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| Built on quick-sand, The CORE doth fall, Even when missions are growing. Crumbled have plans in every land, Church drones are planning and spending. Wasting the funds of young and old But above all the rich who're rolled, Paying for sins everlasting. |
rlschultz has left a new comment on your post "Ski Has Resigned, Effective 4-12-2013.":
I would have never thought that this unraveling of the CORE would have happened so quickly. But, it was all just a Potemkin Village anyways. There is just so much that goes on behind the scenes.
It reminds me of those Alfred Hitchcock Hour shows where the perpetrator schemes and plans. Just where you think that they are going to pull off their chicanery, there is an interesting twist of events and they get their comeuppance. I would hope that more laity would see that all is not well in the WELS.
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Wikipedia:
The phrase Potemkin villages (an alternative spelling is Potyomkin villages, derived from the Russian: Потёмкинские деревни, Potyomkinskiye derevni) was originally used to describe a fake village, built only to impress. The phrase is now used, typically in politics and economics, to describe any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that some situation is better than it really is. It is unclear whether the origin of the phrase is factual, an exaggeration, or a myth.
According to the story, Russian minister Grigory Potemkin who led the Crimean military campaign erected fake settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787.
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GJ - I have been reading about Church Growth fantasies for decades - where some entity throws an enormous sum at one location to start out big, Big, BIG! Staff - building - programs! It's colossal. It's stupendous. It's gigantic! (See the graphic below.)
Mark Freier, the other WELS P-Boy, was involved in two of those debacles. One was the Florida church that ended up Roman Catholic. The other was CrossWalk, that ended up Evangelical Covenant. For a time CrossWalk thanked three WELS pastors for starting their congregation.
Mark Freier is now teaching Parlow's congregation how to be as successful as he has been. I hope the essence of Freier rubs off on all of them.
ELCA tried the same thing, in Yorba Linda. Big flop.
The true church is not based on money, clowns, and circus entertainment, but the Word. WELS does not teach faith in Christ but salvation in unfaith. Naturally the apostate leaders are drawn to unfaith programs of growth - Driscoll, Groeschel, Jeske, Stetzer, and the like.
