doctrine and practice are always reciprocal. “By their fruit you shall know them” (Matthew 7). In terms of doctrine-and-practice, then, the Missouri Synod is fracturing Lutheran churches, and undermining our faithful African Lutheran bishops and pastors with its words and actions regarding fellowship.
This doctrinal and practical problem is best explained in light of the official actions of our North Dakota District this summer of 2025. This LC-MS district recently passed an official recommendation that the LC-MS sever fellowship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya (ELCK) because some of our ELCK bishops have had relationships with other, heterodox church bodies who in fact teach against biblical and Lutheran doctrine.
The brethren in North Dakota were right to make their recommendation, based on the information available to them. But the fellowship problem – which we at the LST have been trying to help our nearby bishops to correct – was instigated by the LC-MS in the first place.
When the Missouri Synod officially entered into fellowship with the ELCK, they never sat down with the ELCK bishops and pastors to find out whether or not they subscribed to our Lutheran Confessions. They never took the opportunity to tutor the ELCK men on how and why to read and study our Confessions. They never paused to teach our African bishops the significance of confessional subscription! Apparently, the working assumption with LC-MS administrators is that any pastor or bishop or church body who self-identifies as “confessional Lutheran” is automatically confessional and Lutheran.
Unfortunately (and un-Lutheran-ly as well), the LC-MS has adopted a paternalistic attitude toward African Lutheran church leaders, the same stance they took toward the Lutherans in Sri Lanka and our faithful missionary there. The Missouri Synod has been practicing what we in the States know as “the soft prejudice of unequal standards” toward the African Lutheran churches on a regular basis. It has been doing this in matters of doctrine and practice, as in the example of fellowship. Again and again and again, the Missouri Synod administration has been leveraging LC-MS offerings and bequests, along with the questionable church authority of its synodical officials, to the great harm of Lutheran churches and Lutheran education in Africa.
This has come to a head in the synod’s tyrannical doctrine-and-practice regarding the divine call. Let me show you briefly from the following miniature Lutheran Disputation, exactly what has become of Missouri Synod doctrine in just one generation. These propositions are directly from one of our trusted and beloved theologians from the end of the last century, Robert Preus. Prof. Preus’s writings on justification are a mainstay of our curriculum. In our dogmatic (systematic theology) course on Christ and His work, in particular. Our African students cannot get enough of how he teaches us that justification is real (something Dr. Preus repeats again and again).
In those same classes, along with others in pastoral care, preaching, and so on, we see in the passages from our Confessions which Preus cites that there is no daylight between the article of justification and the article on the pastors who are called by God to be His preachers and messengers of justification.
Now, the doctrine of the divine call – or rather, the LC-MS’s arbitrary and capricious revision of the Lutheran doctrine of the divine call – is at the heart of the Missouri Synod’s attack on Africa. The LC-MS administration has for years been attacking the called and ordained director of the Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya by placing him into a man-made category of called pastors which they refer to as “restricted status.” This was done without any due process whatsoever. Furthermore, this fictional status is their cover-up for a campaign here in Africa that has been underway since before the LC-MS attack against native Lutheran pastors and our own LC-MS missionary in Sri Lanka.
To counter the current LC-MS administration’s twenty-first century mutation of the biblical Lutheran teaching of the divine call, I have put together sixteen of Robert Preus’s statements from his 1991 essay, “The Doctrine of the Call in The Confessions and Lutheran Orthodoxy,” in the form of a Lutheran Disputation. This makes for easy reading and teaching. The two-page Lutheran Disputation on the Divine Call is available online at LutheranPhilosopher.com. Here is a sampling of Preus’s propositions, renumbered for this essay.
1. According to the Lutheran Confessions theology and practice are a complete and inextricable unity…In respect to any and all articles of faith, if the doctrine, practice, or worship is errant or not in joint, all will be errant and out of joint (2).
