Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary

Saint Paul once instructed a young pastor, “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13 [show]1 Timothy 4:13 Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (ESV)
).This apostolic direction is hard to follow today. If someone is to read, preach and teach, then the rest of us are to listen and hear. But we live in an age of seriously short attention spans. We grumble if the preacher is long-winded. A friend once said of my preaching, “Verbosity is an atrocity.” Or as one professor here has been known to demand, “Get to the point.” O.K. Fair enough. It is important to be concise. However, it is tempting for the church to mirror the unwholesome values of the culture and resort to soundbite theology, to reduce the Ministry of the Word to repetition of religious-sounding slogans or principles or steps. Many people today, deeply shaped by the rapidly flashing images of a TV screen, have virtually lost their ability to listen and hear the spoken word unless it is as brief as a hamburger commercial. What shall we make of the words of Jesus today, “He who has ears, let him hear”?

Christianity is counter-cultural in the sense of being highly verbal, oriented around authoritative speech and texts. The Church cares about words, specifically God’s Word. As the Savior said, “Man shall . . . [live] on every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4 [show]Matthew 4:4 But he answered, "It is written, "'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"
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But God’s Word is never mere chat. It is alive and active. The Divine Speech which long ago brought all things into being from nothingness still today brings order to chaos and reverberates in the Divine Service to create new life and usher us into a renewed fellowship with God. Each day we recall that “the Word became flesh.” Never a mere intellectual abstraction, God’s Word entered the concreteness of our existence through Mary, the virgin, for our redemption. His incarnation speaks new realities into being.

Because of this emphasis on the Word of God, we also assign great importance to the Office of the Ministry of the Word of God. Speaking God’s speech is constitutive of the Holy Office. CTS, as a place where pastors are formed, is devoted to Divine Speech. Our community life is structured around the Word of God. We devote ourselves as seminarians and pastors to the intensive and reflective study of the Sacred Texts. We mine these treasures in the classroom using the original languages, and we gather daily to hear the Scriptures read and proclaimed in public worship. We receive Him weekly in the Holy Supper. All of this is part of a program that molds the seminarian into a Servant of the Word.

As pastors, chief among our tasks is to bring people into communion with the Body of Jesus Christ. This we do through administering God’s Word in oral proclamation (reading, preaching and teaching) and Sacrament. In this Ministry, the blessings of Divine Speech are conveyed, namely, life and forgiveness. May Christ bless you as you pray and consider entering this life of speaking God’s speech.

The Lord be with you.

From Volume 2, Issue 1, January/February 1998 of Pilgrimage