Pastors’ Seminar, Friday 27 August A+D 2021 at Trinity Lutheran Church, Davenport, IA
Presenter: Rev. Dr. Lucas V. Woodford
Rev. Lucas V. Woodford, MDiv, STM, DMin is President of the Minnesota South District of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and the Associate Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Farmington, MN.
Pastor Woodford is the author of Great Commission, Great Confusion, or Great Confession? (Wipf & Stock, 2012). He is co-author with Harold Senkbeil of Pastoral Leadership: for the Care of Souls (2nd ed Lexham Press, 2021) and their book on contextual mission, Culture of the Word, is forthcoming from Lexham in 2022. He has written numerous articles published in The Lutheran Witness, Logia and Seelsorger.
Woodford is a member of the Board of Regents of Concordia University, St. Paul, MN. He has served as an adjunct instructor for Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN and the Institute of Lutheran Theology in Brookings, SD.
Dr. Woodford is a Fellow in the Collegium of DOXOLOGY: The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and Counsel, charged with research, writing and speaking regarding the care of souls in the contemporary context. He is a frequently invited presenter on matters related to soul care, missiology, marriage, sex and gender issues.
Topic
Dr. Lucas Woodford teaches on how to preach, teach, catechize, evangelize and care for souls in a world of increasing sexual delusion and chaos. Using Scriptural teaching as well as case studies from his own pastoral practice, Dr. Woodford will provide useful examples of how to apply our Lutheran theology using actual examples of pastoral work.
Topic 1: With Faith, Hope, and Love: Living our Baptismal Identity in our ‘Anything Goes’ Age
All around us life is being turned upside down and inside out. Our sexually explicit culture threatens to strip the world of meaningful purpose and the self of any true moral character. This cultural madness and social mayhem infect the digital media and entertainment of our day. It’s anything goes. However, this is also a moment of opportunity for the Church to boldly address the challenges of our age. Rather than retreat from the onslaught, we need to step up and speak up. Rather than cursing the darkness, we need to light a match to confront the toxic moral and spiritual influences all around. We can show how to find hope and develop good habits of faith and life that combat this evil. We can build biblical character and the family unit not only among ourselves but for the next generation of Christians.
This session gives several real-life examples of how our Lutheran theology brings God’s great light to this present darkness. Gain a clearer grasp of how the baptismal life brings the joyous reality of a redeemed, sanctified, and moral identity in Christ Jesus, and hope and light for a world languishing in darkness and death.
Topic 2: The Temple of the Holy Spirit: Considerations on the Theology of the Body
Our society does not know what to make of the body, what it is meant to do, and how it is to be regarded. We live at a time when some of the sharpest social, moral, and religious conflicts have to do with the body. Consider the disagreements over sexuality and gender, marriage and divorce, homosexual intercourse and same sex marriage, artificial reproduction and genetic engineering, cosmetic surgery and gender reassignment, pornography and voyeurism, sexual abuse and prostitution, abortion and euthanasia, overeating and malnutrition.
As pastors we need to address these concerns and attacks on the body. In this fraternal discussion we will learn how to more confidently and courageously speak the truth in love regarding these foundational issues of human identity and purpose while providing healing and wholeness in Christ to the walking wounded and defiled.
