The Lutheran Hour Is Still Broadcasting
I remember, as a youngster, hearing "The Lutheran Hour" broadcast every Sunday on some radio station in my local area in California. It has been on the radio since the 1930s.
In 2017, if I wake up between 6 and 6:30 AM on a Sunday and turn on my bedside radio, which is perpetually tuned to WCCO AM 830, there it still is. It's a reliable, if unlistenable, fixture in the United States, at least on AM radio.
I still listen to it now and again, and am still amazed that it's still using the same old circular logic to "reveal" it's message.
Sponsored by the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, it's a solidly conservative sort of broadcast. The Missouri Synod is the second most conservative splinter group of Lutheranism. Like Martin Luther himself, it always appears to me to be suffering a severe case of constipation.
It's like a mini church service on the radio. The sermon is always centered around the horrible and dismal sinfulness of humanity, which can only be counteracted by Jesus and his sacrifice. The Lutheran Hour has been following its mission statement on the air for over 70 years: "Bringing Christ to the Nations—and the Nations to the Church"
I've heard a number of ministers preaching on the show over the years, but they all say the same things, over and over again. The show closely follows the Lutheran liturgical calendar, so its content is predictable, and never fails to say the same things on the same Sunday every year. For all I know, they're still reading the sermons from 1939. 
The very best part of the program, in my opinion, comes at the end of the show, when the current "pastor of the day" answers "listener" questions. All of those questions are obviously written by the pastor of the moment, and are written to coincide with the theme of the week. All of the answers are instructive lessons in tautology, and use creative apologetics instead of objective logic.
The "bumper music" used on the show comes from a wheezy old pipe organ somewhere or the Concordia College Choir. The organist has a distinctive style, although I have no idea who he or she is. The lugubrious hymns, many of which are creations of constipated old Martin Luther himself, that are played are first run through using a breathy set of flue stops, and then repeated after pulling out all the stops on the organ, creating an almost miraculous muddiness of sound. Add to that the weird modal scales Luther was so fond of, and it's easy to understand the sour, depressing mental state of most Missouri Synod members.
The only good thing about The Lutheran Hour is that it is not a product of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran Church. If it were, we'd be hearing sermons about the Catholic Church and its Pope being the veritable Antichrist, a dogma that is still part of that sect's core beliefs.
If you don't get this broadcast on your local AM station, there's no need to despair, though. You can listen to the programs on the show's website. All of them. Years of them. Or not...
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