Criteria of Communion Part 6 - Tech Talk

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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All right, let's pray, and then we will get started. Lord Jesus, as we, again, open your

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Word and consider the use of the technologies that have been developed over the last decades for the purpose of making disciples, baptizing, teaching all that you've commanded, and engaging in Word and sacrament ministry, we pray through your

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Holy Spirit we may rightly understand what it is that you would have us do and that our use of technology would be the purpose of glorifying you and advancing the kingdom of good news and forgiveness of sins.

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We ask in Jesus' name, amen. All right, I'm going to hand everything over to Don here. The computer blows up.

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It's just because of Microsoft. So that's what I'm going to give you. OK, thank you,

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Pastor. Can everybody hear me, both online as well as here? OK, just as a disclaimer up front, my comments today have been known to be controversial.

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Therefore, I want to make it clear that this material is based on my personal experience, research, and study, and not necessarily the perspectives of either

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Pastor Roseborough, the Kungsvinger Lutheran Church or Council, or the AALC Commission on Doctrine and Church Relations, of which

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I am a member. So not everybody agrees with me. And I've had reactions all the way from way over your head to, boy, you should really publish this, because I think it's really good.

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So somewhere in between, there might be your reaction. But anyway, just to let you know, nothing will surprise me in terms of your reaction to what

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I have to say, but it's strictly my personal perspective, and research, and experience.

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So now, OK, I'm having a little problem advancing the screen.

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We're not advancing. Let's try this.

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Let's go ahead, and when you advance, just hover over that and press that button.

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Hover over this and press that. That's not Microsoft, OK? Just so you know my bias, and now

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I'm not coming through on this screen here. I'm coming through here, but I'm not coming through here.

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A little technical difficulty. This is what happens when you get paid.

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I'm not sure why. Hey. Hey, there we go.

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OK. OK, just so you know where I'm coming from, especially for those who are online who

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I have not met, don't know me. Most of you here know my background. Farm boy, 20 years.

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Grew up on the farm not too far from here. For the last 50 years, I've been practicing mechanical and also trained in bioengineering at the

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University of North Dakota. Been a member of this church for approximately 70 years. And for the last 15 years,

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I've been very much involved in what I would call a decentralized corporate environment. All of those things influence my perspective.

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In terms of professional activities, over the last 50 years, I've been involved in business venture startups, university academic research and program development activities, new technology development and implementation, organizational turnarounds, which is particularly important,

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I think, to this talk. I've been part of several team efforts to change the culture and direction of organizations that were having some problems, and also been involved in national and international engineering and construction teams.

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So all of those things play a role in my perspective and my bias. What I'm going to talk about today is considerations impacting acceptance of what

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I call decentralized congregations in the sacrament. And let me start out by saying very clearly, the optimal situation for church services and sacraments is in a setting involving the fewest number of communication media components required for a full functionality of all our sensory inputs.

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That's a long way of saying in a church building, OK? We have the fewest number of transfer mediums involved.

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And we're going to be talking about transfer mediums here today quite a bit. We have the fewest number of transfer mediums involved.

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When I'm sitting across from you at the table, you're sitting in the pew. The pastor's up front. We're all in the same buildings. That is the optimal situation.

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The questions are, however, at what level of media components is a group of participants no longer a congregation?

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At what level of media components is the sacrament no longer efficacious? And who determines that level?

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Those are kind of three fundamental questions that are at the forefront of all of this discussion, which has been going on in some circles for actually over a decade.

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Methodist Church particularly struggled with this beginning about 2005. Within the ALC, we've been dealing with since about 2016, 17.

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And within the last 18 months, almost everybody has been dealing with this kind of situation and some of these questions.

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So keep those fundamental questions in mind. At what level of what number of media components or transfer mediums is a group of participants no longer a congregation?

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Is the sacrament no longer efficacious? And who determines what that level is? If there were absolutely clear scriptural and confessional statements regarding church doctrine and practice, this would be easy.

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Such statements, they would take precedence over everything else, all other considerations, if there was an absolutely clear scriptural and confessional statement.

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But Jesus never had the definitive talk. He never had the definitive talk.

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Now, what would that look like? Well, here's one option. And certainly, God, through his transcendent omniscience,

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God is all -knowing over time and space, he could have said something like, now as they were eating,

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Jesus took bread, and after blessing it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, take ye, this is my body. And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, drink it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

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That's the red letter part of it, OK? I tell you that the sacrament shall not be received through any medium except as you received it this night.

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In less than 2 ,000 years, the internet will come along, and you shall not eat or drink of my body and blood. Using the internet for in that day, you eat and drink through this medium.

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You shall surely not be receiving the blessing of the sacrament. That would have been a definitive statement. At least specific.

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Or he could have had definitive talk number two. Again, because he's omniscient, all -knowing, over time and space, he could have said, again, the red letter part is right out of Matthew.

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And he could have said, I tell you that in less than 2 ,000 years from now, the internet will make it possible for you to eat and drink of my body and blood and receive the blessings of this sacrament in simultaneous fellowship with your baptized, catechized, believing brothers and sisters throughout the world.

