Clouds Without Rain Complain

I have had many interesting exchanges with Lutherans in the last month. In the 1980s, I heard from older women who had no trouble seeing the errors, but wondered where the men were - especially the clergy.

Now I hear from younger men, mostly laity but also clergy. The Shrinkers have done everyone a favor by proving how bad their theology is. The Shrinkers tried to silence all the clergy, but some survived and now want the boil lanced for good. The laity are angry about the money wasted on these sinecures, but furious about the doctrinal apostasy and plagiarism of the Church and Chicanery lazybones.

WELS created an odd situation - with a reform Synod President elected to fix the problems generated by 30 years of Love Shack incompetence, with the ruffians still drawing a salary and seething for revenge. The previous convention had a body of men who wanted to replace everyone at once, whether their terms were up or not. That is a measure of the disgust felt about the Gurgle administration.

After the convention, the Shrinkers at WELS headquarters worked hard to highlight their insubordination, surliness, and Calvinism. FIC continued to feature Shrinkers as authors and subjects. Lavish praise fell upon Latte Lutheran Church, the outpost with a cross in a cup of coffee. WELS responded by giving the church a vicar, a sure sign of District Pussycat endorsement.

Thanks to a ream of information supplied by Internet research, the odious Patterson Church and Chicanery network was exposed. The response? Patterson hired Gurgle, the ex-SP in charge of the WELS meltdown. VP Patterson also applied for two free staff members and got one - a free vicar. WELS members can thank DP Glaeske for giving his VP buddy a free vicar. One way or another, WELS members are propping up Patterson financially while prep school teachers are being fired for lack of money.

A Lutheran strategist would have suggested that the Church and Chicaneries tone down their agenda since they were clearly losing. But no, several incidents proved the utter cluelessness of the bunch.

1. Item: Kudu Don Patterson organized a group of WELS workers to attend the 2008 Exponential pan-denominational CG conference in Orlando. Some of them immediately began yelping that they were not there. Babtist Stetzer spoke at the conference and found himself signed up to speak at the 2009 Church and Chicanery shindig. He bragged about it on his Twitter account and his blog, where he listed the conference while making fun of Lutheran doctrine. Chicaneries went into loud yelping about this not being so, never admitted their apostasy. Finally the Doctrinal Pussycats showed some claw and ordered the Chicaneries to un-invite Stetzer, the same Babtist who had never been invited, we are expected to believe. I also understand that several Chicanery leaders had a Come-To-Jesus meeting with the SP, leading to loud howling and clucking on the Shrinkers' network.
   
   
2. Item: In the fullness of time, God revealed to Church and Chicanery the need for a downtown mission in A-town, one block from a well established WELS congregation with an active downtown ministry. In fact, one can hardly find a region in the US where WELS members are denser than in Fox Valley. The Enthusiasts took Ski and Katie, who were working together at Jeske's St. Marcus, and moved them to the Popcorn Cathedral of Rock in Appleton, an Imax Movie Theater. Ski and Katie were not yet Schwaermer enough from working at St. Marcus, so one or both of them trained at Drive 08 and 09 (Babtist Stanley), Catalyst (Stanley and Groeschel), Granger Community Church (Beeson), and Mars Hill (Driscoll). Once again, the smokescreen of deceit has been raised around the work of Church and Chicanery. St. Peter in Freedom issued the call and installed Ski, even listing him on their clergy staff, but St. Peter does not want to claim their own baby - The CORE. Ski bragged that he worshiped with the Babtists at Drive 08, and 7 other WELS clergy joined him for Drive 09, but now the mountain has come to Mohammed. Ski gives Groeschel sermons (in the same order) each week, as revealed by his own websty. The Doctrinal Pussycat approves, Ski says.
   
   
3. Item: VP Patterson got behind Rock N Roll Lutheran Church in Round Rock, Texas, which began by consciously aping false teachers with the website Church From Scratch. That address now directs traffic to the main URL, but the substance of Old Scratch remains. Three years of rock music, huge grants, and plagiarized sermons have seen attendance soar to 30. It's a good thing they had a second staffer (like CORE and Latte) and their own blogmeister Joe Krohn, or attendance might have been much smaller. Once again, the Doctrinal Pussycats met--at Patterson's church no less--raising their consecrated and consecrating hands to bless Doebler's methods. Rock N Roll got another grant, albeit smaller than the $200k they wanted, and more time to drain the resources of WELS.
   
   
4. Item: For a long time the Chicaneries bragged on their non-WELS mission, CrossWalk in Phoenix. WELS pastor Jeff Gunn was the bomb, they said. Now the free money is gone and Gunn wants to reload at Wisconsin Lutheran College, the love nest where Church and Chicanery was born.