“Soon I will be engaging in religious debates with my girlfriends pastor and I am looking for advice. He is an Evangelical Lutheran pastor. We are doing this so she would see a Catholic priest with me and talk about converting. So I am just looking for advice on what to talk about with the pastor.”
This is the post of a participant at Catholic Answers Forums. This is my advice:
“Ask if he will send you an email with the itinerary of his choosing so that you can prepare.Be polite, do not be rude or triumphal. If you don’t know an answer say “I will have to research that, let me write that down.” Don’t BS – that will only get you in trouble.
Thank him for his time when you arrive. Thank him again when you leave. Keep it cool.
Polite. Polite. Polite. Are the three rules to follow.”
Gentle readers, what do you think? What is your advice? Our Lutheran (yea, you LutherPunk!) and Methodist-Calvinist readership are certainly invited to weigh in.
February 29, 2008 at 3:12 am |
Whatever you do, do NOT insist that he recant his heresy. In my experience this almost never works.
February 29, 2008 at 4:56 am |
In my experience arriving with both volumes of Butler’s Lives of the Saints and begining such meetings with “Let’s pick out a confirmation name for you, together, shall we?” generally is not a real winning strategy either…
Eh, some days you feel balsy!
February 29, 2008 at 7:10 am |
Why are you having debates with your girlfriends pastor? Either the young lady wishes to learn about the Catholic faith or she doesn’t. It seem to me that this may give her the hope that you may become Lutheren (or have I completely missed something.)
I think you guys should just have coffee and discuss baseball.
February 29, 2008 at 7:58 am |
Wait… Lutherans like baseball?
Well I learned something today.
February 29, 2008 at 9:04 am |
I don’t know all the details of this meeting but what strikes me as odd is the fact he is meeting with an ELCA pastor… I have never met an ELCAer who was all that particular concerned with “converting Catholics.”
(Possible exception made for one liberal pastor-gal who would have been interested in inviting Catholics to leave the oppressive “patriarchy”…)
If I had to guess, this fella would mostly likely be doing this as a courtesy to his parishoner…
February 29, 2008 at 11:49 am |
Well, it is true that most ELCA pastors aren’t out to convert Roman Catholics away from the church, especially since the vast majority of us recognize the Roman Catholic Church as a place where the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered in accord with the Word of God (this is the Lutheran litmus test for a church).
My advice is to take this as a chance to learn a little about your girlfriend’s faith. If she is important to you (which she clearly is) and her faith is important to her (which it must be if you are meeting her pastor) then you owe it to your relationship to take conversation seriously, and to treat it with the same care you treat her with.
Other than that, do understand that most of us (Lutheran pastors, I mean), enjoy discussion, are more than comfortable not having to agree with everyone on everything, and in typical are respectful of the faith of others. My guess is that this has the opportunity to be a nice meeting and not one that is contentious.
If you want to get on his good side right away, then bring a six pack of Beck’s Dark and whistle “A Mighty Fortress” on your way into his office.
February 29, 2008 at 2:38 pm |
-If you want to get on his good side right away, then bring a six pack of Beck’s Dark-
Stop right there and come to my house!
I was going to agree with Adrienne this morning, though. Scott Hahn or Patrick Madrid would do fine, but I don’t really recommend most Catholic laymen going one on one with Protestant pastors, even if they aren’t out to convert you. I doubt the pastor just ‘winged it’ through seminary and he will probably destroy any chance this guy had of getting his girlfriend to convert.
February 29, 2008 at 6:56 pm |
“Evangelical Lutheran”.
What does this mean?
Is he a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA)?
OR
Is he a pastor in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS)?
You’d be dealing with two entirely different conversations!
February 29, 2008 at 7:21 pm |
“Is he a pastor in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS)?
You’d be dealing with two entirely different conversations!”
Ooooooo… Very good point! WELS is not very thick on the ground in my neck of the woods… ELCA with some Missouri Synod folks here and there are more on my radar. I confess I had not considered that.
An Missouri Synod friend of mine on a business trip with me once commented when passing a WELS parish (and asked the difference between his synod and theirs) replied “They are basically fundamentalists…”
Which I took with a grain of salt -I get called the “F-word” (the nicer one! Though I have…) from time to time for being a Catholic loyal to the Holy See.
A few years back I did read that WELS had re-affirmed “the Pope is the Anti-Christ” and it occured to me that MAYBE my friend hadn’t totally misappropriated that word…
February 29, 2008 at 7:37 pm |
Up here in Wisconsin, the WELS is HUGE. I mean HUGE! On the other hand, when I lived in Tulsa, I was aware of only one WELS congregation in the entire metro area. (There may have been more; I was only aware of one).
The WELS consider the LCMS entirely two liberal (and most Missouri Synod folk I know could hardly be considered liberal!) and the ELCA to not really be much Lutheran at all. They are EXTREMELY conservative — essentially fundamentalists with liturgy. They participate in virtually no ecumenical dialog whatsoever. Their members are not allowed to belong to the Boy Scouts, and they have no military chaplains.
One area in which they are in agreement with Missouri is that both groups refused to recognize the Joint Statement on Justification between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church.
We have close friends who are WELS; there are just certain things we very carefully don’t talk about.
February 29, 2008 at 8:10 pm |
Pappa Z are you familiar with what their numbers or growth? I have been looking for different figures… but in that department I have come to believe that there lies, damned lies, statistics and ecclesial statistics!
(Kind of like the OCA’s 1,064,000 reported membership… When anyone willing to look can garner they have beetween 20K- 35K members…)
Mention of the WELS actually jogged a memory I had of seminary days when a brother seminarian told me that after visiting one of our parishes he poked his head into either a LCMS or WELS parish that was wide open. Recieving a somewhat staid reception he reportedly mentioned to the seminarian “Ahh, Catholic. The ELCA is in communion with them now!”
Admittedly hearsay, but if true, that would be a most brilliant case of willful ignorance!
February 29, 2008 at 8:27 pm |
Adherents.com lists the WELS at 445,000 members. The WELS own website puts the figure at 400,000.
I suspect that these figures are probably accurate.
While not large compared to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod or the ELCA, the numbers are certainly not insignificant.
March 1, 2008 at 12:56 am |
Some of the advice on the Catholic Answers forum reminds me of my response during my fundamentalist days…debate em’ to death and bring a bunch of tracts. I am glad that the guy wants to share his Catholicism with his gal, but having a debate with her pastor?
March 2, 2008 at 6:07 pm |
So…do we get an update of what happened? Or can you post a link to the particular forum?
March 2, 2008 at 6:36 pm |
LP,
Here
March 2, 2008 at 7:45 pm |
Thanks David – I thought I linked there.
January 31, 2009 at 9:23 pm |
Why get married in the first place? Hello? You’re going to let some cloaks set the rules of life? Why not tune in tune out and find your truth inside.