Saturday, March 14, 2009

A Mouse in Doubt




Anonymouse has left a new comment on your post "From One of Many Excommunicated by WELS":

Would you care to elaborate on the excommunications? Again, I see nothing here but charges. You offer no proof. This is just typical of you, Greg Jackson.

***

GJ - That is typical of Mouse, to start accusing. I don't have enough mental energy to make up stories. I use my brainpower up exposing the lies of Church and Change. Now that is a creative bunch.

I could name people because I know a lot of them. I have met them. Some write to me. Some are related to family friends. Some were members of my congregation. I will list what I know, without names for the most part.



  1. One pastor gave a paper questioning WELS' dependence upon AAL funding. He was driven from the ministry. He never recovered from the shock. I met him and know his daughter and son-in-law.
  2. A number of laity were excommunicated for participating in Scouting. Two different families were LCA members when I was serving in Michigan. St. Paul in German Village had a Scout troop and a Pioneer group. They also had very active Masonic members. St. Paul (ironic name?) started Church Growth under the anointed leadership of Floyd Luther Stolzenburg. Alas, the congregation has only shrunken more.
  3. WELS drove several ministers of the pulpit for questioning the NIV. Before, WELS was all-KJV. Then they were NIV-only. I met one of the ministers at a conference.
  4. Bruce Becker specifically drove Howard Festerling from the ministry because Howard taught the efficacy of the Word alone (and kept insisting on it). Two other pastors I knew from the Toledo area were also driven out of the ministry by WELS. Their crime was questioning the Fuller spin on "make disciples." Note that the KJV never made that error. For the innocent readers: "Making disciples" is the motto of all Lutheran CGM fanatics.
  5. I know a brilliant family, formerly WELS. They had some questions about the Sampler. The Sampler! The pastor stopped at the house and said, "You are no longer in fellowship with WELS."

I could list more examples, but my typing fingers are growing weary.

Mouse - you may post your apology on this story. Perhaps on the other one too.

Boom Times for Mega-Church Foreclosures





The Bigger They Are, The Deeper in Debt

Metropolitan Baptist Church was bursting out of its home.

From a group of freed slaves in Civil War-era Washington, Metropolitan Baptist had grown into a modern-day megachurch and community service powerhouse. In 2006, construction began on the congregation's dream complex in Largo, Md. — a $30 million campus with a 3,000-seat church, an education center and an 1,100-car parking lot.

Last year, the congregation sold its church in Washington. Preparations began for the move to what leaders had taken to calling "God's land in Largo."

But on Oct. 20, their plans were abruptly put on hold.

The Rev. H. Beecher Hicks learned that financing for the project had dried up. Construction stopped. And the congregation found that it was homeless — reduced to renting space and struggling to find new financing.

Add houses of worship to the list of casualties of the mortgage crisis.

Foreclosures and delinquencies for congregations are rising, according to companies that specialize in church mortgages. With credit scarce, church construction sites have gone quiet, holding shells of sanctuaries that were meant to be completed months ago.

Congregants have less money to give, and pastors who stretched to buy property in the boom are struggling to hold onto their churches.

"The economy has dramatically changed over the last year to 18 months in a way that very few, if any, had expected," said John Stoffel, administrative pastor at Seabreeze Church in Huntington, Calif.

Seabreeze spent about $12 million on a new complex that was completed in 2007. But a drop in donations, partly due to a rift between the pastor and some church members, forced the church to renegotiate for an interest-only mortgage. Stoffel said Seabreeze hasn't missed a payment, yet the mortgage is far from the church's only debt. The church also owes $1.2 million — due this year — on bonds that helped finance the project, and must repay a $200,000 loan that a couple took out on their house to help Seabreeze cover its costs.

It's hard to quantify just how many churches are at risk. Foreclosure records are scattered throughout county offices nationwide. Completing a foreclosure takes months or longer, so it's too soon for many failures to show up on a company's books. In financially stressed churches, clergy are often reluctant to discuss their plight. They don't want to alarm their congregants, and they fear that any complaints about their dealings with banks will backfire.

