They have their own website. Watch their videos here.
The key motivator of Church Shrinkage, now called Emerging Church, is "sick of church." Don Pieper uses it on his website. Ski exudes it at The CORE. I could find more examples, but the bored are extremely boring. They copy each other's ennui and call it evangelism.
Long ago and far away, Rick Miller (WELS, now ex-WELS) used the same language in starting a mission for those "sick of church." Church was boring, meaningless, irrelevant. That sounds like Ski today. They all sound the same. Miller, Freier, and Voigt managed to turn a Missouri/WELS start into an Evangelical Covenant congregation.
They like to denounce everyone as "money-grubbing" (Don Pieper, etc). No one scrounges for money more than Church and Chicanery. There is not one self-supporting church among them. They waste incredible amounts of loot from foundations, Thrivent, and the synod. Gunn, Parlow, Doebler, Ski, and Patterson have their hands out all the time. Their political managers at The Love Shack "help" (divide) congregations and demand $5,000 to $35,000 for boilerplate nonsense. They call their business "Parish Services."
3 comments:
People who find the Word of God "boring" and feel they need to add things to it to make it "exciting" are suffering from some deep, deep spiritual problems. In reading your piece today, Pastor Jackson, I actually began to feel a little pity for these enthusiast dudes, even with all their crassness and arrogance. Although I am a confessional Lutheran who extolls the objective nature of the gospel; when I hear it preached by my 83 year-old pastor, it still gets me excited and interested. If you need a rock concert and all sorts of hippy banter to make Word and Sacrament somehow "better," then there is something gravely disordered in your faith. I used to think that somewhere along the line these folks were genuime Lutherans and they were offended or slighted by an orthodox Lutheran pastor and they decided to take some wierd kind of revenge. I don't know about that any more. I now lean toward the theory that there is some deep, dark insanity at the core of modern American culture and they were just carried away by it.
Mr. Schmidt,
I agree with your assessment of all of this, especially the dark insanity comment. From my own limited observations, the biggest proponents of whoopee worship seem to be the baby boomers. I have noticed some of the vengeance rear its ugly head. Somehow, the boomers assume that the younger members want to be hip and cool, like the aging boomers aspire to be.
Here's the context that must have been missed by your comments:
Green Valley Evangelical Lutheran Church is a church started by people sick of churches! Power trips, money-grubbing, sermons that could pass for sleeping aids! We wanted to be able to focus on what God actually said to us in the Bible rather than what this or that religious guru currently in high demand interpreted. We wanted a place where we felt we belonged and actually did belong, a church that listened to us just as much as it spoke to us.
We are what we are--Lutherans who believe the Bible--and it shows! We have a structured worship service with songs, Scripture readings, a sermon and prayers. Preaching is upbeat, explaining the Bible and applying it to our daily lives.
(and we've been self-supporting since about 1997.)
When the Word of God is not preached in the sermon can be nothing but boring and either money or a brand-new-you-program-for-legalistic-Christian-betterment is what comes out.
Don't want your readers to be misinformed.
Don Pieper
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