Synod executives fostered the Church Shrinkage Movement, draining the coffers to fund Fuller, Willow Creek, Trinity Deerfield,
and who knows how many other beehives.
In this Photoshop creation, Craig Groeschel is driving the car
that Huebner is trying to sell to everyone.
Ichabodians only need to look for the union label to find the church officials and professors who are indifferent to doctrine.
Spener's Pietism led to the creation of Halle University, the center of Pietism in one generation and a Unitarian school in the next.
Robert Schuller, who considers himself the founder of Church Growth, went from being liberal Reformed to being pan-religious. The only religion he rejects is orthodox Christianity. Schuller invented the entertainment style church with no denominational label in the 1950s, because denominational identification hurts recruitment. "Doctrine divides, but good works unite." WELS is currently aping the Schuller of the 1970s.
The unionist clergy are those who recommend Church Shrinkage materials for their members and underlings. Most of the WELS leadership came through Fuller, Willow Creek, Trinity Deerfield or all three. Since the executives all went for training, everyone else was excused for thinking it was unionism. Besides--and this is the fun part--it became their secret little club and a great way to fellowship with Missouri.
Now they can go to Mequon and get the same training. As I wrote before, the Sausage Factory graduates were loaded up with Reformed books required by their unionistic sem professors. That was true already in the 1980s.
"'Church growth.' I've seen people cringe when they hear those words. I think I know why. They react negatively because they feel 'church growth' implies an obsessive fixation with numbers and statistics."
Pastor James Huebner, Spiritual Renewal Consultant, Notebook, School of Outreach IV, Seventeen Ways to Keep Your Church from Growing, p. 178.
"We can't do a thing to make his Word more effective. But surely we can detract from its effectiveness by careless errors and poor judgment. It just makes good sense to utilize all of our God-given talents, to scour the field for appropriate ideas, concepts, and material (sic), to implement programs, methods, and techniques so that we do not detract from the effectiveness of the gospel we proclaim. Church growth articles, books, seminars, and conferences can offer such ideas and programs."
Pastor James Huebner, Spiritual Renewal Consultant, Notebook, School of Outreach IV, Seventeen Ways to Keep Your Church from Growing, p 178.
---
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Look for the Union Label":
Yes, Jay Adams was all the rage in the WELS seminary, and he was and is only one of the Reformed writers that Mequon promote. Here's one of Adam's books I got rid of a while ago:
What to Do on Thursday: A Layman's Guide to the Practical Use of the Scriptures