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That would have made it easier, too. So, those are the extremes. He could have said, absolutely no.

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Or he could have said, it's okay. Because he's omniscient, he's all -knowing. He didn't.

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In the absence of the talk, or any other scriptural confessional statement, what happens is we end up parsing scriptures in the confessions from the perspective of our own presuppositions and experiences.

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And that's really what's been going on in various circles. It boils down to, where am I coming from?

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What are my presuppositions? And I'm gonna parse scripture in the confessions to prove that point. That's a natural reaction.

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I'm not being critical. That's a natural reaction. This discussion really is based on our perception and understanding of our human senses.

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When you get right down to the bottom line, it's how do our senses work? How do we perceive the person sitting across the table from us, or how do we perceive the person on the internet, or through any other medium?

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It boils down to understanding how our senses work. The livestream discussion largely revolves around what constitutes words like presence, place, connection, community, gatherings.

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How do you define those in this electronic age? All of a sudden, there's a new element in that discussion.

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At the most fundamental level, these concepts depend on how our minds receive sight, sound, et cetera, and turn those stimuli into cognitive sensation, and then turn those sensations into physical, emotional, and spiritual comprehension.

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And that all takes place up here. Doesn't take place outside of you. That takes place right up here, because it's our minds that give us reality to the inputs that we get through our senses, whether it's vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, all of those.

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And so that's fundamental to, from my perspective, it's fundamental to discussion. And bear in mind, from my kind of engineering, technical perspective.

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So we interpret our comprehension of presence, place, connection, community, gatherings, from the external stimuli that come into our conscious or cognitive brain.

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We basically have three components to our brain. If you really simplify our brain functions, we have the conscious or cognitive, we have the subconscious, and we have the unconscious.

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That goes way back to Freud's first kind of formulation of how our brain works. Cognitive is kind of the outer portion of our brain.

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That's where we receive stimuli. That's where we think about things. That's where our consciousness lives.

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And then those get absorbed into our subconscious, which is really our conscience.

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So consciousness takes place cognitively. Conscience takes place subconsciously.

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And that's fundamental to understanding how we perceive things. Not only this topic, but a lot of other topics.

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We react to this cognitive input, however, with what is stored in the subconscious brain, as I just mentioned. The subconscious brain is the home of our past.

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It's the compilation of our past experiences and how we view the world, how we view other people, how we view our morals, and the whole business.

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So when inputs coming into the conscious portion of our brain conflict with the experiences of our past, we have what's called cognitive dissonance.

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That's where the internal struggle takes place. We get input from the outside, and if it's different from what our past perspectives are, we struggle with it, and we struggle with it internally.

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Our immediate reaction to cognitive dissonance is to either fight for our prior strongly held convictions or flee from the new cognitive inputs that are causing internal conflict.

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It's the fight or flight response. I gotta quote James 4 .1. Pastor knows this is my favorite

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Bible verse dealing with conflict, so I had to include it. It simply states, what causes quarrels and causes fights among you?

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Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? Well, the passions at war within you are taking place between the cognitive and the subconscious when the cognitive inputs are at war or conflicting with your subconscious past.

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However, instead of the fight or flight response, which is our normal reaction, our normal reaction when we find ourselves in a cognitive dissonance state is to fight or flee.

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Instead, what it should be calling us to do is lead us into critical thinking. It should cause us to evaluate not only what's coming into our cognitive center, stimuli, it also should cause us to question our subconscious background as to what we've been taught.

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So instead of fighting or fleeing, we should take the time to have serious critical thinking going on and discussion with others, both those that agree with us and those that disagree with us.

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I'm gonna talk about paradigm shifts. This is kind of fundamental to, at least the perspective that I take on this situation.

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A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions. And that boils down also to, when a paradigm shift is taking place, that really racks our subconscious mind because it may be something that's new and different that I'm not comfortable with.

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But I'm gonna talk about this from more of a technical perspective than an emotional perspective at the moment. The understanding of the senses, again, vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, underwent a paradigm shift in the period beginning around 1600.

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Now, 1600 is after the time of Christ, obviously, 1600 years earlier.

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It's also just after the time of the writing of the Lutheran Confessions, which were basically wrapped up around 1580 or in the 1580s.

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So all of this took place after the texts were written that we ascribe to as fundamental texts in our

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Lutheran faith. Prior to the 16th century, all senses were understood to operate by a form of touch, by direct contact.

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And I've got a reference here. I'm not gonna go into the reference. But before 1600, very little had changed in terms of our understanding of the senses.

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Very little had changed in the way things were done, whether you were a farmer or a businessman or whatever, or you're dealing with transportation or communication, very little had changed from the first civilization up until then.

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The modern understanding of the senses didn't emerge until after 1600. So what we're dealing with today, and that's the time period when things just started to develop, when the big name scientists that we think of in our past, the

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Middle Ages or the medieval period like Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, all of those folks, it was in the 1600s that they really started putting together the pieces of the foundation of what we know today as modern science and modern physiology.

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And they were rudimentary at best, but that's where this all started time -wise. I'm gonna talk primarily about vision here because it's the easiest and it's probably one of the most important.

