Catastrophic Failure of WELS School System Proven By Stampede To Fuller, Willow, Trinity Deerfield, Stanley, Stetzer, Sweet, Beeson, et al.

The Alma Mater (nursing mother) of Enthusiasm - the WELS budget, fattening the piglets with your offering money, Thrivent grants, and Schwan loot.

Valleskey and Bivens studied at Fuller to teach at Mequon.

Olson got a DMin from Fuller to head the Staph Ministry program at MLC.

WELS initials--We Heart Trinity--are carved twice in the catalogue at Trinity Deerfield.

Parlow and Trapp are Willow Creek members.

Glende, Ski, and Katie trained at Granger, Drive 08-09, Catalyst, and Seattle (Driscoll?).

Patterson organzied a pilgrimage of WELS workers to Exponential.

Kelm fought for space cadet Leonard Sweet to teach WELS about the Word of God via Church and Change, then found himself hired a perish consultant at The Love Shack.

The initial invitation and hire for C and C 2009 was Babtist Ed Stetzer, but Shrinkers were ordered to dis-invite him.

Maybe some WELS leaders will go to Advance, thinking I never heard of that one (Stetzer, Driscoll, the usual suspects), but I have.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Is the FIC Editor in Bed with Church and Change?":

One would assume that the "need" for "change" in WELS is because its leaders are suggesting that the "unchanged" synod was a failure.

We are led to believe that missions are a failure because they are not meeting their self-funding deadlines. We are led to believe that missions are a failure if they do not use church growth ideals. We know our mission program is a failure, otherwise it would not need "church growth immersed" mission counselors.

We are led to believe that worker training is a failure. Why else would so many seminary and administrative leaders go to Fuller, Willow Creek, and the like?
The impression is given that if MLC and WLS were doing their job, we, especially our "best" leaders, would not need to go to school to experience worker training elsewhere.

Since our seminary and administrators are demonstrating by their practice that WELS' efforts to do mission work and train workers are by and large failures, and that they cannot "change" away from that failure from within, we can understand the collapse of the system as we hae (sic) known it.

Of course, this collapse will force "change." Obama said America needed change and we are getting it in politics. We are told WELS needs change, and we are, of necessity, going to get it. I don't think Lutheran conservatives will be any happier with coming changes in WELS than political conservatives are with changes in American politics.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Catastrophic Failure of WELS School System Proven ...":

Who masterminded the failures so successfully?

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GJ - That is an insightful question. Clearly an organization was building in 1977, and many people knew it. When I helped with the Orthodox Lutheran Forum (WELS) in the 1980s, one person said, "We should have dealt with these issues 10 years ago."

TELL marked the open espousal of Enthusiasm, 1977. Another turning point was Ted Hartwig's Isaiah essay and the lack of discipline for his espousal of the Historical Critical Method.

In the 1980s, everyone knew the score, because they were feeding me documents from all over and I was publishing the quotations in Christian News. I would not list Valleskey, Kelm, Bivens, Huebner, and the main villains, nor would I list their enablers - Mischke, Gurgel, and the Doctrinal Pussycats. The real culprits are the parish pastors who ducked the issues for 20 years, as if the Kudzu Vine of Enthusiasm would stop growing and choking the synod.

Some of the people being fired right now are the ones who chose to silence themselves when they knew the truth. Others were glad to switch sides to get a promotion or that coveted call. If the Kingdom of France was worth a Mass, as Henry of Navarre said, then a call overseas was worth a denunciation.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Catastrophic Failure of WELS School System Proven ...":

Thank you for your candid response and validation of things I saw and suspected back in the 70s and 80s. What I observed shocked me very deeply at the time. At a succession of conferences and confabs I saw grown men shifting their consciences and gratitude from Christ and to a few tyrannical pastor/ leaders. You know the names.

Their obeisance to a few Alpha leaders turned me off to WELS. As they competed with each other for the turn of a sanctimonious phrase, they looked like the asses they are. Emphasis on growth and expansion caused building worship to really take off. I had the suspicion then and am totally convinced now that the pastors were surrendering themselves to evil in hopes of better securing themselves within WELS.

In summary WELS is now reaping what pastors sowed with such apathy, complacency, and faith in their peers instead of in God. May God have mercy on them for the many souls they have misled throughout the years.

President Reagan's Normandy Beach Memorial

Reagan rehearsed this speech until he could give it without breaking down. Someone said, "There wasn't a dry eye in 50 miles."

President Reagan's Speech at Pointe de Hoc, Normandy

Ronald Reagan -- Pointe de Hoc, Normandy, June 6, 1984 (The 40th anniversary of D-Day)

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers -- at the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting only ninety could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life...and left the vivid air signed with your honor'...

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.