Three Synod Trifecta
May 5-6, 2011
Lecturer: The Reverend President Mark G. Schroeder, Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. President Mark Schroeder graduated from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in 1981. He served in the parish as the Pastor of Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He then served as president both of Northwestern Preparatory School in Watertown, Wisconsin and of the newly formed Luther Preparatory School on the Watertown campus and guided the amalgamation of two synodical preparatory schools into the new Luther Preparatory School. In July, 2007, he was elected president of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. President Schroeder married his high school sweetheart Andrea (Kuester) in 1977 and they have been blessed with four children.
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GJ
- He was assigned to Fond du Lac in 1981.
- He accepted a call to Maitland, FL in 1987. Oops. Left out of the bio.
- He accepted Call to Northwestern Prep in 1990.
- He accepted Presidency of new “Luther Prep School” in 1996.
- He was elected Synod President in 2007.
I have noticed this before. No one would ever know that Joel Gerlach left WELS. That was erased from his bio. When I mentioned that, based on local narratives, someone wrote, "I found that in the conference notes." He came back, of course, to make the synod safe for Church Growth. That is ironic, since Gerlach apparently left over a doctrinal issue.
During the Al Barry supremacy, the denizens of LQ made a big deal over my synod membeships. Someone born and bred LCMS was de facto superior (as long as everyone forgot about Cascione, who was rejected by the ELS and founded the Cascione Synod). I brought up Al Barry's extensive synodical history, which included the church basement seminary plus Bethany (ELS) plus a WELS vicarage and finally Missouri. That could not be found in the Concordia Historical Institute bio. Perhaps McCain photoshopped the bio during his brief tenure at the CHI.
Jack and Robert Preus belongws to three synods.
Why the Gap with Schroeder?
One person offered this opinion - a short call would not be listed by WELS pastors, according to custom.
The funny thing is, I remember the call to Florida. At the time, my WELS friends told me that anyone who got too critical of Church Growth was given a call out of Florida. Florida was Radloff's baby. He graduated with Valleskey, so the two of them would be good sources about how CG started in WELS.
I was starting to publish in Christian News about Church Growth. I got a letter from Pastor Mark Schroeder in Florida. He asked me for resources about Church Growth because he was assigned a paper about it for his conference. I sent a packet to Florida. In a few weeks I saw that he was called to be the president of the Watertown prep.
He has been Synod President for almost four years now. He has not acknowledged in public that Church Growth doctrine exists in WELS. Sweeping changes include:
- The CG VP Wayne Mueller was replaced with Fuller grad VP Jim Huebner.
- Church and Change has done everything it wanted, and still has a website active, with so many nodes growing that the original cancer site no longer matters.
- Church and Change founder Steve Witte (DMin, Gordon Conwell) was promoted to the Asian board first, then promoted to seminary president there.
- Church and Change founder John Parlow has gone with various groups to such events as the Babtist Drive conferences hosted by Andy Stanley.
- Church and Change leader Don Patterson (a district vp, woo-hoo) has led a group of suckers to Exponential, a pan-demon conference in Orlando each year.
- Shrinker leaders like Aderman, Patterson, and Bivens write for FICL, dominate FICL.
- Major domo Mark Jeske does whatever he wants, in whatever synod he wants.
Call me over-speculative, but I believe the Florida exile represents the unmentionable in WELS, Missouri, and the ELS today - Enthusiasm, Church Growth and worse, denying the Efficacy of the Word, UOJ.
One man put this in his office: "The unspoken is often the most significant thing."
That must be true, because there have many efforts to silence me. All I do is post or publish what is easily obtained from the libraries and the Net. I mention the unmentionable.
Their Shrinkers can give R-rate sermons, so bad that children are warned to stay away. But the truth is treated as pornography.
