Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Reason #439 why LUTHERAN Campus Ministry matters...

Have you ever wondered where young Lutherans disappear to when they leave the church and don't come back?  There's not one simple answer or place, but here's an example worth checking out.
This quotation speaks for itself:

It was during my sophomore year of college when my life changed forever. That year, I began to attend an on-campus Christian fellowship group—His House Christian Fellowship. I had been baptized as a baby into the Christian faith by Bethlehem Lutheran Church, but because this baptism was done before I understood what it meant to be a Christian, I had myself baptized a second time at age 20 to make a personal commitment to God.


How have we failed this young man?  I met him once, when he stopped by the chapel hoping I would read his book (I haven't, yet), and possibly hoping I'd recommend it to others.  He claimed to be Lutheran, but how do you reconcile rebaptism with Lutheran theology - either he understands one or the other.

I don't have a lot of time to theologize what happened, but here's a man raised in an LCMS congregation who attended a university with a thriving LCMS Campus Ministry *right in the middle of campus*.  You can walk from the church he mentions in his testimony to the chapel I serve in about 12 minutes.  For some reason, however, he began attending another church (I don't know whether he ever attended Christ The King Lutheran Chapel) and began believing what this other church teaches (in other words, he fell for the anabaptist heresy condemned in the Concordia).  I can't speculate as to the reason(s), there could be many.  If he reads this, perhaps he will respond, who knows.  I had long been searching for his story after seeing it once years ago, and am glad to have found it and hope it finds its way to other Lutherans so that they see what we are up against.