Breaking News - Church and Chicaneries Venting Their Rage at Proposals

The Ad Hoc Report suggests shutting down Perish Services.
Perish Services are the same Fuller/Willow Creek guys
who hired Paul Calvin Kelm, age 64.

Church and Chicanery is writing a Memorial for the '09 synod convention guys attacking Ad Hoc Committee's report. Joel Nelson is the alleged author.

Also, Paul Kelm is said to have written a pointed letter to the Ad Hoc Committee objecting to their findings.

Paul Calvin Kelm
Will you please go now?
You can go on a horse
You can go on a cow
But Paul Calvin Kelm,
Will you please go now?

Ichabodians, you better plan on attending the Saginaw convention. It will be a knock down, drag out political battle.

Kudu Don Patterson has enlisted Karl Gurgel, the ex-SP, Wendland - the chief at the Sausage Factory, and others for his campaign.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Breaking News - Church and Chicaneries Venting The...":

Wishful thinking on the knock down drag out part. We in WELS subscribe to Love the Lord your God and Love your neighbor as yourself. You seem to forget that part GJ. You see, God commands us to love our neighbor and if you don't do that, you don't love God.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it. BTW, are you sure your name isn't Richard?

***

GJ - I have seen Wisconsin Sect love beaming down on many different people. One layman was told he was no longer on the district evangelism committee after he criticized Church Growth, but he was not informed until he noticed he was no longer getting mailings for his position - after many years on that committee. Corky Koeplin (see the essay linked on the left) was called "brain-damaged" for questioning Church Growth and amalgamation. The former seminary president was called "senile" for disagreeing with amalgamation. Three faithful pastors in Toledo were driven from the ministry, one excommunicated by Bruce Becker for insisting on the efficacy of the Word. The Columbus leaders lied through their teeth, with Love Shack backing, to get Lutheran Parish Resources going, "the first Church Growth agency in WELS." The excited vicar who wrote those words should have added "unless we include WELS headquarters, the seminary, and DMLC."

WELS love is the reason I call 2929 The Love Shack. Fuller Creek love is reserved for fellow heretics, pastors who should be in prison, and gullible laity.

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Anonymouse has left a new comment on your post "Breaking News - Church and Chicaneries Venting The...":

It is amazing for someone who is no longer WELS and who is so doctrinally correct, that the direction to "mark and avoid" has been swapped for "mark and antagonize." The latter attitude in the heart is sinful spite. You talk about others whining and venting. Look in the mirror, dear Ichabod. The WELS is far from pure (no visible church body or congregation is) and will always be so ... but the Gospel is proclaimed in Word and Sacrament. As I recall those are the marks of the Church (big C) and believers are gathered there. I don't think that WELS is a place of either white-washed tombs or a body of folks that serve the devil below (as Brett likes to chide.)
Back to whistling while I work. This blog would be funny if it wasn't (sic) so sad. I'm praying for both Mr. and Mrs. Ichabod's needs this morning. Peace in Christ.

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GJ - I am basking in the warm rays of love from Anonymouse. The problem is: the Church and Chicaneries--like all Enthusiasts--deny the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. Luther's prayer for false teachers was "May God dash you to the ground." Amen. Let it be so.

His Holiness, The Antichrist, Adds a Hindu Spin to the Passion of Christ

Paul McCain, MDiv, got Father Neuhaus to put in a good word with the Antichrist.
Missouri's clarion witness to the Man of Lawlessness
has led to many LCMS pastors becoming priests.


VATICAN LETTER Apr-10-2009 (880 words) With photos posted April 9. xxxi

Eastern meditation: Pope's Way of the Cross adopts an Asian viewpoint

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- This year's meditation for Pope Benedict XVI's Good Friday Way of the Cross has a distinctly Asian perspective, referring to Hindu scriptures, an Indian poet and Mahatma Gandhi.

But the linchpin of this Eastern reflection is the passion of Jesus Christ. In that sense, it reflects Pope Benedict's view of Christianity's relationship with the non-Christian world -- that the Gospel enlightens and fulfills the beliefs of other faiths.

Indian Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil of Guwahati wrote the meditation on the 14 stations, to be read as the pope leads the candelit "Via Crucis" at Rome's Colosseum.

The pope chose Archbishop Menamparampil, a 72-year-old Salesian, after hearing him deliver an impressive talk at last year's Synod of Bishops on Scripture. The archbishop took it as a sign of the pope's interest in Asia.

"His Holiness regards very highly the identity of Asia, the cradle of civilization. Moreover, our Holy Father has a prophetic vision for Asia, a continent very much cherished by him and his pontificate," he said.

The immediate assumption among many Vatican observers was that the choice of an Indian would serve to highlight religious freedom issues in the wake of anti-Christian violence in parts of India.

Archbishop Menamparampil has assumed a leading role in conflict resolution among warring ethnic groups in northeast India, and his Good Friday meditation reflects his conviction that violence is never the way to resolve problems.

