Interview with Pr. Tim Ahlman & Jack Kalleberg, Unite Leadership Collective

A wide-ranging discussion with the hosts of the ULC podcast.

Sep 25, 2025

A note on ‘platforming’

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) has accumulated too many self-appointed hall monitors and teachers’ pets. We will be criticized for appearing on Unite Collective Leadership’s channel, and Pr. Ahlman will be criticized for interviewing Ad Crucem.

Why? Because for decades our church body has been sucked into mirroring the broader culture’s worst habits: intolerance of open dialogue, rejection of free association, and the enforcement of the prevailing in-group consensus. What passes for “guarding the faith” is often little more than name-calling, labeling, and pigeonholing—practices now treated as more urgent and honorable in Lutheran circles than evangelism and the careful discernment of a Christian confession.

Ad Crucem has been branded with every conceivable slur, depending on the faction: church-growthers, pietists, liturgical but not confessional, conspiracists, anti-missional, Catholic apologists, accelerationists, compromisers, incrementalists, prudes, and even “palling around with Nazis.” We have been condemned for running a business, disdaining comfort dogs, demanding good stewardship, being immigrants, taking a shabbas meal with family, linking to or liking the wrong podcast or tweets, encouraging women or pastors too much or too little—apparently for everything under the sun except actual heresy.

Not once have these “concerned Christians” picked up the phone. Not one has contacted our pastors (five are available—take your pick if you’re afraid of one or more of them). Even the Illinois pastor who reportedly wants a boycott of Ad Crucem over our passing mention of Ryan Turnipseed in a tweet never called or wrote to us. Instead: blocking, subtweets, whispers, insinuations, and half-truths passed under cover among our self-appointed guardians of the current thing.

This is neither Christian nor mature. It is slander, as forbidden by the Eighth Commandment (“Here belongs particularly the detestable, shameful vice of speaking behind a person’s back and slandering, to which the devil spurs us on, and of which there would be much to be said.”). And it must stop—everywhere and by everyone.

Those in our body who casually toss around “Nazi”, “White Supremacist”, and “fascist” should keep Charlie Kirk front of mind—and what happens when you help scaffold the Left’s permission structures for violence.

Much of the theatre-kid hyperbole and online larping comes from confusion. Fame is mistaken for authority; attention is misidentified as leadership. Some actual authority and authentic leadership are desperately needed to hush the moral and norm entrepreneurs.

The interview

If you don’t like our opinions, please don’t watch or listen to the interview. We disagree on a lot and we agree on a lot; we don’t have to be enemies or suspicious of the other’s faith. Everyone is free to criticize everything; welcome to the United States of America! If you think we lapsed into heresy, then, you know, Matthew 18 and all that.

The shop's internet connection dropped out with about 15 minutes remaining, cutting the discussion short. We are scheduling a follow-up with Pr. Ahlman and Jack Kalleberg to close out the discussion about the Vicarage and Pastoral Support Initiative (VPSI).