"Right now, when you're at the mercy of the lenders, you don't want to look like you're coming out against them," said Bishop Eugene Reeves of New Life Anointed Ministries International in Woodbridge, Va.

The 3,500-member Pentecostal church near Washington needs a couple of million dollars to finish its new $19 million complex. Construction stopped last spring when New Life's lender said it would make no new loans to the church, Reeves said.

"We now have children who don't have classrooms to get into, adults who have to go to an overflow room," Reeves said. "We have parking issues. We don't have enough spaces for cars."

Across the country, congregations large and small are struggling to pay off debt:

_Reliance Trust, an Atlanta company that is trustee for nearly three-quarters of the church bonds in the U.S., has seen "some increases in delinquencies," said spokesman Tony Greene, though he would not elaborate.

Among its clients is Temple Beth Haverim in Agoura Hills, Calif., which sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last July and owes the company more than $7 million, Reliance said in court documents. The property is estimated to be worth less than what the synagogue owes.

_Strongtower Financial, an arm of the California Baptist Foundation, said in a prospectus that 10 percent of its $119 million in outstanding loans were in default as of March 31, 2008, its most recent required reporting date. Chet Reid, Strongtower's president, said the specifics were private, but the company had only one foreclosure in the last decade — in 2006.

_The Evangelical Christian Credit Union, a major church lender with more than $700 million in loans last year, moved to foreclose on seven of its 1,100 loans in 2008, said Mark Johnson, the company's executive vice president. The company has had "a noticeable increase" in late payments, and two more foreclosures are expected this year, he said. By contrast, the Brea, Calif., company said it had no other foreclosures until 2007, when there were two.

These problems may seem minor compared to the epidemic of foreclosures on private homes. But church mortgages have always been considered one of the more solid investments, with lenders often boasting of only one or two foreclosures over a billion dollars in loans.

Even in bad economic times, people still go to church, which helps shield congregations from downturns, lenders say. Churches also have more flexibility than some other borrowers in cutting expenses. They can end charitable programs or trim staff and still stay open for business.

"You can certainly make a bad church loan if you try hard enough," said Dan Mikes, who leads the church banking group of Bank of the West, a major lender. "But if you're careful and you don't overlend, and you're cautious in the way you underwrite, you're fine."

However, the recent boom years brought changes that made the industry more vulnerable.

Firms looking for new lending opportunities in a time of easy credit entered the industry, and competition escalated. The size and number of church loans skyrocketed, with several companies reporting double-digit annual growth rates before the bust.

Some lenders even got into the business of securitizing church loans, combining them as an investment in the way banks did with home mortgages. In 2006, Strongtower Financial, based in Fresno, securitized church bonds for the first time, with a $56.3 million offering.

Roland Leavell, president of Rives, Leavell & Co., a church bond broker in Jackson, Miss., said that firms specializing in church financing often aped their commercial loan counterparts, lending too much money without a thorough check of what their clients could afford.

"The starting point was the commercial banks," Leavell said. "When somebody on one side of the business gets moving fast and loose, it makes every body else move fast and loose."

Johnson, of the Evangelical Christian Credit Union, insists that his company upheld its strict underwriting standards throughout the flush years when the firm was growing at an average rate of more than 20 percent annually. He said the economy alone is behind the recent troubles.

"Our history would say that we had done a really good job," evaluating clients, he said. "It has become very visible to everybody today that the recession hit 18 months ago. The foreclosures we've seen have coincided with that."

But foreclosure and bankruptcy records paint a more complex picture of some of the company's failed clients — and raise questions about whether the pressure for profit altered the industry's normally ultra-cautious approach.