But he doesn't explicitly mention anti-Christian discrimination. His aim here is not to list Christianity's grievances, but to present its hopes and its answers to universal questions.

The archbishop is chairman of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences' Commission for Evangelization, and has spoken many times about the receptivity of Asians to the Gospel. He has argued that the church's presentation of the Christian message tends to be intellectual and doctrinal, but that it works best in Asia when it is more personal, experiential and poetic.

He follows that approach in his "Via Crucis" meditation, focusing on the way Jesus deals with violence and adversity, and finding parallels in Asian culture.

Condemned to death before the Sanhedrin, for example, Jesus' reaction to this injustice is not to "rouse the collective anger of people against the opponent, so that they are led into forms of greater injustice," the archbishop wrote.

Instead, he said, Jesus consistently confronts violence with serenity and strength, and seeks to prompt a change of heart through nonviolent persuasion -- a teaching Gandhi brought into public life in India with "amazing success."

He cited another Christian success story in India, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, when reflecting on how Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry his cross.

Simon was like millions of Christians from humble backgrounds with a deep attachment to Christ -- "no glamour, no sophistication, but profound faith," in whom we discover "the sacredness of the ordinary and the greatness of what looks small," the archbishop said.

It was Jesus' plan to lift up the lowly and sustain society's poor and rejected, and Blessed Mother Teresa made that her vocation, he said.

"Give me eyes that notice the needs of the poor and a heart that reaches out in love. Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service," he said, borrowing a line from the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Archbishop Menamparampil echoed one of Pope Benedict's favorite themes when he spoke about Jesus being mocked before his crucifixion. Today, he said, Jesus is humiliated in new ways: when the faith is trivialized, when the sense of the sacred erodes and when religious sentiment is considered one of the "unwelcome leftovers of antiquity."

The archbishop said the challenge today is to remain attentive to God's "quiet presences" found in tabernacles and shrines, the laughter of children, the tiniest living cell and the distant galaxies. His text reflected the idea that Jesus' own life embodies Indian values, including an awareness of the sacred through contemplation.

"May we never question or mock serious things in life like a cynic. Allow us not to drift into the desert of godlessness. Enable us to perceive you in the gentle breeze, see you in street corners, love you in the unborn child," he wrote.

Archbishop Menamparampil seemed equally comfortable drawing from the Western and Eastern Christian traditions. He illustrated the "mystic journey" of personal faith set in motion by Christ's death on the cross with a verse from a psalm and an eighth-century Irish hymn.

He ended with a meditation on Jesus' entombment, borrowing insights from the Eastern spiritual distinction between reality and illusion.

"Tragedies make us ponder. A tsunami tells us that life is serious. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain pilgrim places. When death strikes near, another world draws close. We then shed our illusions and have a grasp of the deeper reality," he said.

He quoted a prayer from the Hindu holy writings, the Upanishads: "Lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality." He said this was the path taken by the early Christians, who were inspired by Jesus' life to carry his message to the ends of the earth.

That message remains a simple one today, he said: "It says that the reality is Christ and that our ultimate destiny is to be with him."

END

St. Marcus Hagiography

Miracle at St. Marcus
On the Frontlines of reform with writer Sunny Schubert

Henry Tyson shows how urban education can succeed in the right setting.
"I never wanted to be involved in helping the poor. My mother was born in Africa and was always very sympathetic toward the poor and people of other races. But the whole inner-city thing came about during my senior year at Northwestern," says the superintendent of Milwaukee's St. Marcus School.
"I was majoring in Russian, so in the summer of my junior year, I went to Russia. I absolutely hated it - just hated it. So when I got back to school, I realized I had a problem figuring out what to do next," he remembers.
About that time, he was having a discussion with a black friend, "and she basically told me I didn't have a clue what it was like in the inner city. She challenged me to do an ‘Urban Plunge,' which is a program where you spend a week in an inner-city neighborhood.
"We were in the Austin neighborhood, on the West Side of Chicago. It was a defining moment for me," he says. "I was so struck by the inequity and therefore the injustice of it all. I couldn't believe that people lived - and children were growing up! - in such an environment, such abject poverty."
"I knew after that week that I wanted to work with the urban poor. I felt a deep tug, like this was what I was meant to do. In my view, it was like a spiritual calling."
Tyson's Journey
It was the start of several journeys for Tyson: an educational journey into the failing milieu of inner-city schools; a physical journey that would carry him to St. Marcus Lutheran School on Milwaukee's north side, and a spiritual journey that would lead him to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
The programs he oversees at St. Marcus are the embodiment of everything he learned along the way. Tyson's students are proof of the ability of poor black children to perform just as well academically as their affluent white peers when placed in a highly structured and challenging environment, and testimony to the power of the Christian Gospel to transform lives.
Tyson, meanwhile, has become a powerful spokesman for the successes of the 20-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. He is an eloquent and elegant speaker with a direct gaze that conveys the strength of his convictions. It doesn't hurt that he is Hollywood-handsome as well, looking like he might be actor Colin Farrell's older, smarter brother.
AmeriCorps Volunteer
The 36-year-old bachelor was 4 when his family moved to the United States from Britain, but three years later, his parents sent him back to attend Felsted School in the south of England. That decision, he says, was based partly on tradition - I had five older siblings, three of whom were at Felsted - and partly because they were disappointed in American schools. Years later, he would come to share that disappointment.

