Summary of: LCMS Task Force Report — ELCA Sexuality Decisions Faithful Witness in a Time of Confusion A Call to Serve with Truth, Charity, and Conviction The Church of Jesus Christ has always lived in times of tension—between faithfulness and accommodation, between clarity and compassion, between cultural pressure and biblical confession. Our own time is no different. Questions surrounding human sexuality, biblical authority, and Lutheran identity have become especially pressing, not only in the wider culture but within Christianity itself. This ministry exists to serve faithfully in that tension. We…
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LCMS and Ministry to LGBTQ and their Families
Summary of: LCMS Task Force Report — A Plan for Ministry to Homosexuals and Their Families A Confessional and Compassionate Call to Serve Our church’s ministry is grounded in a simple but profound conviction: Jesus Christ came to save sinners, and His mercy is sufficient for every human life touched by the brokenness of sin. Because of this, we seek to serve people—not as projects to be fixed, nor as problems to be managed—but as neighbors whom Christ has redeemed by His blood. Scripture teaches that God created humanity male…
Read MoreFrom Scripture to Construction
A Confessional Lutheran Reflection on Authority, Hermeneutics, and Institutional Drift Introduction: A Lutheran Beginning Without a Map Authored by: James F. Polk I entered California Lutheran University in 1997 for a simple reason: I was Lutheran. I had grown up in a Lutheran congregation connected to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) and was baptized at sixteen at Grace Lutheran Church. At the time, I assumed—without suspicion—that a university bearing the Lutheran name stood broadly within the same theological family. I did not understand then that “Lutheran” in America encompassed profoundly…
Read MoreRed Flags in the Hospitality Industry for Sex Trafficking: a recent DHS publication
https://praxisprofessional.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/25_0605_bc_hospitality-toolkit-v02-508.pdf The Department of Homeland Security’s Hospitality Industry Human Trafficking Response Guide is a resource developed under the Blue Campaign to help hotels, motels, and other hospitality businesses recognize and respond to human trafficking. Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit individuals for labor or commercial sex, and it can occur right in plain sight within everyday hospitality environments. Because employees in this sector regularly interact with guests and operate in spaces traffickers often exploit, the guide emphasizes how critical staff awareness is in identifying…
Read MoreMachine Learning Didn’t Prove JEDP—It Exposed Its Assumptions
Machine learning has increasingly been applied to biblical studies, including debates surrounding the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple independent source documents—traditionally labeled J, E, D, and P—stitched together by later editors. Proponents of the classic Documentary Hypothesis argue that these sources can be distinguished by differences in divine names, vocabulary, theology, and literary style, assuming internally consistent authorial fingerprints and relatively clean boundaries between documents. In recent decades, however, machine learning techniques—particularly stylometry—have been used to test whether such distinctions emerge naturally from the…
Read MoreSelf-Serve, Single-Dispense Supplies with Refundable Deposits (Budget Hotel Playbook)
By tying each single-dispense item to a room-key tap and a small refundable deposit, the system generates objective, time-stamped telemetry that makes patterns—not one-off anomalies—visible: late-night clusters of towel or linen pulls, repeated ice fills, bursts of toiletry minis, or unusual water and coffee activity can be correlated with other signals like extended DND, frequent late checkouts, multiple replacement keycards, short-stay male visitor cycles, and payment irregularities to reveal a cumulative “red-flag” profile consistent with sex-trafficking. Because every dispense is linked to room, time, and dispenser location, supervisors can spot…
Read MoreWhen the Word Wins: The Deep Integration Your Mind Was Made For
“Exploring how a higher view of Scripture quietly reorganizes life’s big (and small) decisions.” When people come to trust the Bible as God’s inspired and truthful Word, something deeper than a tweak in opinions happens—they undergo metanoia (a change of mind) and begin the lifelong renewal of the mind. Their whole worldview is re-ordered around Christ and Scripture: truth and authority shift from relativism to God’s revelation, identity moves from self-creation to life in Christ, and purpose, morality, community, and hope are reshaped by the gospel. Ephesians 4:17–18 (NASB):“So I…
Read MoreOakland, Surveillance & Hotel Trashcan DNA
A uniform, citation-ready presentation for policy makers, law enforcement, hospitality leaders, and amicus audiences. IntroductionOakland, California, stands out as one of the most concentrated sex-trafficking hubs in the United States, with activity levels in some reports estimated to be several times higher than surrounding regions. Much of this exploitation occurs in budget hotels and other transient real-estate settings, where victims from nearby counties are funneled into the city’s commercial sex market. Understanding the business patterns that enable this—ranging from organized trafficking networks to opportunistic local operations—is essential to crafting effective…
Read MoreBIOLA and LGBTQ?
Can you summarize from this video which colleges are doing what and where they fall on the continuum compared to what the ELCA began to do after the LCMS Expulsion from the St. Louis Seminary: https://youtu.be/l6bVKawU_Sg?si=VxU2dEqMMdP4SqP4 Here’s a quick, “just-the-facts” digest of who’s named in the video and where they land on a continuum that runs from confessional/LCMS-style orthodoxy to the post-Seminex ELCA trajectory. What the video explicitly says Scope: Dr. Everett Piper (former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University) and host Alisa Childers argue that some CCCU schools are drifting…
Read MoreCommon Design vs. Common Descent: A Philosophical and Scientific Comparison
1. Introduction: The Challenge of Studying Origins The study of life’s beginnings and diversity stands at the crossroads of science, philosophy, and theology. It invites humanity to ask not only how life began, but why. While modern science often operates under the assumption of naturalism — that all phenomena must be explained by purely material causes — Scripture reminds us that this assumption is not neutral. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). To exclude the Creator from the study of creation is already to…
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