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It's really vision and hearing are the two senses that we're dealing with. I don't really care how you smell in church.

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I don't really care how the bread tastes. Today you gotta be careful about how you touch people.

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Giving hugs is not what it used to be. So I'm gonna focus on vision and somewhat on hearing, but primarily vision instead of trying to cover all those groups.

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But up until including the medieval period, perception was an open process. What do we mean by this?

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This is where information might pass not only between perceived and perceiver, but also the other way around from the perceiver to the object or individual who was the focus of perception.

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Okay, let's put that into an example. I'm standing outside here. I'm looking at a couple of the trees that are left.

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Okay, I'm the perceiver. The trees are the perceived.

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Under the open process, there's an interchange going on back and forth between me as the perceiver and the tree is also giving me feedback.

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There's an open line. This is the way it was understood before 1600. There was an open line of communication. The tree was telling me something.

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It wasn't just reflecting light. It was actually telling me something. It was sending images at me. They had a whole different perception on vision.

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So it was a whole different set of assumptions than what we know today and have all been trained in in our health classes, physiology classes, or whatever biology background you might have.

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So it was an open process. There was interchange between you as the individual perceiver and the perceived element, whether that element was a tree or another person or whatever.

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Post -enlightenment, the scientific world has a closed model of perception. In other words, the person's sense organs receive information which is passed to the brain where it is interpreted.

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We're getting stimuli now into our mind that's being translated, converted into something that we recognize in our brain, but we don't, we're not assuming that we're having a discussion with the tree, so to speak, okay?

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Maybe some people are. I know there's tree huggers out there, so maybe some people are. But generally speaking, generally speaking, we're not talking to the tree, okay?

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And the tree's not talking back to us. We're getting a vision. We're getting light reflected from that tree which is coming into our brain.

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We recognize it as a tree. That's a closed model of perception. From the time of Aristotle to the 1600s, vision was understood to occur into two models.

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I'm gonna repeat myself a little bit here. When it comes to vision, the model that existed prior to the 1600s, there were kind of two dominant models.

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One was called extramission. It assumed that a light source resided in the eye and emitted light outward to objects.

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This was before the time when they understood reflection, refraction, and it wasn't until Kepler and others and Galileo started playing with the telescope that they started recognizing the physical parameters that also were functions in our eyes.

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So they assumed that there could have been a candle in the eyes putting out light onto an object and seeing that object.

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They also had another model called intramission which assumed that light or images of an object were emitted by the object into the eye.

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So under this scenario, that tree out there was sending me multiple images of itself to me.

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Already, I was picking up images that were already created. Almost like packets of information coming to me.

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There's actually a little bit of similarity here with the internet. But the idea was that there was actually pictures of trees coming at me in a fast fashion, coming from the object itself.

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That was intramission. And that kind of became the dominant understanding, the dominant theory. But both theories related vision to the sense of touch for which you had to be in the same physical location.

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Obviously, they didn't know about telephones, they didn't know about wire transmission, they didn't know about the internet. So, and then together with the fact that this conversation, so to speak, this metaphysical conversation going between you as the perceiver and the perceived, this had to take place within the same physical location.

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So that's the underlying context on which the general population understood the senses right up to and through the 1600s.

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Thus, the science of the fourth century BC, a lot of this goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle wrote a rather comprehensive documentary or perspective paper on how he viewed the senses, very rudimentary by today's standard.

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I mean, we wouldn't agree with too much, but he made an effort to try to put a body of science together going back to the fourth century

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BC, and that lasted through about 1580 and a little longer. So it's the inherent context of the historic

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Lutheran confessions on the practices of the Lutheran church regarding the sacrament. It's inherent, it's not stated, but this is what was understood as to how the senses worked.

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Therefore, in consecration, a perceiver, meaning the pastor and congregation, has a spiritual communication with the perceived, the elements, which provides a type of metaphysical feedback or benefit to the perceivers.

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So there was actually this kind of metaphysical conversation, if you will, involving light, vision, that would have taken place under the understanding that they existed at the time.

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And again, there's no other option there but being in the same location. Thus, in an open process of understanding sight, it was inherently understood that the verba spoken by the pastor in the presence of the element directly conveys

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Christ's body and blood, which are directly received by the elements. Now, that's my interpretation of reading a body of knowledge.

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You won't find that reference someplace as it is. That's my summary, if you will, of how you would have viewed consecration coming from the background context of how they understood vision, hearing, and the other senses at the time.

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Likewise, since the sense of touch was inherent in this pre -1600 understanding of the senses, the perceiver had to be in the same physical location as the perceived.

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As I mentioned earlier, even sight and hearing was considered a form of touch in that time because of this kind of interchange feedback that was going on under the open system.

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Now, we're gonna shift a little bit again. We're gonna kind of skip over a few centuries and come to 1948.

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In 1948, a gentleman, a scientist, Bell Labs, by the name of Claude Shannon, published a paper entitled

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A Mathematical Theory of Communication in which he defined communication in what is now known as the classical information theory.