2. This inexorable fact is especially clear in the case of Augustana XIV, which speaks of the divine call of suitable men into the public ministry of the Word. Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession presents a doctrine of the call…a practice which comes down from apostolic times.
3. Ministers are deposed and put out of the holy ministry or restricted without cause from being called. This aberration in practice which in fact denies the doctrine of Augsburg Confession XIV occurs in a multiplicity of ways.
4. [For example, a] district president may place a pastor who is in office or who has been deposed from office, either rightly or wrongfully on “restricted status.” If this is done prior to due process (Deuteronomy 19:17; Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, 51, 74, 75), it is a per se violation of the minister’s call according to Augsburg Confession XIV or of his right to receive a call, and constitutes a tyrannical imposition of the lesser ban.
“and stop interfering with God’s Word in…our Lutheran Seminary in Kenya!”
The latest threat is that the LC-MS administration is going to get rid of Rev. James May by not renewing his restricted status. Really? In Lutheran doctrine, as we just read from Robert Preus, there is no such thing as a restricted status, no room for such an innovation, so where did that nonsense come from in the first place? Pastor May, and every called and ordained servant of the Word sidelined by this made-up status, should be released from this tyrannical purgatory of “restricted status” forthwith.
Furthermore, that cheap DIY synodical bylaw, LC-MS Bylaw 3.8.3.1 investing power to call or terminate, to fund or defund missionaries in synodical administrators, and so on, is nothing but a cheesy effort to codify a patently unbiblical and anti-Lutheran teaching. The divine call, dear friends, is a divine call and not an at-will employee relationship. This is true for every pastor in the LC-MS and beyond. We pastors are called and ordained servants of the Word Himself, not synod loyalists.
If the LC-MS administration had a conscience, and if they loved the African people in Christ, they would be rejoicing at what the Lord is doing through His servant of the Word, Rev. James May, in Africa. The true Lutherans in Africa know him as the Lutheran pastor who comes to their countries and their villages at need; who baptizes their babies freely and without charge, using the powerful Word of God; who teaches scores of Masai children the Bible and Luther’s Catechism (the whole thing by heart!) in the nearby grade school; who teaches against false doctrine in such a way that African pastors learn how to defend the faith themselves; who has built what our African bishops (the ones who actually “come and see” what the Lord of the church is doing in this place) recently called “our University of Wittenberg.” They wrote this to the district president of the South Minnesota District when responding to yet another LC-MS witch hunt – excuse me, another “ecclesiastical supervision” inquisition – into Pastor James May.
Those bishops also wrote in their official letter to the LC-MS district president involved, when they learned what the LC-MS has been doing to our divinely called director for all these years, “Our question for you is, ‘Why would anyone want to be in fellowship with a church such as the LC-MS?’” Theirs is not a rhetorical question.
Last Sunday, August in 2025, The Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya presented six well-trained pastor candidates for divine calls into Lutheran congregations in Africa. One graduate has already been accepted into the Masters of Theology program by Concordia St. Catharines in Canada. This is our first class of African graduates, barely ten years after the LST land was purchased, exclusively with freewill offerings directly from Lutheran congregations and motivated Lutherans around the world.
Visitors in attendance at this first graduation service thanked God again and again for this historic day for Lutherans in Africa and marveled at the reality that this entire campus with its accredited academic and tent-making curriculum, its beautiful rock solid buildings and self-sustaining farm and animals, its self-sustaining water and electric, will become their responsibility, once we achieve a stable faculty majority of African Lutheran lecturers and professors, and their own Lutheran churches take up responsibility for the majority of its financial support, shoulder to shoulder with the School. (“Shoulder to shoulder” is the African concept of fellowship.)
And on that day which the Lord made, African Lutheran bishops, who had already been on campus for a full week of theological study together with us and our graduating students, asked me quietly, one after another, if I could get them their own copy of the Lutheran Confessions for them to read and teach—and then, they told me, sometimes holding onto my hand even after the handshakes, leaning in, shoulder to shoulder, “We want to come back to our campus to sit in on your classes to learn with our future African pastors. We also ask that you would please have classes for us every year to learn more as Lutheran bishops.”
