We Love the Lies

Susan Boyle

Susan Boyle was presented by Simon Cowell as an 47 year-old, unemployed woman who needed her first chance to sing.

Her dialogue with Simon seemed carefully rehearsed. Stage-struck amateurs do not come across poised enough to mock the powerful host of a famous show.

We are supposed to believe that the panel had no idea she could really sing! They went from sour to ecstatic in seconds.

Now You Tube has registered 100 million hits on various versions of the performance.

Susan clearly had a polished, professional voice, completely in control - unlike their cell phone guy who sang opera. He was probably a real Cinderella, or Cinderfeller. I found his performance far more compelling because it was honestly done.

Susan recorded "Cry Me a River" 10 years ago with a full orchestra, so she was not exactly a newcomer, an amateur or a miraculous find.

I looked up her fan site, which lacks any real information, except the immediate present. Her voice is beautiful so I hope she does well. It appears that she tried in the past and her career did not take hold. I know someone like that in Hollywood. He became a minor star. Millions have seen him in movies like "The Fly" but he did not start any prairie fires, as Reagan used to say.

People enjoy lies. The lottery in every state is a lie. Social Security is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme, but no one puts Congress under house arrest, as poor Bernie Madoff is - in his penthouse. He made off with only $50 billion. Congress has America on the hook for trillions in unfunded liabilities.

America just elected a president with no history. He had quite a sordid history, but no one wanted to hear it. He foreshadowed Susan Boyle, arriving as something he was not. Now he has already done more damage on the domestic side and in foreign relations than Carter did in four years. The evil continues and grows.

Proof of Evolution

If you believe this happened spontaneously in six different European train stations, then you also believe in evolution.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Proof of Evolution":

Had you read the comment associated with the source video, you'd know it was rehearsed. The amazing thing is that it was only rehearsed twice.

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GJ - I need to be more obvious in the future. For this dance to have happened, a lot of planning was necessary, with each person doing his own part on time and in the right way. Most people see the planning needed in a few seconds.

Far more complicated is the sequence of a cut healing or the decomposition of organic material.

And yet the intellectual community would have us believe in evolution.

Exploiting the Tithe

Dr. Randy A. White and his ex-wife posed awkwardly for this photo. His sanctuary is facing foreclosure and loss of members.
Read about it here.
"Touted in 2004 by Church Growth Today as the nation’s second fastest-growing Christian congregation, the ministry took in as much as $40 million a year. But it has faced many hurdles in the past couple years. Among them: an ongoing U.S. Senate inquiry into its finances; the divorce of cofounders Randy and Paula White; and a dramatic drop in attendance."

Check this link for a video report.

On the webpage, look for the video on the upper right, about televangelists and athletes.

This false prosperity message can be found in abundance at Orlando - and also coming from such other works-salesmen as Joel Osteen.

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GJ - Watch similar mega-churches tank during this recession. Several years ago a huge Missouri congregation in Texas fell apart over the minister's flagrant adultery. The campus is now a prison. Up to that point, the minister was lauded and courted by synod officials - and then he lit out for Brazil, which has no extradition treaty with the USA.

Twitter Tattle-Tale: Ski and the Orlando Speakers

Twitter is a way to send very short messages to people. One feature is the ability to follow someone, receiving his or her Tweets (messages) - as they are called.

Some of us were speculating that Ski and other nominal Lutherans were down at the Orlando CG Lollapalooza called Exponential. A trip to Disney World is not in my budget so I looked up the parsons being followed by Ski and matched them up with their bios for Exponential.

A pattern emerges as one meditates on the people being followed by Ski:


Mark Batterson - Mark serves as lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, DC. NCC was recognized as one of the 25 Most Innovative Churches in America by Outreach Magazine in 2008. One church with eight services in four locations, NCC is focused on reaching emerging generations. 73% of NCCers are single twenty-somethings and 70% come from an unchurched or dechurched background. The vision of NCC is to meet in movie theaters at metro stops throughout the metro DC area. NCC also owns and operates the largest coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. In 2008, Ebenezers was recognized as the #1 coffeehouse in the metro DC area by AOL CityGuide. Mark has two Masters Degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of a best-selling book, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. And he is a daily blogger @ www.markbatterson.com. Mark is married to Lora and they live on Capitol Hill with their three children: Parker, Summer, and Josiah.

