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| At Holy Word, Austin, WELS, Joe Krohn questioned the need to give $45,000 to the unionistic Cornerstone business. |
rlschultz has left a new comment on your post "The Previous Two Posts Illustrate the Purpose of I...":
An acquaintance of mine used to be a regular contributor to Planned Parenthood. When he stopped giving, he began getting weekly phone calls from them nagging him for money. That has an eerie parallel from when the congregations needed only weekly offerings to operate. Now, there are stewardship drives, electronic giving solicitations and the contact with the planned giving counselor. Congregational financial planning makes use of pledges instead of giving from the heart.
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GJ - WELS should audit all the congregations that jumped into expensive remodeling programs, paying Cornerstone huge fees for encouraging them to embrace such debt.
WELS should then audit the books of Cornerstone. I imagine that will not happen. Is Cornerstone a registered charity or a business? Do they answer to anybody except the spirit of Ron Roth?
And for what has this been done? Masonry evangelism is a farce - always has been.
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LutherRocks has left a new comment on your post "When the Money Fails, Use the Whip of the Law":
I asked that question at Holy Word when they were still in diaprax mode. I can say with authority that they are a business for profit.
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GJ - Riddle.
How do you find out whether any fellowship principles were violated?
Answer - There are none left, so no fellowship principles were violated.
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LutherRocks has left a new comment on your post "When the Money Fails, Use the Whip of the Law":
Come now...fellowship is the new entry to ever growing list of adiophora...
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LutherRocks has left a new comment on your post "When the Money Fails, Use the Whip of the Law":
The contracting was rationalized this way: It is no different than hiring a business to come in and do any kind of building or grounds project.
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GJ - Oddly enough, the same excuse was used to to have Floyd Luther Stolzenburg serve as a fake pastor, "evangelism <s>Church Growth</s> consultant." Although Floyd was not a WELS member and openly loathed the synod, DP Mueller and VP Kuske bowed before him, begging him to enlighten their benighted sect.
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rlschultz has left a new comment on your post "When the Money Fails, Use the Whip of the Law":
$45,000 for a consultation fee for just one congregation? That is close to the average annual full time wages in Southeastern Wisconsin. Consulting sure beats working for a living. After my former WELS congregation contracted with Cornerstone, one of the members naively asked if Mr. Davis was actually going to do any work for the capital appeal. She did not understand that the members would be the ones who would get their hands dirty, without any compensation at all.
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GJ - Another joke is this - they use boilerplate for their materials, so the congregations keep paying for the same old verbiage with a few local items added to make it look personal.
When my vicarage congregation used Lutheran Laymen's League, an agency within the LCA, they paid the consultant a weekly sum plus his local costs (lodging, food) for a specific amount of time. He worked 50 hours or more each week. This was the largest Lutheran church in Canada, with 3,000 members.
His salary was good but not outrageous. It was fee-based rather than a commission. I walked into my office one night to find him ironing his clothes on his own ironing board.
The overhead for the entire campaign was quite modest. He was not there to force the congregation into a wild building program. They actually put off their much-needed building, years before, to build the seminary schoolrooms first. That cost them about $250,000 in extra building expense.
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AC V has left a new comment on your post "When the Money Fails, Use the Whip of the Law":
Estimated Madison, WI (near Lake Mills, Cornerstone headquarters) median household income in 2009: $49,595 (it was $41,941 in 2000)
Estimated Madison, WI per capita income in 2009: $28,129
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/city/Madison-Wisconsin.html#ixzz1dmPTgzAU