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His paper was to modern communication what Galileo's dialogue concerning the two chief world systems was to astronomy.

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One of the other big paradigm shifts that has taken place in history which involved the church was the understanding of heliocentricity versus geocentricity.

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Again, up until the 1500s and into the early 1600s, the worldview of the universe was geocentric.

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The earth was stationary. The sun revolved around the earth. It was a flat earth theory for the most part.

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And so, that was the viewpoint of the church, both Protestant and Catholic, through the 1500s.

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When Galileo wrote his paper, it kind of shook things up and the church actually persecuted or isolated

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Galileo, didn't want him talking about it, and the Catholic church. But Luther sided with the

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Catholics on this one. He was on the same page, basically. They both agreed that this guy was a little bit off, a little bit far out, to think that actually the earth could be revolving around the sun.

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And it wasn't until 1992, was it Pope John Paul II, whoever the pope was in that time, actually apologized to Galileo, Copernicus, and took it off the books.

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The Catholic church had long since abandoned that. They acknowledged heliocentricity long before that, but as far as the official record goes, it was 1992 and they kind of cleared up and apologized.

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A little bit late, but you know, just, church things take a while, things go slow. So that was a paradigm shift in the understanding of the universe.

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In 1948, I wouldn't say that Claude Shannon made the paradigm shift, but he articulated what we now know as modern information theory.

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He basically defined the fundamental principles of communication in any form, in a general form, as we understand today, whether we're talking about conversation, communication in a room, or over the internet.

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I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole here just for a second. It's not pertinent to the internet communion or congregation, but it's a close to home kind of thing, so I'm gonna throw it in.

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Claude Shannon, in his 1948 book, cited a gentleman by the name of Harry Nyquist as one of the folks who had developed an understanding of communication on which he built his paper, among others.

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Harry Nyquist was born in Barmland, Sweden in the late 1800s.

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Barmland, Sweden is where most of the pioneer families from this church came. Harry Nyquist moved with his parents to a small farm near Hillsboro, North Dakota, right around 1900.

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Grew up on a small farm, early 1900s, out in the open prairie. Went to the

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University of North Dakota in 1915, 16, I believe it was. Got his bachelor's, master's degree in electrical engineering.

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Went on to, was it Yale or Harvard? I forget. His document, the document that he had the right to get into an

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Ivy League school astounded his professors, and he basically laid out a theory of how communication can take place.

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Some of the most fundamental elements of it was, and to describe it briefly without getting too far in the technical weeds, if you have, if you are sampling a frequency in a piece of electrical equipment, sound equipment as an example, you have to be sampling twice the highest frequency that's coming in or being played.

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So in the case of a DVD, that frequency is about 40 ,000 per second.

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Therefore, your frequency has to be less than 20 ,000 in order for it to be decipherable clearly, and that's known as the

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Nyquist frequency guide. He went on to Bell Labs, made lots of patents, was a

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Swedish Lutheran boy from a farm, coming from Varmland, Sweden, who helped lay the groundwork for what we know today as digital communication, and Shannon cited that.

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So at UND, there's a monument to Harry Nyquist. I happened to be at the university at the time, happened to be able to moderate the ceremony in which we dedicated that kind of memorial to his daughter and son, and it was a fantastic evening.

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So that has really nothing to do with whether online communion or consecration or church is valid or not, but it's a local home situation that has an input into the understanding of modern communication theory, or modern information theory.

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Here's a block diagram. Again, don't wanna get too deep in the technical stuff, but block diagrams are sometimes the easiest way to describe more complex mathematical functions.

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Our understanding of communication today involves the following things. We have an information source, we have a transmitter of that information, it passes through a transfer medium of some kind, that information is received by some type of receiver, which in turn passes it along and sometimes converts it into an understandable form to a final destination.

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And along the way, during the time when this information is being transferred, you've got a noise source, typically.

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There's usually a noise source of one kind or another. This is the building blocks of modern information theory.

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Let's take an example of this in an audio conversation in a room, just as an example. Okay, we're sitting in a room, we're sitting across the table.

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The information source is the speaker's mind, it's whatever he's thinking and whatever he's about to say. The transmitter is his vocal cords, it converts a thought into a frequency.

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That frequency flies through the air across the table, picked up by the ear of the hearer, that ear takes that stimuli, that frequency is transmitted to the speaker.

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That frequency converts it into something, a signal that goes up the auditory nerve into the mind of the hearer, and we have a decipherable conversation.

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Now, we might have some local noise sources. It might be the kid running along crying, or it might be noise in the background, or the people at the next table, or whatever.

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We got noise, but our ear is capable of deciphering, generally speaking, and deciphering what that speaker is trying to say.

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So you've got, under the most fundamental form of communication, you have these elements at play.

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Now, how does this pertain to live stream service and consecration? Well, the transfer medium may be a space in a room, it might be a wire, it might be radio waves, or some combination of media that we call the internet.

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Within classical information theory, the internet functions no differently than the line of sight or volume of air within a building.

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It serves the same purpose, same function. The internet allows place, connection, community, and gatherings to occur over a broad spatial area.