Andy Stanley - On Ski's list but not at Orlando? Are they nuts?

Mark Jeske - He will soon be at Orlando: count on it. Mark is one of the kingpins of Church and Change.

Brittney Spears - She is not speaking. Most of the exceptions are sports figures while Brittney is a sporting figure.

The Indicators - They are the group brought up for the website party. They do not follow many people but they do follow Ski and Katie.

Groeschel via Swerve - Craig is the founding and senior pastor of LifeChurch.tv. Craig, his wife, Amy, and their six children live in the Edmond, Oklahoma, area where LifeChurch.tv began in 1996. Craig's creative leadership skills are changing the way church is done worldwide. Under his leadership, LifeChurch.tv has become one of the country's first multi-campus churches, with over fifty weekend worship experiences at thirteen different locations throughout the United States. Craig and Bobby Gruenewald write daily blog posts. You can participate in this blogging community at swerve.lifechurch.tv.

Catalyst Leader - Catalyst is the joint event hosted by Groeschel and Stanley.

Mark Driscoll - Not at Orlando? Maybe he has his own AmWay conferences going. Most of the participants at Orlando have their own gatherings, so Orlando is a great way for the wolves to network.

Jon Ruddat - He is a WELS pastor in Appleton and utterly devoted to Church and Change.

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Here is Katie's Tweet on something inspirational from Granger Community Church:

read this post from @MarkLWaltz.-some good toughts on the usefulness of twitter. how can we leverage it 4 the Kingdom? http://bit.ly/2lIW4U
about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

Mark is at Granger Community Church, where Ski and Katie studied/worshiped to get The CORE going.

Granger offers a two-day training event with its management team. The cost is a mere $1500.

Fifteen hundred bucks for two days at Granger?!

Does anyone wonder how many millions have been squandered training WELS church workers at schools of Enthusiasm and synagogues of Satan? The BHM used to send pastors to Willow Creek - your offering dollars at work.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Twitter Tattle-Tale: Ski and the Orlando Speakers":

Correction: John Ruddat is not a pastor. He is a staff minister at St. Matthew, Appleton. St. Matthew is, however, deeply in love with Ski.

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GJ - Mea maxima culpa. Thanks to Larry Olson (DMin, Fuller) no one knows the difference anymore. Everyone is a minister at Martin Luther College, too. And the male teachers are still ordained?

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Drill Down with the Senior Management Team at Gran...":

Pastors would straighten up and fly right very quickly if they had to really work a real job for a living. Sheltered from the realities of life they make no mistakes. They shift the responsibility to church members time and again. Instilling business acumen in them at a two day conference is sheer fantasy.

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GJ - Here is a comment from a retiring bishop who believed in the efficacy of the Word - "Those who enter the ministry late in life often leave again because of the way ministers are treated."

Members of a church can get away with worse behavior in their congregation than they can in higher education or work. As one funeral director mentioned to me, "Men who are miserable at work and miserable at home can take it out on the pastor, because he is a safe target."

I believe most ministers start out wanting to work hard, do well, and be faithful. However, members have a way of giving 1.5% and asking why the bills are not paid, overlooking the 8-10% giving by the pastor's family. And - if a pastor is active in doing those things people say are important, the bills actually increase, so they are picked over at each council meeting. I heard a group of men discuss how much chicken to order for 45 minutes straight.

The CG conference addicts are another story. WELS starts to brainwash the men in college, if not before. All the wrong people are held up as examples at the annual Church and Change bash at MLC. Faithful pastors and laity have been pilloried for decades by the loving Church Shrinkers.

