Pastor Matthew Fenn, a former Jehovah's Witness and repentant Canadian, shares his remarkable journey from cultic beliefs to the Lutheran faith. In this episode, he discusses doctrinal contrasts, cultural shifts, and the profound impact of encountering the gospel of grace.

This episode of Lutheran Answers features Pastor Matthew Fenn, an AALC pastor and former Jehovah's Witness, sharing his story of theological transformation. Pastor Fenn discusses his upbringing within the Jehovah's Witness tradition, highlighting its unique doctrines such as denying the Trinity, rejecting the immortality of the soul, and advocating a works-based salvation. He explains how studying Scripture, particularly Philippians 3, led him to question Jehovah’s Witness teachings and ultimately embrace Lutheran theology.

Pastor Fenn also shares insights into the cultural differences between Canada and the U.S., reflecting on his move to Iowa and his experiences as a "repentant Canadian." The episode concludes with a discussion about law and gospel, the challenges of pastoral ministry, and the joys of living in grace-centered theology.

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Transcript

Remy: Foreign commences Pastor Matthew Finn. Welcome, sir, to Lutheran Answers.

Pr. Fenn: I'm on Lutheran Answers.

Remy: Oh, yes, unfortunately, you are. I know Jordan has probably warned you away from it.

Pr. Fenn: It's okay. We can, you know. Did I beat Jordan? He hasn't been on yet, has he?

Remy: No.

Pr. Fenn: Okay, good.

Remy: No, he won't return my calls or emails or anything.

Pr. Fenn: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have to be on.

Remy: Yeah. So I posted a video with Gage Garlinghouse in which we talked about sacred hours.

The Lutheran Daily Office.

Pr. Fenn: Yes.

Remy: And immediately after that went up, your lawyers sent me a cease and desist, saying that unless I had you on to give you full credit for the book, I could not keep that episode up. So you are actually not Gage, you are the mastermind behind that book.

Pr. Fenn: I am the mastermind behind that book. That book exists because I was frustrated with all the other books that exist.

Remy: That's. I feel like the story behind most books, actually.

Pr. Fenn: In all fairness, though, I mean, the treasury of Daily Prayer is an excellent resource. The Brotherhood Prayer Book is also an excellent resource.

Oremus. Also very good resource. Those are the big three. But I have gripes with all of them.

Remy: Why is yours better?

Pr. Fenn: Because I made.

Remy: It works for me.

Pr. Fenn: No, ours is different. It's not intending to do the same thing. So the treasury of Daily Prayer gives you the lecture, the daily lecture that's in Lutheran service book that is not intended to be a lectionary for both matins and vespers every day. It's intending to give you an Old Testament lesson and a New Testament lesson, each of about 25 verses apiece to give you an overview. So it's not intending to try to cover the Old and New Testaments and the Psalms in. In a year. So. So. And. And it doesn't always have everything that is required to pray, that's traditionally required to pray. The daily office. It doesn't have the daily. The collects from the previous Sunday.

It has other resources that are great, but it just didn't do exactly what I want. The Brotherhood Prayer Book is far closer to what I was looking for, except for it's in King Jameth, and I don't pray in King Jameth.

And it. Not only is it in Elizabethan English, it's in Gregorian chant notation.

And those.

Those things are hindrances. But the. On the other side of that, it. It's also focused.

It's also an actual breviary with all seven hours.

And that's not what I wanted exactly, because the Reformation took the old service of Matins and prime or lauds. So matins and lauds and put them together to make what we know as matins.

And then we took vespers.

Yeah, vespers and compline and put them together as what we call vespers. And then we took the daytime hours and dropped them completely and took parts of prime and made it the suffrages. And that's what comes into the Common Service book in the 1800s, late 1800s. And that gets into service book and hymnal and TLH in the two streams in American Lutheranism.

So having those twin sides of morning and evening, that goes back to like the Old Testament and the morning and evening sacrifice.

There's good reason to have morning and evening prayer. It's even in our catechism. And so I felt that while I really love Brotherhood Prayer book, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. And so the Sacred Hours went back to the Common service tradition and updated it. And when I thought of, well, how am I going to do that? I don't want to have to rewrite all these collects and, and all that. I went to the Book of Common Prayer 2019, which was a. It's a good conservative update to a lot of this material. A lot of these collects are the same. A lot of. And it's unlike the Book of Common Prayer 1979, which was very like kind of liberally and that kind of thing. It was in a conservative revision of.

Of the Daily Office. And so they graciously just gave us permission to use that as our starting point. Just absolutely. The. The publisher said, long live the Daily Office. That was his email to me.

Remy: Amazing.

Pr. Fenn: So they free and clear as long as we had the credit citation.

And so that's how it got started. I made the book that I wanted to use.

I wanted like all of the seasonal things in one spot so that you. Not in five spots or in the case of treasury, you have to grab five books. You have to have your treasury of Daily Prayer. And you've got to get, you know, the altar book or the Pastoral Care Companion or the propers book to get the. The prayers from Sunday.

I just wanted one book in my Bible.

And so that's how the. That's how the project started.

We already have to make a second edition because there are errors and typos that we missed and some feedback that we got. So there's a second edition coming very soon.

It'll just replace the first edition. So when you go to the page after it's up, it'll. It'll just replace it. So there'll be a second edition. So that's, that's great. We had a new, a new editor jump on board for the second edition to help us. Aaron Overly Graham did a great job finding some typos that we missed. You know, it's silly things in the second edition. Like we were inconsistent in how we approached pronouns to deity. Do you capitalize you or do you small? So we decided to capitalize well, so we have to go through the whole book and capitalize. So stuff like that.

Remy: Okay.

Pr. Fenn: Is coming in a second edition very soon. Maybe like next week or the week after Chant.

Remy: Chant tones anywhere.

Pr. Fenn: We have a. One of the other editors on that is Alex Lancaster, a fantastic musician, has a master's in. I believe it's music composition. He's working on it. It's slow. We've previewed some of it at our, at our seminary retreat last year we previewed a hymn and compline and that was, that went very well.

And so he's in the process of writing that music. The.

I think there's a. Rome has a book that they use for the sacred for the daily office. That's all the chant tones and all the, the music. And he didn't think he could use it. And then he realized, oh, it's it. Because it was from the 60s and 60s stuff is still under copyright. Well, this stuff was put into the public domain. And so that's, so that's a, that's a great boon. So we're able to use some pretty traditional chant tones. But he also wants to make it easy and singable and in modern notation.

So as he's working on that, we want to make the, the second edition or the second edition, the music edition. We want to make it a premium edition, you know, leather cover, you know, something nice. And so we're just not sure how to do that yet because Justin Sinner is a, is a small time publishing operation and we use Amazon.

Remy: Take that, Dr. Cooper.

Pr. Fenn: I mean I could say that I'm on the board, so.

But it's, it's small and, and you know, we use print on demand services, Amazon whatnot. And you can't print on demand a leather cover and you know, gilded edges. Yeah, so. So we're gonna, we're looking into how we might be able to, you know, logistics of doing that besides putting them in Dr. Cooper's garage. He doesn't want to do that.

Remy: Yeah, you, I mean you would have to, you would have to do that though, right? Bulk order.

You Know, like a. Like traditional publishing and then fulfill yourself.

Pr. Fenn: Yeah. So...

Reverend Matthew Fenn