The Leviathan in the Room
My favorite elephant proverb in Africa is, “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” A favorite elephant proverb in the States is, “No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room.” In place of elephants, our Lord and His inspired Hebrew writers speak about Leviathan. Leviathan is a creature of the Lord, a monstrous sea creature that is far too big and far too powerful for man to defeat. Only the Creator Himself can manage Leviathan (Job 41 and Psalm 104).
In today’s LC-MS, the Leviathan in the room is our monstrous administrations, the administration of the Missouri Synod itself and the administrations of its Concordia Universities. What has happened to most of the Concordias in the LC-MS’s Concordia University System (CUS) has happened in the LC-MS more broadly. Maybe it is the same giant, amorphous Leviathan in both cases.
The CUS universities, by and large, have turned out to be secular universities with a minority of Lutheran students and a minority of confessing Lutheran professors on faculty. This is traceable to the monstrous growth of their administrations. These administrations are inevitably staffed with many administrators who are not qualified, and with some who are disqualified, according God’s Word.
For example, at last count, at least two of the Concordias in the U.S. have women as provosts; another one, Concordia, Austin, has a woman president. Provosts, who are known as “academic deans” in smaller Lutheran colleges and seminaries, are senior administrators who exercise authority over the teaching of the professors. Normally it is the provost who disciplines professors, supervises their teaching, and directs the hiring and firing of all professors – including, in the case of the Concordias, the LC-MS pastor-professors in theology, philosophy and other disciplines, who are divinely called and ordained.
But women provosts, just like women pastors, are contrary to the Word of God. In 1 Timothy 2:12 Saint Paul writes with apostolic authority, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet.” In other words, women are biblically disqualified from having authority over the teaching of Scripture. This is a doctrine-and-practice problem if, that is, the LC-MS Concordias are Lutheran Schools in the Lutheran church. (For more, see the book, Anatomy of an Implosion, especially Chapter Four, and Appendix R, available on Amazon.com sites worldwide.)
The overall required qualification for teaching in Christ’s church and thus in her institutions is what Saint Paul calls the “aptitude to teach” in 1 Timothy 3:2. This teaching aptitude is not generic but specific. Teaching in the church must be done by the pastors and teachers whom the ascended Christ gives to His church (Ephesians 4) and they must demonstrate the aptitude for teaching God’s Word—not teaching just any subject, but, in every subject teaching the Scriptures. This is required in all Lutheran “churches and schools.”
The model for Lutheran higher education is the University of Wittenberg of Luther and Chemnitz’s day, and certainly not Concordia universities such as Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), the “flagship of the CUS,” where the Lutheran Formula of Concord (the Formula) has been studiously ignored for the vetting and training of its professors and administrators alike, ever since its incorporation as a university. The faculty was, as recently as three years ago, being trained in Critical Race Theory (CRT), complete with sessions on “white privilege,” and so on. At the same time, the administration was also maneuvering and scheming to install a Woke Marxist president, a woman both unqualified academically and disqualified biblically for administrative leadership.
Leviathan administrations are the bane of Lutheran higher education, as measured by the gold standard for Lutheran teaching, which is our 1577 Formula of Concord. (See Anatomy of an Implosion, Chapter One.)
And, just like the Leviathan administrations at CUW and the majority of the Concordia universities, the Leviathan administration of the LC-MS rejects the curriculum and pedagogy of the Lutheran Formula by ignoring it. As evidence of their rejection of the Formula, the Leviathan administration(s) punish anyone who insists that Concordias such as CUW; or the Missouri Synod itself in the States, in Sri Lanka, and in Africa—that the Leviathan administrations too must follow the doctrine-and-practice of the Formula.
By rejecting the doctrine-and-practice of the Formula, the Leviathan administrators, that is, the MS portion of the LC-MS, manifest their separation from the Lutheran Church (LC) of the LC-MS.