The Sausage Factory is even worse, completely dominated by Fuller, Willow Creek, and Trinity Deerfield alumni. An ambitious young pastor is going to continue in the path set by his teachers for 8 years. Those suspected of conservatism have not been given vicars. Three WELS boards are 100% trained in Enthusiasm, so a significant chunk of pastors, officials, and professors point the new pastors in the wrong direction and get them money for addition career-enhancing brainwashing at Granger, Exponential, Church and Change, Willow Creek, Fuller, and Trinity Deerfield.

Ski is no different from a lot of WELS pastors. He is just too candid about it. The Shrinkers do blame all their problems on methods because trust in the Word has been trained out of them. Can anyone imagine going to Stanley's Baptist Church, Granger Community Church, and Catalyst (Stanley-Groeschel) and having a single Biblical thought left? Those guys are all show-biz, a topic I know nothing about, according to Katie.

Awesome

Sermon Dishonesty

Busta Gut began his descent when his well-meaning parents
gave him his first guitar.

The corrosive effects of Church and Change become especially clear when anyone discusses the Sunday service.

The Church Growth Movement among Lutherans (ELCA, WELS, LCMS, ELS, CLC) began and continues as an exercise in copying. Waldo Werning was famous for copying, verbatim, pages from his CG mentors. Kent Hunter, another Missouri pastor, simply channeled the idiocy from Fuller Seminary, where he picked up a DMin.

The elderly Church Shrinkers in WELS--Valleskey, Bivens, Kelm--often copied directly from Fuller and acted as if they were "creative" and filled with new insights. One WELS pastor said to me, "We used to think Kelm had all these great new ideas. We found out they were all copied from Fuller."

Enthusisasts separate the work of the Holy Spirit from the Word, so they do not attribute efficacy to the Word. Kelm, Huebner, Bruce Becker, Bivens, and Valleskey all say that in varying degrees of mockery.

Because Enthusiasts give no credit to the Word, they frantically try to generate efficacy in their own style, personality cult, drama, or aura of entertainment. The Lutherans see huge crowds, but they fail to discern that these crowds are mostly jaded members who want to be tickled and appeased. The charismatic speakers aped by the Lutheran false teachers provide a fake intimacy for their audiences, telling people about their personal woes and shortcomings. They preach themselves and not Christ crucified.

This fakery works so well in the Age of Apostasy that the Lutheran wolves copy Hybels, Groeschel, Stanley, Driscoll, and the Granger gang. People can find ELCA pastors saying exactly what WELS and Missouri pastors are preaching, to stretch the meaning of the term, because they are also trooping off to Exponential in Orlando, Florida. They are also buying or copying sermons. The apish pastors are all too busy making members needlessly busy to do the one thing needful. (Luke 10:42)

That is also why the most ardent CG pastors turn into burn-out atheists. Satan eventually takes away the scales and lets them see his side of the story. The false teachers could repent and believe again, but often they become evangelistic about what they no longer believe. The various District Presidents and circuit pastors are guilty for doing nothing about this. So are the seminaries for teaching this garbage. Fellow pastors and laity also have an obligation to confront false teaching for what it is.

KJV 2 Thessalonians 2:5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? 6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. 7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. 8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the
brightness of his coming: 9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, 10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

11 And for this cause God shall send them
strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: 12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Sermon Dishonesty":

>>"People can find ELCA pastors saying exactly what WELS and Missouri pastors are preaching, to stretch the meaning of the term, because they are also trooping off to Exponential in Orlando, Florida. They are also buying or copying sermons. The apish pastors are all too busy making members needlessly busy to do the one thing needful. (Luke 10:42)>>

So what you are saying, is that in the end, there is really no difference in what ELCA teaches and all of the other Lutherans because of what is being preached on Sundays? We in WELS believe in closed communion. We believe in Biblical Fellowship practices. We believe that God's Word is really true and not full of errors. Umm, we believe in, umm lots of things that THOSE LIBERALS scoff at!