After graduating from Northwestern, he joined AmeriCorps and was assigned to work with Habitat for Humanity in Chicago. "I became involved with several Habitat families, and through them I became aware of how bad many of the Chicago public schools were."
Then his boss invited him to dinner, where Tyson met fellow guest Arne Duncan, who would eventually become the reforming CEO of the Chicago public schools and President Barack Obama's pick for U.S. secretary of Education.
That night, over dinner, Duncan convinced him that education "was a more involved, systemic solution than housing" for the problems facing the urban poor.
Tyson enrolled in DePaul University, earning a master's degree in secondary education. "I had a good experience at DePaul, but I did not learn what I consider to be the critical elements of great urban education there. I'm a firm believer that great urban educators aren't educated on college campuses - only in great urban schools."
Which the Chicago high school where he began teaching emphatically was not. His fellow teachers lacked passion and commitment. The students were out of control. The classrooms were chaotic.
After a year, he moved to a suburban high school, which was somewhat better. But then a former colleague, Kole Knueppel, called him up. Knueppel had moved to Milwaukee to become principal of St. Marcus Lutheran School.
"You've got to come up here!" Tyson remembers Knueppel telling him. "We're going to do great things!"
Testing His Ideas
St. Marcus was about to undergo a $5 million renovation that would allow the student body to expand from 220 to 330. But best of all, St. Marcus would give Tyson the freedom to put his ideas concerning urban education into practice, and he would be surrounded by fellow teachers who shared his passion and commitment.
That was six years ago. Today, Tyson is superintendent of St. Marcus. Knueppel has moved on to head Hope High School, St. Marcus' "sister" choice school.
"When I got hired at St. Marcus, the first thing they did was send me to New York to look at a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school." He has visited other excellent urban schools in Houston and Chicago as well.
"What I saw in those schools revolutionized my thinking. When you walk into a great urban school, you can tell the difference immediately."
The kids are focused. The teachers are teaching with passion. It's happy and calm.
The school day is crazy-long. There's direction. You see college stuff everywhere. And if you talk to a student, they make eye contact. They talk confidently, and they're polite."
That's what St. Marcus is like. At first glance, it looks like any school, albeit cleaner and neater than some. But the difference between St. Marcus and an average public school becomes apparent when students are between classes.
There is no jostling, no yelling, no slamming each other into lockers. The students, wearing uniforms of blue pants, blue blazers, white shirts and red ties, walk swiftly and quietly to their next class.
And they are excelling. Tyson pushed for them to take standardized tests, which are not required for private schools, and they are testing far ahead of their demographic peers.
Like their teachers, they are serious about learning. They arrive at St. Marcus as early as 6:30 a.m., and middle-school students often stay as late as 8:30 p.m. Tardiness, truancy and any kind of disruptive behavior are met with instantaneous discipline.
In the early grades, the teachers eschew educational fads like the new math or "whole language" reading instruction. Instead, they focus on the basics. In the upper grades, the curriculum is rigorous. Students are expected to complete three to four hours of homework every night. Along with academic subjects (including Latin), they have daily religious instruction.
"The transformative power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" is a crucial element of St. Marcus' success, Tyson says, and in his own life.
"I have never been a good Christian," he says. "Christ said only God is good. I am a miserable, broken sinner saved by grace, which brings me a tremendous amount of joy."
He and his colleagues are driven to share that joy with their students.
"We teach these kids that ‘God made you, God loves you, and God has a purpose for you. And when they know that, they will do anything to serve him."
"Love is absolutely the No. 1 ingredient" at St. Marcus, Tyson says. "The kids don't go nuts on us because they know we love them. There are all kinds of things you can do to kids in terms of discipline when they know that they are loved."
Long Hours, Hard Work
Likewise, St. Marcus teachers are willing to put in 12-hour days in service to God and their students.
"Any school that is successful has very extended hours," Tyson says. "That single point right there is absolutely critical. As long as the schools want to stick with the 6.5-hour day, we will never be successful.
"I never have to fight with my teachers. I think there are a lot of teachers out there who would jump at the chance to teach at a school like this. When you give a teacher the opportunity to change lives, the job becomes a consuming passion."
"Teaching is impossibly difficult. Period. You get better with practice. That's one thing that's wrong with our teacher training programs: Students don't spend enough time in the classroom, not enough time practicing.
"Urban education is not rocket science. Our model is largely stolen. People who are serious about school reform need to ask themselves why St. Marcus is more successful than most inner-city public schools at about half the cost," Tyson says.
"What we do here works. We should be replicating what works, but society has chosen not to."
Sunny Schubert is a Monona freelance writer.

"I Love Arizona" Song and Flash Movie

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