The response to our FREE posters with the full text of the six chief parts of the Small Catechism has been tremendous.  We’ve sent thousands of sets all around the world.  Every U.S. state plus Canada, Australia, Togo, Kenya, Spain, the Philippines, Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and more.

If you have received a set of the posters and have them hanging in your church, school or home, please take a few snapshots of them and send them to me (email: scott.stiegemeyer@ctsfw.edu).  I’d like to create a little album showing all the places our posters are at work.

If you would like to receive a set, simply email me at the above address.

Life seems woefully fragmented for so many people, including Christians. We have brutally compartmentalized the various facets of ourselves, drawing bold unbroken lines of distinction around our hearts, our heads and our bodies respectively.

Christians sometimes over- intellectualize the faith, making God a mere object of study.  Other times, we over- emotionalize, making the Holy Spirit captive to our fickle moods.

Both those excesses have their critics and correctives.  It seems to me, however, that contemporary Christianity is in a different kind of pinch that relatively few have even noticed. Our capacity for imagination is atrophying. Our ability to hypothesize and fantasize is anemic. We associate the word “imaginary” with childhood (i.e. childishness) or lunacy.

Our ability to use words to create stories and drama is downright godlike. No other creature can transmit knowledge, elicit emotion and inspire action by storytelling.

Everyone should imbibe great literature but most especially those who wish to be pastors. Personally, I can’t think of anything more practical than reading good fiction and good poetry. If you serve a congregation, what is the best way to gain insight into the people you serve? By conducting scientific surveys, questionnaires, and objective analysis? Or by listening to their stories? When you sit at the potlucks and listen, when you chat with the old-timers over coffee, when you go to their sickbeds or visit them in their homes, you learn how to be their pastor by hearing them tell about their past, talk about their grandkids, complain about their last trip to the doctor’s office.

If you want to grow as a pastor (and as a human), you had better learn how to listen to people’s stories. And how to tell them. The great novels and poetry of Western civilization, whether written by Christians or not, are valuable because they are instructive.

And by “great,” I don’t necessarily mean old or flowery or even well-known. Snobbery is a waste of time. Great books are not necessarily those on the bestseller lists nor on the so-called canons of the past.

Finally, please don’t piously assume that fiction at the religious bookstore is automatically good for you while the pulpy paperbacks in the airport are bad. Don’t underestimate the value of man’s natural knowledge of God or of everyman’s ability to exposit wisdom. There are mountains of insight to be discovered in the talented works of those who confess Christ as well as those who do not. It’s time to mine those mountains.

Another crowd of young Lutherans-Eight hundred and three-enveloped St. Louis University this past week for one of the three Higher Things conferences this summer.  At our seminary booth this exuberant group had the opportunity, as at the Poconos conference, to decorate their already CTS logo-laden backpacks, sign up for the Amazon.com Gift Card drawing, and take home sundry CTS items, especially our packaged catechism posters.

This round, however, we brought a friend with us. As soon as the youth met him, like frenzied fans, they wanted to take pictures of him and with him. And take pictures they did! Decked out in a “Dare to be Lutheran” t-shirt, Dr. Martin Luther joined us for the festivities- and happily stood by the youth to ham it up for the camera.

Along with Luther, we brought a television that displayed various pictures of Concordia Theological Seminary; and after a few days of snapping shots of the youth at the Higher Things Conference, we put their pictures up on the tv, too. It was quite the active booth; and we-Rev. Cholak and myself, well…were compelled to match their energy!

All in all it was another wonderful conference, filled with great people, youth and adults alike. The chapel at St. Louis University was absolutely magnificent, too. Our very own Kantor Resch accompanied the youth choir on the organ, which only added to the transcendent quality of the the chapel services. It truly lived up to the organization’s name, “Higher Things,” in which the youth could receive and focus on the gifts of forgiveness, life and salvation that God brings to us in His Holy Word and Sacraments through Christ Jesus our Lord. As God faithfully promises to transform our lives in the Gospel, I am confident that this conference aided in bringing the Gospel to the youth and giving them a firm foundation on which to live and see how God works in the world and in their respective home congregations. They learned (and relearned) that through water, bread, wine and Word, God reveals Himself, works faith, and makes us His own in Jesus Christ. What a blessing to behold with so many young people! Amen!