Outlines for Rev. Dr. Woodford’s presentations:
OUTLINE With Faith Hope and Love; Living Your Baptismal Identity
OUTLINE Theology of the Body; Woodford
1. Pastors’ Seminar Opening Prayer Office
This opening prayer office for the pastors’ seminar features a short homily on Genesis 2, where the Lord forms the man from the dust and breathes into him the breath of life. The preacher dwells on the creaturely truth that Adam, Eve, and every person are God’s own handiwork, and that complete dependency on the Creator is a creature’s “sweet spot” that frees us for vocation and doxology even when world events frighten. He presses that God does not destroy or redesign what he made but regenerates it, pouring the blood that gushes from Christ’s side upon body and soul in baptism, so that a person can confess to being God’s perfect imprint, declared righteous and redeemed exactly as made. Reflecting on Revelation 13’s mention of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, he wonders whether the pre-incarnate hands that shaped Adam from the dirt already bore the marks of the cross, and concludes that the whole created order is affected when we rebel against our design. The office closes with the Lord’s Prayer and prayers for peace and concord. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Pastors’ Seminar, part 1
In this first session of the pastors’ seminar, Lucas Woodford equips pastors to care for souls wounded by a sexually disordered culture, opening with two detailed case studies, a woman named Autumn who was both a victim and agent of grievous sexual and spiritual abuse, and a young man named Jefferson exploring same-sex relationships, to show how care must meet the whole person where they are. He traces the modern sexual revolution through Freud, Sanger, Kinsey, Hefner, Reich, and Foucault, arguing that sex has been severed from marriage and procreation and recast as an individual entitlement, and that family and human identity are being redefined in the marketplace and in transgender policy. Against this he sets a “baptismal virtue ethic,” grounded in Galatians and the catechisms, in which identity in Christ received in baptism determines character and conduct, so that Christians are addressed by their baptismal identity rather than by sexual orientation. Woodford distinguishes moral infraction, which brings guilt, from spiritual contamination, which brings shame and attracts the devil, and commends the vices and virtues as diagnostic tools for applying the light of Christ. He speaks candidly to the pastors themselves about acedia and the pull toward pornography, urging confession and absolution, and closes toward table discussion on how to respond to preferred-pronoun requests. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Pastors’ Seminar, part 2
Continuing his pastors’ seminar on baptismal virtue ethics, the presenter frames the baptized life as one lived in faith, hope, and love, and turns it toward the families in the congregation—equipping parents and grandparents through carrying conversations, rituals, biblical devotions, and service rather than a single blunt sermon. After fielding questions on tolerance, pronoun use, and admitting the abused and the sexually broken to the Lord’s Supper, he lays out a theology of the body organized by the three articles of the Creed: the Father as Maker who gives the body and its maleness and femaleness as very good; the Son incarnate, born of the Virgin Mary, who makes human flesh the hinge of redemption; and the Holy Spirit who sanctifies and will raise the body. He reads male and female, made in God’s image, as embodied souls and reads the one-flesh union of marriage as an icon pointing to Christ and His church. He closes on suffering and death, insisting that funerals proclaim the resurrection of the body rather than merely celebrate a life. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Pastors’ Seminar, part 3
The presenter resumes the theology-of-the-body material, first coaching pastors on how to reclaim the language of virtue and sexuality gradually—through parent workshops, Bible class, and lectionary preaching—without shocking a poorly prepared congregation. He surveys how the culture disorders the body medically, sexually, and emotionally, and argues that because the marital one-flesh union signs our union with God, the devil aims his sharpest attacks there. Working through the second article, he draws on Athanasius and Chemnitz’s Two Natures to show that the Son assumed our whole human nature—body, soul, and mind—so that what He did not assume He did not heal, grounding the value of even abused and mutilated bodies in Christ’s incarnation and shed blood. Under the third article he locates pastoral care in sanctification: tactile blessing, absolution that answers sin (while marriage answers only relationship), and catechesis toward the Lord’s Supper, illustrated by the ongoing case of a returning woman named Autumn. He recommends Kleinig, Christopher West, and Nancy Pearcey while noting where Lutherans and Rome differ on holiness received by faith versus habituation. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. Pastors’ Seminar, Closing Prayer
This closing service centers on a first-person sermon in the voice of Paul charging young Timothy to preach the Word amid the idolatry, false teachers, ritual prostitution, and entertainment-hungry culture of Ephesus. Again and again the refrain ‘preach the Word’ answers each obstacle, because only the Word gives the atonement and reconciliation between God and man accomplished in Christ. The preacher casts the small, feeble congregation not as a civic club but as God’s beachhead of heaven on earth, created by the Spirit through preaching and armed with the Word against the surrounding death. The seminar then closes with the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, penitential psalm verses, Luther’s evening prayer, and the benediction. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →