I'm not on the editorial board of The Lutheran nor do I fully comprehend its policies on what advertising it accepts or rejects. But in the end, how they make those decisions is not really of any interest or concern to me. No person or group has any claim of entitlement to purchase ad space in The Lutheran's pages. So it should not be taken as an affront if advertising is refused. On the other hand, many might make the argument that acceptance of advertising is a tacit approval of the material by the publication. I think that is a logical stretch, but we know that it is a leap commonly made. In the best of all possible worlds the kind of publication that The Lutheran is (or aspires to be) would have no advertising of any kind, but the financial realities make that prospect less than dim.
Braaten's complaint against the editor of the Lutheran seems to be grounded in his sense that there was a 'wall of separation' (to borrow a phrase) between the conference he organized under the CORE umbrealla and NALC. To be sure the chronology bears him out mechanically, but he strains credibility when he suggests that the formation of something like NALC was not already underway. It was not underway as far as Braaten or CORE was concerned, but it is just plain naive to think that the conference would not have appealed to those angered or disgruntled with the actions of the 2009 churchwide assembly and who were already thinking about alternatives and what that church should look like. It is true that the organizers of the conference bear no direct responsibility for the subsequent actions of others who went on to organize an alternative Lutheran shop in North America. But like it or not, it is probable that those who will write the history of NALC (should its existence be long or short) will, like the editor of The Lutheran, discern that the conference figured in the history of its origin. Was the magazine's judgment prescient, or was it simply making reasonable assumptions about what would be the next step for many of those who would attend that event?