If you cannot look at the sum of Charlie’s confession and life and recognize a man hated for the sake of Christ and His gospel, then it seems apparent that you have been conditioned by Satan to believe that Christians must live out their faith in the privacy of their own hearts and homes, never applying the Word of God to life in this world.

I have to admit that, when I came out of seminary, I was woefully unprepared to give pastoral counsel. I don’t blame the seminary in this because I’m not sure what course of study they could have offered that would have prepared me for it.

The Church of the Augsburg Confession is, historically speaking, very much a bilingual church. Well, there are rather more than two languages involved, but Lutheran worship is broadly unique for its embrace — from the beginning — of both the received Latin plainsong and choral repertoire as well as vernacular hymnody, whether that vernacular is German, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovak, or English. If you would like to claim that the Latin language has no place in Lutheran worship, I would direct you to Article XXIV of the Augustana: