My website: www.ginotheseminarian.weebly.com

Here's the short form of my biographical statement if you're short on time (and who isn't now days?):

My name is Gino Marchetti, and I'm a first year student in the Master of Divinity program at Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne. I'm raising money to help me fund my way through that degree, to pay for living  expenses, and other school related activities/supplies.  I'm grateful for not only any monetary suport you can afford to send my way, but for your prayers as well - as both of these things get me so much further towards my goal of serving Christ and his kingdom.

If you want to read a longer statement of what I'm doing and why, find that below. What is written below was the autobiographical commentary I submitted to the Seminary in my application.

I hate to say that I’m going to start this Autobiographical Statement by saying ‘In the beginning’ because I fear that you will imagine that either: A.) I think I’m writing a book as important as the one that starts with those words, or B.) you’ll sigh, imagining that you’re in for some long winded excurses about some kid from Nowhere, Minnesota. Yet, I do have to start pretty early in my life to do justice to the prompt and in order to do right by those who’ve had their influences on me. I promise to keep it relatively brief though.

The first person that I can remember influencing me as far as the Christian religion is concerned is my dad. I remember that, when I was about the age of eleven or so, he used to read the Bible to me at night from a large illustrated Bible. I remember seeing the vivid pictures of King David slaying Goliath, a great triumph, and also the horrific images of Hell, which were less full of fire and demons and more full of people crying out in despair because of their separation from God’s mercies.  I also remember talking to my dad about God and other things, and just thinking to myself that I wish I could grow up to someone who knew so much about God and loved God so much.

It was also during one of these Bible readings that I remember having my first of many Lutherian Anfechtungen (though I knew nothing of Luther or Anfechtungen at the time, growing up in a Charismatic/Pentecostal Christian household). I remember on two separate occasions crying to my dad as he sat on my bed side saying to him that I didn’t think I was saved because I didn’t know if I loved God enough or loved Him rightly. At the time, because we were involved in nonsacramental Christianity, all my dad, God bless his good intentions, could do was to lead me in the pseudo-sacrament of the Sinner’s Prayer, inviting Jesus into my heart like I had done a hundred times before at different churches, or simply reassure me that I did actually believe. Those things, however, did little to quell my conscience, which was tormented by my sins (as seemingly small as my youthful sins seem now as I look back).

There was, most importantly in this situation, no pointing to the objective promises of God made to me in baptism (which I received as an infant at the behest of my Roman Catholic grandparents, God bless them) nor any pointing out that faith in those promises is righteousness – faith was for me, and for the churches we belonged to then, a sort of nebulous act of believing something or other about Jesus. So, while my dad himself and his love for God’s Word directed me in the positive, the theology of American Christianity were a negative.

I would continue to grow up experiencing severe, similar attacks of doubt without any real comfort being given to me. I attribute a part of the severity in those trials to my lifelong battles with depression, but not all of the pain was caused by that mental illness, of this I am sure: the greatest part was spiritual. There was plenty of moralizing preached at the churches we attended, essentially summed up as: well, if your conscience is bothered by sin, then simply stop sinning! There was no Bound Will preached, no Romans 7, no Simil Iustus et Peccator, no righteousness through Faith – just moralizing.

I eventually made up my mind in the 9th grade with all the resolve a ninth grader can muster to give up on Christianity all together if this is what this religion was all about, but even saying that made me feel guilty. So I tried going to yet another church, a Baptist church this time, in the tenth grade that finally presented the Gospel clearly. God was finally presented to me as someone who was not eternally angry, and Christ was portrayed as a robust savior from our sins, my sins. There still weren’t any sacraments, and I was told to look at myself for assurance very often, but the Gospel was still preached clearly at times. Unfortunately, that church was also steeped in the Church Growth Movement and, more recently, I’m sad to say, in being a Joel Osteen-esque self-help church. However, at the time when I first joined that church, as exhausting and law-driven as it could be because of their ‘mission and vision’, the Gospel was still so sweetly preached at various times. Because of that Gospel sweetness, I started to consider joining the ministry in my last two years of high school – I knew that that Gospel, as elusive as it could be at times, was worth pursuing and sharing.

When I graduated high school that church was starting to take on some of its more unsavory flavors of Joel Osteen and extreme American Evangelicalism, and so I cut ties as I went to college. In college, I started going to a Spanish speaking church in the area, as my major at the time was Spanish, and I grew to love the culture and people. Being a part of that congregation certainly gave me a group that I wanted to serve and still want to serve. So, in that way, it influenced me in favor of finding a Gospel-centric, Christocentric church body, yet the question of where to find such a congregation, if such a one as that even existed, perplexed me.

The perplexity didn’t last too long because, thank God, this amazing thing called the internet (even if it is a double edged sword at times) exists. I began reading blogs by the group Mockingbird and Tullian Tchividjian, and while I look back on some of the works of Mockingbird in particular and see a less-than-healthy antinomian leaning in their work, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the fact that these people were so steeped in the idea of grace. These people, I also noted, kept pointing to Martin Luther, particularly his Bondage of the Will, The Heidelberg Disputation, and his Galatians Commentary. Now, I had read about Martin Luther in my history classes, knew enough to say that I knew he existed and started the Reformation, and for that I was nominally grateful, but these works I was seeing referenced blew me away.

In short, reading the works of the Reformed Tchividjian and the Episcopalian Mockingbirders lead me to become a Confessional Lutheran, as odd of bed fellows as all those groups may seem to make, and since then I’ve continued to find myself feeling more at home with the LCMS than with any other church body I’ve ever been a part of. I feel myself more at peace because of the sweetness of the Gospel as it is preached in words and placed on my tongue and poured into my mouth at the altar in the Sacrament. I find comfort in my baptism, not the rebaptism I received in my quest for peace in high school with the Baptists, but my real baptism as a baby, where God’s promise made to me on that day all those years ago still stands true and firm for me even now.

This is what I want to share with our exhausted world, not my story which won’t save a soul, but the Gospel gifts of unexpected mercy, abounding grace and unconditional love that I have received through the dedication of Lutheran pastors and theologians past and present. I want people to have the assurance I searched for for so long. I’ve seen the gambit of ‘flavors’ that Christianity has to offer and tasted a good many, and yet I think that Confessional Lutheran tradition gets it right.

My studies at the University of Minnesota of the Classics and Early Christianity have proven this to me even more, specifically on a more intellectual level. My studies have gone to show me that the Lutheran tradition takes the best of the Church’s history and a proper respect for the authority of Scripture and melds all of this into a cohesive unit where Scripture stands above all, but not Scripture as interpreted by one single man with a ‘mission and vision’ but with the aid of the interpretation of the entire Church, past and present. Learning, for example, that the Church at large has always recognized that the Scriptures teach the salvific nature of Baptism helped convince me that the Baptist and Pentecostal interpretations of the Scriptures were faulty.

It is all of these things that have driven me to where I am today. It is all of these experiences, as dangerous as that word can be for Lutherans to utter at times, and people that I’ve met (and I assure you that there are more than listed here, but I promised you brevity) that I have wound up being an active LCMS member who loves every minute of it. I have been honored by being elected to be on the Board of Elders at my church and to represent the congregation at the Minnesota North District Convention last April as a Floor Committee member (Doctrine and Practice), where I have had the opportunity to serve my brothers and sisters in various ways from leading Bible studies to voicing the concerns of my brothers and sisters before the Church as a whole. I was even asked to serve, at the recommendation of the District President, Rev. Dr. Fondow, as a camp counselor at the Lutheran Island Camp this summer where I was able to do what I love and want to do as my career: sharing the Good News that we have a good and gracious God who forgives sins and saves us from Sin, Death and the Power of the Devil for the sake of no one other than Jesus.