Rev. William M. Cwirla Cwirla draws on Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to describe the shared life of the congregation and its threats. He answers gossip, arrogance, being unheard, and unforgiveness with corresponding ministries: holding the tongue, meekness, listening, and bearing the burden of the difficult brother. He then addresses distortions of community, the cult of personality, […]

Rev. Daniel Torkelson Torkelson examines how Jesus dealt with conflict, in the Good Shepherd discourse that provoked his hearers, before Pilate, and in the healing of Mark 9, and draws a model for the pastor from it. He treats the pastor as an instrument through whom the Holy Spirit works by Word and Sacrament, and […]

Rev. Daniel Torkelson Torkelson describes a ministry marked by congregational conflict and his search for a pastoral rather than a psychological approach to it. He surveys the family systems model of Bowen, Friedman, and Steinke, notes its useful observations, and warns against its dangers, including the temptation to analyze the congregation and to treat power […]

Rev. William M. Cwirla Cwirla takes up the ambiguity in the phrase, since sanctorum can mean holy things or holy people, and he keeps both. He puts the holy things first, because the church exists where God gives the Gospel and the Sacraments, and he grounds this in Augsburg Confession VII, the Large Catechism, and […]

Dr. Joel C. Elowsky The second lecture turns to the everyday life of the early church. Elowsky describes the common fund the deacons distributed, the temptation to misuse it, and the canons that held bishops accountable for the poor. He reads the Epistle to Diognetus and Tertullian’s Apology on the monthly treasury that buried the […]

Rev. Dr. Thomas M. Winger The phrase “communion of saints” rarely appears in the Pastoral Epistles, so Winger works from the vocabulary that is present. He grounds it in the one Mediator, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), in the church as the household of God, and in the office of the ministry, which […]

Dr. Joel C. Elowsky Elowsky begins with the communion of the Trinity. Reading John 17 with Cyril of Alexandria, he shows that the eternal Son took our human nature to bring us into the fellowship the three Persons share, and that this fellowship is delivered in the sacraments. He then works through the Fathers’ images […]

Rev. Dr. Thomas M. Winger Winger examines the two words of the phrase, saints and communion, from the New Testament. Saints are those God has made holy in Baptism, not those who have achieved holy lives; Paul’s “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” describes one gift rather than stages. Communion is a […]

Ryan Anderson argues that “religious liberty” is an insufficient frame for Christians engaged in cultural and legal disputes over sexuality, marriage, and the unborn. The lecture traces why religious liberty matters but cannot address unjust laws themselves, non-religious victims of the sexual revolution, or the deeper anthropological disagreements at stake. Anderson identifies three historical causes […]

Dr. Beverly Yahnke addresses pastoral workers and educators on gender dysphoria in children, drawing on research by Dr. Michelle Cretella and Dr. Lisa Littman to argue that gender dysphoria is pathology, that affirming care causes harm, and that 88-98% of gender-confused children accept their biological sex after puberty without intervention. The session covers the three-stage […]

Rev. Matthew Wurm of Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, Brookings, South Dakota, describes practical parish soul care for families with LGBT members, drawing on cases from his own ministry. He grounds care in the divine service as the place where God gives identity and forgiveness, works through resources from Christopher Yuan and Preston Sprinkle, and traces […]

Dr. Beverly Yahnke walks through the anatomy of difficult conversations about sexuality, gender, and transgender issues, addressing parents, pastors, teachers, and administrators. The session covers post-COVID relational hostility, the ego-driven derailment of conversation, how to set realistic goals, and how to build trust before speaking. Concrete guidance covers what to ask school principals about curriculum […]

This is a Vespers service opening the Courageous Conversations 2023 conference on sexuality. The service includes two lessons, Genesis 1:26-28 and Revelation 12:7-17, followed by a sermon that argues the devil’s assault on marriage, fertility, and children is not a cultural novelty but the continuation of his enmity against the seed of the woman announced […]

A Saturday evening vespers service from the Courageous Conversations 2023 conference, with a sermon on John 20:24-29. The preacher argues that Thomas is not a doubter but the courageous disciple who, unlike the ten locked inside for fear, was outside searching for the risen Christ. Two applications follow: the eight-day standoff among the disciples models […]

Dr. Brian German, Associate Professor of Theology at Concordia University Wisconsin, reads the Song of Songs as a scriptural resource for confessional engagement with sexuality and marriage, arguing the book operates simultaneously as a depiction of Christ and the church, a theology of Christian marriage, and pastoral instruction for those entering either estate. The lecture […]

Dr. Ryan T. Anderson makes the philosophical case for man-woman marriage after Obergefell, arguing that Christians have no more reason to treat that ruling as settled law than Roe, which the Supreme Court reversed in Dobbs. He develops the conjugal account of marriage as a comprehensive union — of bodies, minds, and souls, ordered to […]

John Kleinig opens from Proverbs 18:22 and Luther’s remark that many men have a wife but few ever find her, arguing that marriage is not merely a personal relationship but a God-given estate—a state of being into which a couple is placed. He surveys how differently marriage is enacted across cultures to show that God […]

Kleinig treats pornography not as a merely moral or physical problem but as idolatry—the worship of an imaginary body that promises life and delivers deadness, the murder of eros the devil intends. He first defends nudity as God’s good gift meant for self-disclosure and self-giving between husband and wife, then argues that pornography is not […]

Joel Elowsky first recovers what the church fathers meant by the passions—not one’s enthusiasm but the disordered movements of the soul, drawn from Scripture and reshaped from Stoic categories, pictured in Socrates’ charioteer straining between a noble and an ignoble horse. He shows Cyprian, writing amid plague and persecution, framing life with the passions as […]

Elowsky turns from the problem of the passions to their remedy, working through John Cassian’s fifth Conference on the eight faults—gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride. He explains Serapion’s scheme: some passions arise within us and some from outside, some require a bodily act and some do not, and the fleshly ones […]

William Cwirla sets out to restore joy to the pastor’s work as celebrant at weddings, confessing that for years he found them a burden until he learned, from Norman Nagel, to put the best construction on the couple and the occasion. He grounds the teaching in Genesis 2:24 as the doctrinal basis of marriage—leaving, cleaving, […]

Beverly Yahnke equips pastors to care for marriages in trouble, opening with sobering census and clinical data on divorce, delayed marriage, cohabitation, and the toll on children, and insisting that faithful weekly preaching and teaching on marriage reaches the many whose marriages struggle but who never enter the study. She frames the pastor as the […]

Matthew Wurm addresses the pastoral care of couples who cohabit, insisting the pastor is not a moral policeman but a curate of souls, and that cohabitation’s root is not chiefly the Sixth Commandment but the First and Third—hearts curved in on themselves, loving their own intimacy above God and avoiding His Word. Drawing on Numbers […]

Matthew Wurm speaks on soul care for families with members who identify as LGBTQ, beginning from his own parish experience and from Peter Jones’s account of a revived Gnosticism that despises the body and erases the distinction of the sexes. Through three stories—a college friend, an abused young man near suicide, a man freed after […]

Ryan Anderson examines the transgender movement in three movements: its underlying worldview, its medicine, and its public policy, then evaluates each. He shows that the claim “a person is whoever they identify as” is a metaphysical assertion dressed up as medical science, citing expert testimony that gender identity should override chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy. He […]