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That's one significant difference as compared to the conversation across the table. Within sacramental consecration, the elements are the receiver of the verba from the initial consecration by Christ that was done 2 ,000 years ago, and the congregants are the destination.

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I'll repeat that again. Within sacramental consecration, the elements are the receiver of the verba that came from the initial consecration by Christ 2 ,000 years ago, and the congregants are the destination.

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So, when we have consecration in a church building, what do we have? We have the information source. Who's the source of the information?

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God, okay? Who's the transmitter? The pastor. What's the medium in a building?

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It's air and space. What's the receiver? With regard to the verba and consecration, it's the elements.

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What's the destination? The congregants, those of us in the pews. Now, we might have some local noise sources.

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Again, we might have the child who's screaming in the background or whatever. We have some local noise sources.

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We have to decipher through that, but we do, but all these elements are in play in a church building. Now, what do we have when we have consecration through a decentralized medium?

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Well, the information source is still the same. It's still God. Transmitter is still the pastor, but now we have a number of media components between the pastor's voice and the elements.

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Let's make an assumption here that consecration's being done over the internet. You have people in various locations with elements in front of them that they are about to consume.

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Those elements are receiving that pastor's voice, the verba. Over several media components, it might be a microphone to start with, wires to a computer transmitter.

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It's gonna have media components, radio waves, or however things are being transferred wirelessly and then converted back into sound and vision back on your, let's say, your laptop.

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So you have more media components, but the fundamental process is identical. And in this case, you probably have some electrical noise along the way that has to be filtered out, and you've got filters in your system to do that.

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So the fundamental elements are the same. So going back to one of the initial questions, how many media elements are acceptable and who determines that?

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I don't have an answer for that one. Anybody that does is making some assumptions on behalf of God.

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But basically, you now have media components instead of air and space in a building. But otherwise, everything is the same with respect to modern information theory.

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Okay, I'll throw this one out. Within that system, pastors function very similar to your router, okay?

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Pastor Roseboro's grimacing over there. He didn't know he was a router, but I'm gonna read this definition.

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This comes from a Cisco website. Routers connect computers and other devices to the internet.

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A router acts as a dispatcher, choosing the best route for your information to travel. It connects your business to the world, protects information from security threats, and can even decide which computers get priority over others.

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Well, if you slip in the word pastor into that and congregants, it reads something like this. Pastors connect congregants and the elements to Christ's verba.

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Pastors repeat the verba spoken by Christ 2 ,000 years ago, choosing the proper setting for the verba in which the sacrament is to be administered.

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Pastors connect individual congregants to the broader body of Christ, protect them against false teaching, and guard the table by determining which congregants should be served.

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Is there a similarity there? Yeah. Okay, so pastor, you're a router.

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It's the box on the wall. That's basically what the pastor's function is in terms of delivering the verba in the consecration process.

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Now, I'm gonna get people who can disagree with that. I understand that, because it's more than just the verba.

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There's no question about it. But as far, I'm just focusing today on the transfer of information that's involved when you speak the words during the consecration part of the service.

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Okay, there was an article, pastor already alluded to it a little bit. There was an article that came out in the

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New York Times this week called What We Lose When We Livestream. And since that was last Sunday, it came out in the

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New York Times, there have been commentaries on that since. I'm gonna jump in here with my own commentary.

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So I'm gonna throw out some statements that are in that article and give you my perspective on it, because it became kind of a hot topic over the week in terms of this overall discussion.

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There was the opening sentence in this article, which I have in front of me, but not on the screen, said, riding around town earlier this year, my three -year -old daughter shouted, look, a church.

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It took me a second to understand what she meant. I didn't see any churches. All I could see was a parking deck. Then I realized my daughter couldn't remember our church building.

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Since last summer, our church has been meeting under the cover of a parking deck so that we could still assemble in person without riding in Alabama's summer sun.

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I think the author's intent was that that was a negative. I don't view it that way.

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If the parking lot was your church last year, then that's where your church met, okay?

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It didn't depend on your building. Buildings are wonderful. Buildings are nice. We love them. Buildings are important.

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They're also very expensive. But the parking lot for the last year and a half for that congregation was where the church met.

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Now, we have, I just happened to find this morning, an old book that's been in our church office for a long time.

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Looks like this. This is the secretarial record, pastor's record book, starting in the 1880s when this congregation was founded.

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This congregation, at first, was a cemetery. The cemetery was there before the church building.

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It took about 12 years before the pioneers could actually afford or had the time to build a church.

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Not this one, the earlier one burned down, but it was 12 years that they met without a church building.

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Now, did they have church during that time? Absolutely. Those folks took their faith seriously.

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It was truly their daily bread. And so they existed without a church building for probably about 12 years.

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They needed a cemetery before they needed a church. And so you can have church without a building.

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You can have church in a parking lot. One of the statements that was included here was

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COVID introduced a revolution in religion. The internet tears down nearly every previous hindrance to church attendance.

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It's too convenient. You can attend any church service and you don't have to watch your own. That's true.

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The question is, is it bad? And I guess I leave that answer up to you as an individual.

