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| Mark Belling featured St. John Lutheran Church on his podcast. |
St. John Lutheran Church received immediate support when people learned about the take-over staged by two men with the help of perfidious WELS advisers. The two men remind me of the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents and then spent the estate proceeds on their criminal lawyer.
Hastings and I have been in contact via Facebook for a long time. Before that I was at his church for a conference of independent Lutheran congregations.
This blog has been promoting the organ concerts at St. John. Suddenly WELS took notice of the congregation they kicked out of their sect almost 30 years ago. The recent visibility made people ask about the vindictive pettiness of the shallow "urban" pastors nearby, who cannot seem to get low enough in their behavior: Mark and Avoid Jeske, Jim Huebner.
The two men who engineered this fiasco--locking the pastor out of his own congregation, changing the locks, and grabbing the endowment, with the help of lawyers--are now being shunned by WELS pastors. The Milwaukee broadcast sent potential friends scurrying the other direction.
Readers have asked me about setting up a legal defense fund. I have talked to Tim Niedfelt about that. I will post more information when it becomes available. The real congregation has almost no income now, and there are members who were deliberately and maliciously excluded from learning about this illegal maneuver.
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| http://ecclesiaaugustana.blogspot.com/2013/03/update-on-st-johns-in-exile.html |
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bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Immediate Support for Pastor Kevin Hastings and St...":
The two men infiltrating at St. Johns and voting themselves the church and endowments reminds me of a development in the history of Britain. During the early 20th C the fraternal unions were often being turned into regular insurance companies, or were weakened by competition with insurance companies. People with vested interests in seeing the end of fraternal unions (which provided health and other types of insurance) would join a fraternal union merely to vote the fraternal organization out of existence, or vote to turn it into an insurance company. Those infiltrators had a nickname, but I forgot what it was (maybe ChurchMouse can help here).
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GJ - The fraternals were called "friendly societies" in England. The take-overs? I am not sure of the term. Leave it to Dr. Church to ask, "What was the term I was thinking of?"
I don't know.
Friendly societies.
