Knowing the people I know, would need additional sources and God himself to support the article. Hopefully more will come out soon

I don't see why it's possible that he simply misunderstood the ropes purpose. It doesn't have to be a hoax.

Josh Davis knows one of the co-authors of the petition. He might be able to get us some more information.

I mentioned elsewhere that I have some concerns about Concordia Selma closing, not only because many black students went there to become Lutheran teacher, but mainly because I see the Concordia University system moving away from focusing on training Lutheran educators and pre-seminarians.

When I was at Concordia Seward during the creation of the university system, it was mentioned that Concordia Irvine wasn't doing all that well financially, yet it remains open, even though it sits on incredibly valuable land that could be sold (or could have been sold) for a large profit to make the entire university system financially stable.

The Lutheran high school that I taught at didn't have all that many teachers who were Synodicaly trained (or who had gone through the colloquy process) and was sort of proud of the "staff diversity" this gave them. This isn't to say that many of these teachers weren't good teachers, most of them were outstanding, but they didn't promulgate the Lutheran identity, either. *

On the other hand, the situation at my high school alma mater has brought to my attention some incidents that may very well be racism in action.

As a side note, my freshman year there, one of my religion teachers was a black Lutheran pastor from inner city Chicago. He was also one of the wrestling coaches. He was a strict guy, but someone I had a lot of respect for. I don't remember how long he was there, but he went back to being a full-time pastor.

* The high school I taught at was one of the handful of "pan-Lutheran" schools, being a joint ELCA-LCMS venture. It was also the poster child for the LCMS saying that they were not going to authorize any more such ventures. For a time, there was a real concern the school would lose its Recognized Service Organization (RSO) status which would have meant the LCMS staff would have lost their called status.

What will you do if they block you? That's crazy.

gonna have to choose our battles