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However, the same comment, the same concern basically could be said for the introduction of the automobile and good roads that started in this area in the 30s and 40s.

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Once we had automobiles and good roads, people could go almost wherever they wanted. Initially, when this church was formed, the congregants came from within a five mile radius of the church because that's how far you could get here by horse in about an hour's time and get back home again in about an hour's time.

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Our tolerance as individuals to be able to move any place within an hour's worth of time, historically has kind of driven the demographics of an area.

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When the interstate came along or good highways came along, all of a sudden, our small town started disappearing because now it was easy to drive 50 to 60 miles into a larger town, have more options and conveniences, et cetera.

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Communication and transportation has driven our society from day one.

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And the rapid changes that have taken place over the last hundred and some years has really changed our society, our culture, and how we view institutions.

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So the question is, does this threaten pastors? Well, what I'm hearing is, not all of them, but many of them, yes.

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This is a threat to the established model of the church as we've known it in the

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U .S. for how many years? 100, 200, depends on where you're at in the country.

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So we are facing, and pastors particularly feel this, I think, more than anybody else. There was a survey done in the

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UK several months ago after COVID started, after live streaming services went online. The question was how many pastors supported live stream services and how many lay persons supported live stream services?

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If I remember the numbers right, 18 % of the pastors said they supported it. 67 % of the lay people supported it.

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This is primarily a discussion among clerics, although it impacts all of us. And so I'm not here today to tell you what to think.

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I'm just pointing out some of the factors that have been involved that impact the church as we know it today and the transition that we're in.

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So does this require pastors to sharpen their game? Yes, it's competition.

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It's competition. Competition in business takes place and competition among churches has been taking place for a long time.

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It's not something new. Another statement, live streaming largely benefits larger churches at the expense of smaller churches without dynamic preachers and cutting edge music.

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Well, for a small church, the cost of doing live stream from scratch is about $5 ,000.

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I think we've experienced that right here. The main reasons that anyone should be a church, however, are, again, my perspective, the soundness of the preaching, the administration of the sacraments and the forgiveness of sins, and to give glory to God within the fellowship of like -minded believers.

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Those are the basic elements of why we come to church. There are a lot of other things that happen in a church which are good, but there are a lot of things, a lot of those other things

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I can do in the Lions Club or Rotary Club or whatever, but when it comes to church, it's the solidness of the preaching that should be at the forefront along with the administration of the sacraments, the forgiveness of sins, and giving glory to God with a fellowship of like -minded believers.

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Another statement, live stream benefits churches with more symbolic views of the sacraments compared to more formal participatory liturgical churches.

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Teaching and music communicate more readily over video, and you can't program the body of blood in Christ in ones and zeros of digital code.

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My response to that one is I totally disagree with respect to liturgical versus non -liturgical worship.

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I find that participation in a liturgical service like we have with the liturgy on the screen, easy to follow along.

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You can be engaged to whatever extent you want in your home or wherever you happen to be doing it.

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It's much easier with a structured liturgical service than just being a spectator to a praise band.

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I know, at least that was my personal experience when we were, before we started resuming gathering together again last summer.

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I could follow along at my home, at the dining room table, with the screen in front of me, much easier than if I were listening and just becoming a spectator to an entertainment -type praise band.

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And the idea that one would program the body of blood in ones and zeros is, in my opinion, totally absurd. And I refer you back to the previous discussion on communication.

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Another statement, church leaders will be accused of acting in self -interest if they pull livestream services because they know livestream viewers are not likely to donate much money.

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This is extremely troubling for two reasons. If they're concerned about the financial aspects of serving people, they're serving for the wrong reason, number one.

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Number two, the experience of many churches, including this one, during COVID has been just the opposite.

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The serious livestream participants are very generous. They appreciate the services that are being provided to them.

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And I can affirm, as treasurer of this congregation, our livestream participants are generous.

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And I'll take the time to say a big thank you to all those who are listening. Livestreaming is a mirage that distracts from devastating membership and attendance declines that have not yet reversed from March 2020.

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Okay, well, church leaders with this attitude don't understand that the social and cultural changes and world affairs are beyond their control.

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These are the forces that have always forced the church to adapt its model and the way we do church.

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Church administrators have never dictated society in terms of societal practices, the adaptation of technology.

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They've typically always been a step behind. So the question is, how does church leadership adapt quickly to the changes that are being thrust upon them?

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You're not gonna stop those changes. Okay, this is a little bit more just talking about experiential rather than technical.

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Family gatherings. About five, six weeks ago, we had a family reunion here at church, the

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Hendrickson family. About half the group was online, about half the group was here in the fellowship hall.

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Nobody really questioned whether the folks that were online were not present with us. Yes, they were in a different setting, they were in different media, but they were present here.

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They heard the same talks, they heard the same, they all had a chance to make comments. It was a fellowship based on our common

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DNA and blood history, common experiences. That's what made it a presence, that's what made it a reunion.

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It wasn't the technology. Last week, we had homecoming on the prairie.

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We had many of you who are online with us right here, right now, here in person.

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There was a commonality there among those who were here with each other, even though most had not personally seen each other across the table before.