Among the company's foreclosed-upon clients is Juanita Bynum, a former hairdresser and popular Pentecostal preacher. In 2006, she got a loan from the evangelical lender to buy a $4.5 million lakeview property in Waycross, Ga. She planned to use it for her ministry headquarters and to open a spa for beauty treatments and spiritual guidance.

But she never paid her property taxes on time and ended up owing tens of thousands of dollars, said Steve Barnard, the Ware County tax assessor, who threatened to auction off the land over the debt. The credit union paid Bynum's outstanding tax bill before foreclosing on her land last December, when Ware said the property value had dropped to only about $2.5 million.

Another church with shaky finances and a big debt: the Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ in Fort Worth, Texas.

The congregation began floundering soon after Shiloh's prominent pastor, Sherman Allen, was publicly accused of molesting women and beating them with a paddle. The accusers said that Allen's superiors in his Pentecostal denomination — the Church of God in Christ — had evidence of the allegations for years and did nothing to stop him. Allen has denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the credit union that holds the church's mortgage found another scandal — this one involving money. In court documents, the attorneys said the church could not explain how it spent $100,000 in income in 2006, that a $30,000 anniversary bonus paid to Allen in 2007 "is potentially a fraudulent transfer," and that the church couldn't provide financial statements from a certified public accountant for 2005 and 2006.

The church filed for bankruptcy in February 2007; the Evangelical Christian Credit Union says Shiloh owes it nearly $3.8 million on a 2005 loan, and sought to foreclose.

As in the residential mortgage industry, tight credit has had a chilling effect on loans to houses of worship. Reid, the head of Strongtower, said his company is doing less lending, but he would not discuss specifics. Johnson, of the Evangelical Christian Credit Union, said the company isn't making loans to new clients.

"We're struggling to do a good thing for our community," Hicks said. "Hopefully, we'll get past this impasse and move forward."

From One of Many Excommunicated by WELS





Re: Brett Meyer's Ichabod post about women reading liturgy in WELS.

The statement in the post which summed up WELS for at least the past forty years said it all. WELS "practice is detached from doctrine". In the 1970's the big controversy about government grants to Milwaukee Lutheran High School resulted in ex-communications of WELS members who protested to Synod, then protested publicly, for public largesse is a public matter. The lay members did so on the basis of WELS Statement of Belief published in 1967 which said, "We reject any attempt on the part of the Church to seek the financial assistance of the State in carrying out its saving purpose." The response by some synod leaders in defending the use of government grants was: We didn't seek the grants, they were offered to us. The more things change the more they remain the same.

***

GJ - WELS Pharisaical law is amusing. They were once dead-set against gambling, written policy. Now they are gung-ho for gambling - ever since some big giver was involved in casinos. WELS legalized gambling.

Some other excommunications have included: criticizing the budget process, favoring the KJV over the Reformed NIV, and questioning AAL (now Thrivent). WELS removed men from the ministry over the last two. The big one - daring to critique the Church Growth Movement.

PS - Joining the Boy Scouts went from mortal sin to A-OK.

Tweets in the News



The author of the Tweety bird song died at the age of 91.


Most of the people using Twitter seem unaware or unconcerned that their words are posted to the Net and kept there.

A juror from Arkansas used Twitter during a jury trial where he bragged he was giving away $12 million of Other People's Money. (Church and Change probably added him to their Rolodex - pronto.) The Tweets will be cited in an effort to overturn the verdict.

A Twitter message is called a Tweet. I have found Twitter useful in tracking the Church and Changers. I am not alone in using Twitter as radar. As soon as I activated my Twitter account, a Church and Changer put himself on my list, so he could receive every message. I find Twitter a waste of time, so I never post.

But oh the joys of tracking people on Twitter. One practical benefit is the list of followers and those being followed. Church and Changers follow Mark Driscoll and like to suggest to each other the latest Emerging Church stuff to read. Nancy's World is one Schwaermer on the list for the pricey executive assistant at the Popcorn Cathedral. She also posted a stinging comment on Ichabod. It reminded me of being stoned to death by popcorn.