Here is what I mean. The Formula tells us that “all the Lutheran churches and schools” must declare what exactly it is that “we believe, teach, and confess.” Along with this, they are required to “reject and condemn” all false teaching.
We Lutheran pastors, especially, in all the Lutheran churches and schools – pastors such as Dr. Edward Naumann, formerly missionary to Sri Lanka, and Rev. James May, founding missionary of the LST in Kenya – are required to reject and condemn all false doctrine-and-practice, for the sake of the Gospel.
This leads to the matter of the errant and out of joint doctrine-and-practice in the administration of the LC-MS. The mandate to “reject and condemn” all false teaching is part of our confessional subscription, the sacred oath and promise that we Lutheran pastors each made at our ordination and installation.
But what happened when Rev. James May sought pastoral advice regarding apparent corruption in connection with an LC-MS social project in Africa, and someone else decided on his own to leak Pastor May’s confidential concerns to the internet? What happened when an LC-MS pastor and professor called out the false teaching of Woke Marxism at CUW and its administration’s campaign for a Woke Marxist president? What happened when Ryan Turnipseed, a gifted and conscientious Lutheran grad student voiced his concern online over his church body’s publication of a new study edition of Luther’s Catechism which was peppered with Woke Marxist concepts and inferences? What happened when Rev. Dr. Edward Naumann called on the LCMS officials to give heed to the doctrinal and practical concerns of the fledgling Lutheran churches in Sri Lanka?
Let’s not neglect the other come-along of the administrative Leviathan in the room, namely, the monstrous appetite of the CUS and LC-MS Leviathan(s) for money and donations. When the CUW administration went off the rails very publicly in 2021-2022, I called for a forensic audit to see where the money for their shenanigans was coming from and where it was going. Because of the Leviathan in the room, no one dared even to mention it.
What would we find from a thorough, independent financial audit of the Missouri Synod over the past ten or fifteen years? Is there a correlation between the voracious, Leviathan-sized expenditures to fund our Missouri Synod administration, and the closing, for example, of institutions such as Concordia, Selma? Would CUW have had to withdraw its financial support of Concordia, Ann Arbor to almost nothing if it did not have to fund its Leviathan-sized administration? Because of the Leviathan in the room, we are very unlikely ever to hear the truth.
Our post-synodical world
Time’s up. A large part of the LC-MS’s attack on The Lutheran School of Theology and the called and ordained servant of the Word who is our beloved and highly respected director, is motivated, I suspect, by the dawning realization that we are living in a post-synodical world. Christ’s Word will never pass away, but there is no Scriptural reason to think that the administrative Missouri Synod will never pass away.
To be precise, the doctrine of the Lutheran Church, as defined and exemplified in the 1580 Book of Concord, invites the argument (which I am making, in light of that African pastor’s plea to stop interfering with the Word of God and his LST) that the Lutheran Church will not pass away, but the Leviathan administration of the Missouri Synod will. This is because the definition of church in our unaltered Confessions is this: true churches of Christ exist wherever two or three are gathered in His name around the Word and sacraments. This means that bonafide Lutheran churches will not pass away because the Word that defines them as churches is the Word of God that will never pass away.
But the MS of the LC-MS is not the church, except by conflation with the LC. What our forbears in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant by LC-MS was not that the Leviathan monster of synodical operations should devour Lutheran churches and schools at home and overseas.
Speaking the truth in love and for the sake of souls in need of the Gospel, there is no promise from our Lord that an administrative church that sows division among Asian and African Lutheran churches, as the Missouri Synod has been doing, will continue to exist. Furthermore, as we should all know from the Scripture, that is, from the prophets such as Jeremiah and from the apostles such as Saint Paul, our ascended Lord who gave pastors and teachers to His church to teach and prepare His people for His work (Ephesians 4) will not long tolerate those who presume to ignore and attack His own faithful prophets (Jeremiah 23)—and that is what Edward Naumann from Asia and James May in Africa have been all along, God’s faithful called and ordained servants of the Word. These faithful servants of our Lord are not, not at-will employees of Missouri Synod administrators as prescribed by that arrogant LC-MS Bylaw 3.8.3.1, which places the divine call under the authority of administrators, including those who are themselves no longer servants of the Word. (For more, see the essay, Seminex 2.0, available on Amazon.com sites worldwide.)