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There was a commonality with those of us who were here. The commonality that I experienced was that everybody that was here had expressed their joy in having freedom in Christ.

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That is what they had learned over the course of the last year and a half or more, depending on how long they had been there.

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Everybody came from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of denominational backgrounds, a lot of different personal experiences, but they, over the course of the last year and a half, had been hearing the same sermons, the same messages.

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There was commonality, there was a presence, there was a community here, even though half the people were here for the first time, the other half come here on a regular basis.

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Also, people are different, believe it or not. When it comes to this perception of presence and community via the internet, we're different.

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Some need more social interface than others, and I'm not putting out a judgment statement here. I'm just saying that's a fact.

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Some people need more social contact than others, and that's wonderful. Everybody needs to operate within their own realm of perception.

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I'm part of a small prayer group that meets Saturday mornings. For years, we were meeting in person at a cafe.

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This is not the Kungzinger one, this is a different one. And during COVID, all the restaurants were closed, so we all went online.

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Now that they're back open, half the guys wanna meet over coffee, the other half just wanna log in on the screen.

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And we're all in the age group of 60 through 80 plus. We're not youngsters. We're all kind of seasoned veterans, if you will.

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And there's just a difference in personality. So for some people that want and need the daily or frequent social contact, wonderful.

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For those who don't need all of that, that's wonderful too, and the internet allows one to participate even if that happens to be your perspective.

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Thus, the fundamental question goes back, how does a church body construct church practices for acceptable use of live stream ministry and sacrament?

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This is kind of the thing that we've been wrestling with for the last several years. How do you define a congregation under that mode of operation?

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And how do you determine a valid administration of the sacrament? I'm not gonna give you answers because I don't have the definitive answer.

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But I'm gonna give you some observations from the perspective of an old writer of construction specifications.

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That would be me. For the last 50 years, I've been involved at one level or another in writing specifications either for construction projects or for program activities.

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How do you write a specification when you're trying to define practices for the live stream congregation and the institution or administration of the sacrament in that setting?

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So we're gonna look at the construction world first, okay, this is the model that I work from. In the construction world, if you have a construction project, you're building a hotel, you're building a processing plant or whatever, you have the following parties involved.

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You have the owner. You have the owner's agent, which is usually an architectural or engineering firm. You have a contractor who's gonna actually go out and build the place.

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And then you have the end user. If it's a hotel, it's the folks that walk in every night looking for a room. If it's a processing plant, it's whatever the final product comes out and how that's being used.

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Those are kind of the four fundamental elements of the construction world, owner, agent, contractor, end user.

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Okay, how does that parallel with the church? Well, the church has, who's the owner of the church? God. Who's the agent of God in this case?

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Well, it's the church body overseers, people who have responsibility for developing practices.

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Who's the contractor? The pastor. It's his job to go out and, just like the contractor in the field, it's his job to go out and build the building.

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It's the pastor's job to nurture the local congregation and the end user is the congregant. I'm repeating myself here, but I think it's important that I do so.

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God is the owner of a church body. The church body overseers are his agent, directly accountable to the owner in matters of practice.

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And I think that's the point that everybody should remember. Church body overseers, whether it's a commission of some kind, executive committee or whatever, they are accountable to the owner, in which this case, it's

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God, in matters of practice. The pastor's the contractor, tasked with carrying out word and sacrament ministry and the individual congregant is the end user of the ministry.

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So keeping that structure in mind, a good agent, spec writer, does the following.

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This is in the secular world. I think it applies also into the church world. First of all, the agent seeks to understand the intent and desire of the owner.

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Let's say it's an apartment complex. What's the owner's vision of how that building wants to look, functionality?

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What's his vision of how that building is to take place? Now, a specification, again, from the perspective of the agent who's writing specs, a specification is narrowly defined only when the owner has clearly commanded a very specific requirement.

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When the owner says precisely you're gonna do this, then the agent writes a spec that tries to assure that precisely that gets accomplished.

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Otherwise, if you don't have that very specific, clearly defined parameter, specifications are written to define the boundaries of functionality without confining the contractor to specific methods.

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Once you, as an agent, tell the contractor exactly what he's gonna do, if it doesn't work out, it's your fault as the agent.

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And now you're responsible to the owner because you wrote a spec that the contractor couldn't meet. So if the agent is too specific in defining methods, creating unforeseen problems in the field, the agent becomes liable for the problem.

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That's why engineers and architects don't tell the contractor exactly how to do the job because at that point in the design, you don't know what that contractor's gonna find in the field.

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He might find a water table that's too high, speaking from personal experience. He might find other situations that all of a sudden have to be adapted to in the field in order to carry out and achieve the functionality of the owner's intent or desire.

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So very, very subtle but very important element in this discussion.

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Okay, we said earlier that it would have been great if God would have had a couple of definitive talks, either saying yes or no.

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Well, that didn't happen. The talks he did have were, again, from Matthew 26, 27, 28, the words of consecration.

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I won't repeat it because we've already done that a couple of times. The other talk that he did have was, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father, of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

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He wasn't real specific in how that was to be accomplished. That was the goal, that was the functionality that he wanted us as Christians to carry out.

