"More than 700 attended the 13th Annual Theological Symposium, "In _______ We Trust: The Public Ministry in the Public Realm," held Sept. 24-25 on the campus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. This year's attendance was the largest ever for the Symposium and included more than 50 young men from the pre-seminary programs at Concordia University System schools.
The Symposium offered an opportunity for frank discussion concerning the relationship between the spiritual and civic realms in 21st-century American culture, and the effects of this relationship on pastoral ministry practices. Audio files of the Symposium are available in Real Audio® format on the Seminary's Web site (www.csl.edu) for online listening and for downloading and offline listening." [from Concordia Seminary symposium page]
I was glad to see the Sem offer the streaming or downloadable audio of the four plenary sessions. Don't know how many of my readers will have either the interest or inclination to listen through the whole thing, but if a guy had to pick only one of them to recommend I suggest Dr. Joel Okamoto's "Filling in the Blank: 'American Religion' and Biblical Christianity" (stream / download) because of it's incisive definition, comparison and contrast of American Civil Religion and Christianity. It's seriously worth more than the hour you'll spend listentening to it.
Okamoto does a marvelous job of describing how the two are often confused with one another, particularly by American Christians, such that in many if not most mainstream denominations the two are nearly indistinguishable. It's one of the clearest discussions on the matter I've ever run across in all Christendom.
For those of you interested in trudging through all the presentations, the third session was a panel discussion including Dr. David Benke, entitled "Filling in the Blank: Ministering in the Midst of Civic Crisis." The audio there is split into two parts, the second part being the Q & A that followed the initial panel discussion. If you listen close, you'll hear yours truly bringing the third question to the panel.
After each plenary session, the groups broke down into sectionals where one had to pick and choose among sessions and presenters. These, unfortunately, were not recorded. I'll write more about them later, but know that I went to both of Benke's sectionals. I listened, asked questions, and spoke with him briefly one on one afterwards. More to come on that.
Do check out Okamoto's session, if you're even slightly inclined, and lemme know what you think.
