Frequently Answered Questions - How Do You Do All This?

My son taught me the essentials of a database when he was still in knickers. When I started using Professional File for addresses and mailings, around 1987, the lightbulb blinked on and stayed on. I could copy material verbatim into the fields and record where I got each item. Then I could search on keywords, field names, authors, Biblical passages, and so forth. Professional File could find matching records and copy them into Word in seconds.

Wayne Mueller had claimed in The Northwestern Lutheran (now FIC) that there was no Church Growth Movement in WELS, but if there was, it was just fine. That sounded like a physician saying, "You do not have cancer, but if you do, it's fine."

So I decided to copy every single Church Growth quotation into my database, which I called Megatron, after my car battery. I needed a powerful name, an electrifying name; Megatron jump-started my research. Soon I had about 500 Church Growth quotations, mostly from WELS and their favorite textbooks. I needed to add large doses of anti-toxin, so I typed in Luther quotations, the Book of Concord, and various orthodox writers. Church Growth was my Harvard and Yale College in theology. I am grateful for all the non-Lutherans revealing their hatred of orthodox doctrine.

When people asked me to write Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, I added another 750 quotations about the Church of Rome, Chemnitz' Examination, Calvin, and so forth.

"But," some are sputtering, "how can you have so much inside information?" People have shipped me materials to copy into my database. They wanted the information to come out.

Lawrence Otto Olson (D.Min, Fuller) called Megatron, my "ready-to-go database." James Radloff began denying Church Growth affections after I quoted him often in Christian News. One WELS pastor laughed and said, "At least you got him denying it." Norm Berg, Joel Gerlach, Paul Kelm, Roger Kovaciny, Paul Kuske, and others wrote furious letters to me.

Now these Church Growth fanatics have the fruit of their labors: bankrupt synods and declining memberships.