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He didn't specify the methods. He gave us the means, in this case. He gave us the means of grace, the word, the sacraments.

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He did not give us the methods. He left the methods up largely to the congregation and the pastor to determine what are the methods that are gonna meet the needs of my people that God is bringing to me, or to us, in order to carry out that great commission.

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So, given that perspective, how do we deal with this?

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Okay, as I said before, Jesus never told us his will regarding the use of the internet. Didn't exist, couldn't. We are left to parsing the scriptures and the confessions, and this always takes place within the confines of our own presuppositions and experiences, and that's really what's, that's what we're left to do, and that's what's been going on.

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With something as, without something as clear as the talk, church overseers should not define or restrict the methods available to pastors for carrying out law and gospel ministry as they then become accountable to the owner,

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God, for their actions. Once you start, once a church overseer starts dictating what they perceive as God's will, with any level of uncertainty, they become liable to God for the outcome.

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So instead, my recommendation all along has been, let's deal with, let's create boundaries.

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We are certainly able to create boundaries given on what's clearly defined in the word and the confessions.

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There are boundaries given. The word internet doesn't show up. The word local, defining a local congregation doesn't show up, but there are boundaries given to us.

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Number one, the pastor has the ability to guard the table. The pastor, in whatever format, can basically say, okay,

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I know that you are catechized properly. You believe what we're teaching here. You are in fellowship with us. I'll serve your communion.

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If it's outside of that, we need to talk. The sacrament is administered in real time. The service of the sacrament is not recorded or posted, and that's so that you don't just post a recording of the sacrament online, in your

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YouTube or whatever. Somebody picks it up later on as communion on their own outside of the fellowship. That shouldn't happen.

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That is not acceptable. It has to be done in real time within a fellowship of believers.

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So you don't record, like we don't, we cut the live stream here at Cunningsvinger during the service. That's the reason why we do it, because pastor does not have control over who might be attending, whether they're all catechized properly or not.

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The communicants need to be baptized believers. The communicants have to be properly catechized. The proper elements need to be used, approved bread, wine, grape juice, et cetera.

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We're not into serving Coke and crackers at home, okay? Should be wine, grape juice, and appropriate bread.

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And the communicants have connectivity within the same church fellowship. And the word connectivity here is important.

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How do you define connectivity? Well, that comes, we experienced that last week, I think, here. We had connectivity with people who had only met for the first time in person across the table.

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But we had connectivity because we had been hearing common teaching and a common faith.

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My last slide is this. Unless Christ first returns, the day will soon come when this discussion will be considered archaic and mute.

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The forces of history, social change, cultural change, and technology will someday take the presentation

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I just gave and say, what were they talking about? They needed to talk about that time, but boy, we've changed a lot since then.

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The next level of technology, just as one example, and I'll go back to the semantics, which

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I didn't cover. We talk about online communion. What is online communion?

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Where did the word online come from? Well, it came primarily out of the 1990s when the internet was getting started and you had dial -up internet.

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Remember the old noise when you signed up? That was online because you were connecting to a telephone line, and so that was online.

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Back in the 1890s, we had the horseless carriage.

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The first automobiles came along and we called them horseless carriages because now you had a carriage.

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Most of those things looked like carriages, but there was no horse. There was an automobile engine. There was an engine that propelled it.

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So we carried the phrase horseless carriage pretty much through the 1920s. We're at the phase right now where the word online is gonna disappear.

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We don't use the word online as much as we used to. We talk about it going to a Zoom meeting, not to an online meeting, or whatever the format happens to be.

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I would guess that within a few years, five to 10 or whatever, we won't be using the word online.

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It'll be something else. And it may not be Zoom either. It might be something totally different.

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One of the next levels of technology coming along, the next generation that's already out there but not affordable for most people is holography.

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If you Google portal, P -O -R -T -A -L, holopod,

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H -O -L -O -P -O -D, you'll see demonstrations of what I consider probably the next generation of communication.

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That's where you've got a box that is a little bit bigger than a phone booth. A person is sitting in a studio someplace, and he's transmitting himself via holography into that, let's call it a phone booth, in 3D image, which looks as real as if he were standing there.

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Now he's still in a box, but he's there. It's 3D imaging. It's very realistic. And they're already promoting it towards to religious leaders for purposes within churches, although it's a little bit expensive right now.

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So that's probably, maybe, the next generation of communication, because it all of a sudden now puts us at 3D instead of a 2D screen in front of us.

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And who knows what's coming from now? I mean, if you compare the automobile today compared to the Model T, the only thing that we had in common, really, would be four wheels and a steering wheel.

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And I'm a little scared, but I think our steering wheel's about to disappear. And that concerns me a little bit.

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But that's the progression of technology that takes place, and that drives a lot of society.

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So unless Christ first comes, the day will soon come when we won't be talking about online anything.

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It'll be a totally different scenario, totally different setting. And so with that, I conclude my discussion.

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there's, I don't know if we have time for questions, but if you can record the chat box, that's fine.