One point of Ichabod is to get the Schwaermer to read the blog daily, and that is working. They have to read it, even if uncomprehending, in order to post their latest spelling errors. I follow Wesley's motto: "If you can't convert them, at least make them angry." They are annoyed if I write about the past, present, or future, so I am looking for a time zone they approve. They hate quotations from Luther and the Concordists, but they love Stetzer, Sweet, and Groeschel.

Ski and his pricey executive assistant continue to refer to Appleton on their Twitter as A-town, their own term but not one favored by long-time residents of the valley. I hope they never tweet about the Appleton landfill. I can only guess what they will call that operation. Mrs. Ichabod adds, "We live in Phoenix, not in P-town."

Ski cannot help revealing the shallowness of the Popcorn Cathedral of Rock. His website has no reference to Lent because there are no Lenten services. His grand opening is the Sunday after Easter. Until then he only has Sunday evening services announced - with Craig Groeschel sermon themes and texts. He is sharing Lenten duties at his friend's WELS congregation, so the mission to date has almost nothing to do with reaching the I-hate-church crowd, even less to do with the most important content of the Christian Gospel: the cross and the empty tomb.

Sermon preparation, according to Ski's Twitter, means watching TV on his Imax screen. Other peak moments have included firing up the popcorn machine and watching the Wizard of Oz on the giant screen, dancing down the aisles.

Do the Church and Changers ever imagine they are the Great and Terrible Oz, the frightened man hiding behind the curtain?

Or perhaps they identify with the Cowardly Lion? They erase their own revealing material as quickly as they copy the wisdom of the Schwaermer.

Genuflecting to pop culture could best be signified by leading the coffee-saturated congregation in a rousing version of "If I Only Had a Brain."

Twitter in My Google Told a Tale on You
I recall when the Church and Chicaneries went to Defcon-5 to deny Stetzer was invited to speak for their November conference. They were so shrill that one of my sources started to believe them.

The Conference of Pussycats already discussed the invitation. More enlightening were three different pieces of data, starting with Babtist Ed Stetzer's own Twitter. He recorded the moment when WELS Church and Change hired him to teach them the Word of God. He also blogged about speaking to WELS and Missouri, making fun of Confessional Lutheranism (shocked? - you bet I was!). And Stetzer added both WELS and Missouri to his speaking engagement list. Stetzer is no longer a pastor with a congregation. He simply talks about being a minister - as long as people pay dearly for it.

The Chicaneries were squawking so loudly because their stealth leader, Kudu Don Patterson led a group of them to hear Stetzer at Exponential last year. That was probably the start of the Stetzer hire. So C and C responded by saying, "How do you know we haven't canceled him?" I knew from Stetzer's Twitter and his schedule. The dates are recorded for posterity:

  1. Stetzer and Patterson at Exponential pan-denominational event, where Lutherans paid but did not speak.
  2. Stetzer hired by Church and Chicanery.
  3. Stetzer blogging to make fun of Lutherans and doctrine.
  4. Stetzer listing WELS and Missouri on his speaking schedule.
  5. Conference of Pussycats meeting.
  6. Silence, deceit, and denial from Church and Chicanery.




If I Only Had More Grants

I could while away my daydreams
Watchin' movies on the Big Screen
Consultin' with Andy.
And popcorn I'd be poppin'
And the money never stoppin' -
If I only had more grants.

I would preach like Craig Groeschel
For any individd-el
In trouble or in pain.
With the thoughts Craig'd be thinkin,
They would say, “Another Lincoln!”
If I only had more grants.

Oh, I could tell you why
Sub-woofers make me cry.
I could think of things I never thunk before,
And then I'd sit and think some more

I would not be just a Changer,
My head all full of danger,
My sermons Groeschel’s chants.
Perhaps I deserve you,
And be even worthy erve you,
If I only had more grants.