How dare you suggest that we are not different! Are you saying that by subscribing to the Augsberg Confession (UAC 1580), which ELCA does too, is putting us in the same boat? Why I never!

If what we say we believe isn't enough to distinguish us, then I don't know what is! So what if the sermon is the same. Maybe it's all just good homoletics. I hear pastors copying Luther all the time. Well, I used to, but that's beside the point! It's the heart of worship that matters isn't it? After all we can't just be happy in the Lord?

WE would never Fellowship without coming to agreement in our doctrine, so it just can't be true that we are the same.

I think we're not, I think we're not..........

Photos From the Debut of the Popcorn Cathedral of Rock

Rock and Roll goes better with Coke. First official service.

Rock and Roll CORE-Us.

A wireless mike allows for greater movement
on the performance stage.

His Grace, The Right Reverend Ron Ash, Top Dog at Church and Chicanery. "He has been a promoter of creating innovative ministries
for a changing world."

The Craig Groeschel series of sermons is called Urban Legends. May 30, 2008. General. Young Adults (19 - 30) Add to Favorites. God Wants You Happy. 2 Timothy 2:4-2:5 (NIV, NIRV, TNIV, KJV) Sermon Series: Urban Legends
You will hear people talk about this. You will hear it on TV today with TV preachers. You’ll read books about it, and you will hear it over and over and over again, and it is a message that feels very good. Here is the urban legend.


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Anonymousy has left a new comment on your post "Photos From the Debut of the Popcorn Cathedral of ...":

Odd, Greg.

I don't seem to see you in any of those pictures. It must be my imagination, but it almost seems like you weren't there.

Nice to see that you were present in order to have a first-hand account of events.

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GJ - Odd, Joe. I did not see your photo, so how would you know?

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Photos From the Debut of the Popcorn Cathedral of ...":

Is there any audio or video footage so we can hear what was preached? Seems like that would be something the CORE would want to post on their website, like many other churches do.

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GJ - Others have been just as curious. The CORE portrays itself as evangelistic but it has no message. Two full-time employees blog less in two weeks than I do in one morning. The Groeschel sermon themes are posted, but no text, no audio, and no video.

Ichabod Most Read, Least Quoted: Reformed Blog Breaks Drought

Francis Turretin, Calvinist.

UPDATE: In view of an amusing post at Ichabod, I've updated the post above a bit further (link).

His post is Plunder the Philistines or Join Them?

I have no idea how the readership here compares to any other blog, but I have noticed a lot of reactions to posts. Information and photos disappear faster than money in a Church Growth project.

Lutherans show a surprising reluctance to address doctrinal issues. Several Lutheran bloggers pose as orthodox or confessional, but they have avoided confronting the apostasy around them. Doctrinal lapdogs enjoy treats and snacks from their liberal pals. And the heretics love to hear their winsome pets snapping and snarling at the orthodox.

Few Protestants will dare to mention the Antichrist. According to WELS history, Wisconsin Lutheran College never hosted Archbishop Weakland and a bevy of priests for a round of public lectures. Like many scandals, that one was so bad that it became a non-event. All the pastors and Doctrinal Pussycats were on vacation, so they did not respond.

Anticipated Budget Shortfall Widens. WELS Members Evacuate

WELS created an odd juxtaposition with the two headlines listed above, from their Together email

Congregation Mission Offerings (CMO)—given by congregations for the synod's collective ministry—were $3.76 million for the quarter, down nearly 14 percent from the same quarter last year. Some of the difference may be due to the timing of Easter, which occurred in March last year. Foundation grants and gifts from individuals are also down dramatically.

As one person told me, "No matter what has been cut lately, they have to go back and cut even more the next week."

The part I marked in lavender is especially telling. As I predicted, extra money from the wealthy and their foundations is drying up. If the trends continue, the story will be worse in a year.

Times are tough, even in Texas. I imagine that future safaris will be limited to the wild animal farm in Lubbock, or the local petting zoo.