There is every reason to believe that our Lord will answer the prayer of my African brother, that the LC-MS would “leave us to our poverty, and stop interfering with God’s Word in Africa and our Lutheran Seminary in Kenya!”and step in Himself, very soon. We have been praying that the Missouri Synod administrators repent, but if they will not, we are also praying in the words of the psalms that the Lord would catch them in their own nets, that He would frustrate their efforts to quash the Gospel work at The Lutheran School of Theology, so that His kingdom will come and His revealed will will be done in Africa as in Heaven.
Let me mention in this connection that the Lutheran seminaries and theological schools funded by the LC-MS, in the regions of Africa from which our students come, have been remarkably non-committal. For example, consider the failed school, Centre Lutherienne Theologique de Togo in Dapaong. The school failed because the LC-MS was giving out free bicycles and money. No accreditation, no transition to African governance. When the money and bicycles ran out the school closed, and many of the Lutheran students became Pentecostals. Non-committal.
Only two Lutheran seminaries on the huge continent of Africa are properly accredited. Our sister school of theology, The Lutheran Seminary in Tshwane (Pretoria), way down in South Africa, and the LST. Schools funded by the LC-MS administration are not accredited, which means they are not committed to institutional continuity—”sustainability,” as the African accrediting agencies call it. In Missouri Synod schools, generally speaking, Lutheran professors come, for a while, and then they go. There are no plans in the Missouri Synod schools to replace faithful Lutheran professors from the U.S. with faithful Lutheran professors from Africa. Non-committal.
Perhaps this non-committal philosophy or theology of Lutheran education from the LC-MS, together with the consequences of their meddling with those of us who are fully committed, are evidence that God is moving in His own time to send the Missouri Synod packing.
We live in a post-synodical world.
Like our much-anticipated Luther Classical College in Casper (LCC), Wyoming, the Lutheran School of Theology is funded, not at the will of a bureaucratic synod, but directly, by engaged Lutherans in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. This is the future of confessional Lutheranism. In the case of LST, this model of direct congregational support for high-fidelity Lutheran education is the present of confessional Lutheranism. This is the twenty-first century paradigm of Lutheran theological education as kingdom work.
It is worth noting, in this regard, that the LC-MS Leviathan attacks the LST with false doctrine regarding Pastor May’s divine call, as if a highly successful Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya was the work of Satan himself. At the same time, the LC-MS officials oppose the LCC, with what they say and what they won’t say, as if such a promising independent Lutheran Classical College was a demonic threat to the Concordia University System. The “tell” is that the Leviathan in the room is utterly incapable of speaking well of, much less rejoicing at the gifts that our Lord is giving to His African churches in Kenya, and to His American churches in Casper. As our Lord says, “By their fruit you shall know them.”
The administrators of the Missouri Synod, if they have any fellowship with the Lutheran church of our LC-MS forebears, from C.F.W. Walther to Robert Preus, need to pack up their bags of money and their false, patronizing “ecclesiastical supervision” of Rev. James May. Let them return to the doctrine of the divine call as Robert Preus and the greater generation of LC-MS taught and practiced it. If they can.
On their way out of Africa, for their own sake, they need to demonstrate respect for the African Lutheran churches and acknowledge the divinity of Rev. May’s call publicly and officially. They must apologize for their actions against the Lord whose servant of the Word our brother, Rev. James May, has been all along.
Meanwhile, as my African brother has said to you, “Leave us to our poverty, and stop interfering with God’s Word in Africa, and our Lutheran Seminary in Kenya!”