Featuring lectures from Dr. John Kleinig.
1. Affective Proclamation
Kleinig speaks on the embodied word and affective proclamation, beginning with how often Jesus touches people and how touch clarifies and carries what words alone cannot. He recovers the older sense of the heart as the seat of both thinking and feeling, and traces how the Enlightenment split feeling from reason, leaving modern people both craving and numbed to emotion, a disorder rooted in sin’s corruption of the heart. God’s cure, he argues, is not a demand that we feel rightly but the opening of his fatherly heart to us in Christ, the mirror of the Father’s heart, healing disordered emotions through law, gospel, and the Holy Spirit. He shows Luther teaching justification affectively and closes with three passages—on the Father’s well-pleasedness, the joyful exchange of the bridegroom, and the absorbing touch of the word—as models of preaching that reaches the heart without manipulation. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Affective Meditation
Kleinig teaches affective meditation as the source of affective proclamation, using his own habit of rereading and savoring his wife’s love letters to illustrate dwelling on a single word or phrase for its emotional impact rather than mere information. He shows Psalm 119 and Psalm 1 meditating on God’s word with delight, and reads the Gospels for how Jesus and the Father feel toward people—his compassion, his tears, his groaning—and how Paul mediates Christ’s affection to the Philippians. Drawing on Luther, he pictures the heart as a stringed instrument the Holy Spirit tunes through the word to receive and pass on comfort, and he unpacks trost as strength, courage, assurance, hope, and consolation. He then models a practical method—asking who the characters are, how they feel, how Jesus deals with them emotionally, and how it applies—working through the woman who blesses Jesus’ mother and the widow of Nain. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Visitation: Pastoral Care Delivered! – Rev. Tyler C. Arnold
Arnold argues that visitation is not merely a function of the pastoral office but defines what a pastor is, grounding the point in the New Testament word for overseer, which carries the sense of visiting. He presses that every visit is a house blessing where the pastor brings Christ, his word, and often the Supper into a parishioner’s sacred space, and that listening—not talking—is the pastor’s chief contribution, citing Peterson’s practice of walking his neighborhood to learn what to preach. He works honestly through what hinders visitation—time, geography, fear of difficult members, self-judgment, and a culture that no longer answers the door—and invites the wives to encourage and support the work. He connects home visitation to the divine service and the body of Christ, and closes with Gerberding’s call for pastors as diligent in private soul care as they are sound in the pulpit. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Ministry to Cohabiting Couples
Kleinig addresses ministry to cohabiting couples, insisting pastors are shepherds of souls, not moral policemen. Reading Proverbs 30 and Genesis 2, he presents marriage as God’s instituted order and a movement of leaving father and mother, cleaving in public lifelong commitment, and becoming one flesh—Trobisch’s three-legged stool. He surveys the social causes of cohabitation—prolonged adolescence, contraception, disillusionment with marriage, the cost of weddings, and biblical illiteracy—and argues that cohabitation reverses God’s sequence, entering at the one-flesh end without the commitment and leaving that make it work, exposing couples to Satan’s accusation that drives them from the church. His pastoral strategy is to commend a couple’s decision to marry, walk them through the marriage rite to add the missing legs, and offer confession and absolution so they begin marriage with a clean conscience and the devil put out of the bedroom. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. Finding Courageous Hope – Dr. Kleinig, Rev. Senkbeil, Dr. Yahnke
This session opens with Kleinig on Luther’s claim that the devil is the enemy of God’s order, describing the four orders—natural, political, domestic, and the holy order of the church—as walls that protect God’s gifts, and urging pastors to teach the commandments, live faithfully in their stations, and put hope in God rather than political saviors. Yahnke then names his anger and helplessness before a culture marked by abortion, ISIS, redefined marriage, and open Satanism, and turns pastors toward their calling as local purveyors of God’s hope, delivered each Sunday through word and sacrament. Senkbeil widens this into a meditation on the third article—the Spirit gathering the church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting—as a formula for fidelity amid the end of Christendom. The closing question-and-answer covers imaginative apologetics, learned helplessness, safe and ritual touch, and finding hope and pastoral care when a pastor feels isolated. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →