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| Time of Grace ladies auxiliary finally reads their "Statement of Faith." |
The Statement of Faith from Mark Jeske was not a sudden revelation to me, nor a shock to my system.
Here is a far better one, which I wrote for our evangelism brochure in Columbus. It was copied by many congregations since that time. I did not copyright something already in the domain of the Holy Spirit -
If you hold to my teaching, then you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8:31-32
In an age of anxiety, we still believe, teach and confess that peace comes from Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
In an age of confusion, we still believe, teach, and confess that the Bible is the Word of God, inerrant and infallible.
In an age of doubt, we still believe, teach, and confess that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
In an age of guilt, we still believe, teach, and confess that Jesus Christ died on the cross to remove the power of sin, death, and Satan from our lives.
In an age of fear, we still believe, teach, and confess that Christ rose bodily from the dead to lead us to eternal life.
In an age of self-centeredness, we still believe, teach, and confess that God acts through the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion).
In an age of constant change, we still believe, teach, and confess the unchanging Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Context
I wrote the statement as a message to be used in any area where mainline congregations dominated. The locale? - a Church Growth bootcamp organized at Mequon by Paul Kelm and David Valleskey, complete with oozing references to Paul Y. Cho and the Church Growth Movement.
Copies of copies and variations exist all over the Net.
Statements of faith must be important to some, because congregations change the wording to reflect their peculiar dogmas. Thus Trinity (WELS) in Neenah has Christ rising from the dead to "win" eternal life - the Halle Easter absolution language.
The great irony here is is that Kelm's mission in life has been to make Lutherans into generic liberal Protestants, to attract more members--supposedly--even though his labor has had the exact opposite effect.
At this conference, I opposed what Valleskey and Kelm were doing, but they knew they were already in control of the entire WELS structure. Many lawsuits, failures, felony arrests, and millions of dollars later, they are even more in control of WELS. They are just too ashamed to admit it.
In their recent brochure on WELS mission funding, they omitted the huge sum given to The CORE for buying the stinky old bar in downtown Appleton, plus the loan to fix it up and kill the vermin. My theory is that their sugar daddy found it easier to pass through the money via Keith Free than Tim Glende. Some at Glende's church might have woke up, as they say.
Mark Jeske
The Gospel according to Mark and Avoid Jeske is central to this tale of woe.
One way to discern a mainline liberal (closet Unitarian) is to ask about the Virgin Birth of Christ and the actual Resurrection of Christ. Adverbs and adjectives really matter, because they like to parse both articles of faith as something believed by others (the Easter faith of the disciples) or a quaint reflection of antique values (honoring Jesus through Mary).
Both silence and denial are parts of the Unitarian creed of unfaith. Denial would leave some Time of Grace donors feeling awkward, so silence is the preferred gambit. "Leave it out" they say in the committee meeting or a secretive meeting at some Milwaukee ale house.
I met a high school classmate at reunion. He was a member of the Augustana Synod congregation I joined. Since that time he had become a Unitarian. His second wife was a Disciples of Christ seminarian, who bragged that her school was a joint operation with the Unitarians. Unfaith brings people together. I asked, "How can you tell who the Unitarians are?"
She was puzzled by my questions, which included, "Do you believe in the actual Virgin Birth of Christ?" and "Do you believe in the actually bodily Resurrection of Christ?" She dismissed both articles of faith as "not important," a phrase I heard or read many times among modern theologians.
If those articles of faith are not important, then why deny or avoid them? That makes them seem quite significant to me, the actual reason for the wording in the brochure I produced.
Jeske, Kelm, Olson, Bivens and their doppelganger in Missouri all represent an anti-confessional stance. The idea is to blend with current culture. In business, that means the Asian prosperity cult linked with the occult.
In one of his TV shows, Jeske said, "I am thankful we can call upon the powers of universe to help us." That is a paraphrase from memory, but it is close enough to alert anyone to his subservience to
- The Power of Positive Thinking - Norman Vincent Peale's book plagiarized from an occult writer.
- Possibility Thinking - Peale borrowed by Robert Schuller.
- The Fourth Dimension - Asian paganism borrowed by Paul Y. Cho, a hero to Fuller and Schuller.
- Nightingale Conant - More blah blah of the same occult genre.
- Napoleon Hill - possibly dumber than Napoleon Dynamite.
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| Napoleon Hill inspired Robert Schuller, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and many others. As Paul Y. Cho has shown, the spirits of prosperity are part of Asian occult concepts and ancestor worship - "not that there is anything wrong with that." |
