Leading for the Week on Ichabod

The WELS Seminary - Mordor in Mequon - offers secret hazing rituals, training in plagiarism, and regurgitated Church Growth baloney - wrapped in a blanket of Universal Forgiveness without Faith.

Dr. Lito Cruz Asked That Bethany Add a PayPal Acco... Jul 5, 2011,  308 WELS Discussions Group on Facebook Links Lutheran ... Jul 28, 2015,  102 LCMS Loves Working with ELCA - Just Like WELS Dec 24, 2018,  73 Martin Luther College Recognized Sex Felon DP Ed W... Dec 26, 2018,  73 Wendland's Condemnations Prove the Truth of Justif... Dec 26, 2018,  68 ELCA Hits Bottom - First Things Expose by Dr. Robe... Dec 27, 2018,  57 What Is Worse? - ELCA or the Synod Leaders Enablin... Dec 28, 2018,  56 Luther's Sermon - A Christian’s Conduct toward God... Dec 22, 2018,  45 The Holy Spirit Teaches Man Better Than Books May 23, 2012,  44 Dr. Walter A. Maier Is Condemned as a False Teache... Dec 26, 2018,  41

Look at her network, look at her goals.
So why do Missouri and WELS work with her - besides the Thrivent money?

Is ELCA the Dodo Bird in the Lutheran Coal Mine? From 5.3 Million to 3.5 Million Members in 30 Years! Why Do the Others Emulate Their Big Skanky Sister?

 The ELCA 2% control the denomination, much the way Church and Change took control of WELS, and UOJ/CG captured the LCMS.

http://www.startribune.com/fewer-men-and-women-are-entering-the-seminary/490381681/

The Star Tribune wants my subscription money, but I will only give them some publicity.

The LCA had 3.1 million members, the last I remember. ELCA started by merging the LCA, The ALC, and the Seminex crowd for a total of 5.3 million members and 10,000 congregations. Now they have 3.5 million members and maybe 9,100 congregations. That is a vague figure since they even count remnants of shattered congregations, meeting in coffee shops and Goodwill reception areas as worship centers. Let us hope none use the spare room of a rented house.

 Headline - "She Is Loose."

Because I’m telling you what, the Spirit is up to something …Bishops: Amen. Yes, she is.Briner: … if we would just let her out.Bishops: Let her out. Get out of her way.Briner: Open the doors and let her out.Bishops: She’s out! She is loose!

ELCA Bishop Briner

Briner: I see that in all sorts of little ways. As I sit around the table and listen to this, I think, Wow, God, you are up to something. 

ELCA cannot get enough people to graduate from their seminaries, even though they ordain men, women, transgender, the entire rainbow coalition - excluding traditional Lutheran men. Before the merger, anyone questioning the harpy agenda of the seminaries was hated out.

I heard them discuss the demographics in 1978, at a national evangelism seminar held in Pennsylvania. That was good training, because everything taught in the LCA was from Fuller, and the same idiot worldly wiseman garbage came up verbatim in WELS. They even did their national Church Growth seminars together, one called the Church Growth Initiative (AAL/LB).

 Let's do a Book of Concord with ELCA's leading gay activist, the Kolb-Wengert. That's the ticket!

How delicious, to consider what an utter disaster that CGI program was for ELCA-LCMS-WELS-ELS. They had other seminars too, where WELS, Missouri, and ELCA leaders pooled their ignorance. One was on large churches, and Martin Marty, who was never really a pastor, filled them with liberal wisdom.

As I pointed out in print - because no one had the guts to say so - Missouri and WELS had to subordinate themselves to the ELCA women clergy who ran various departments.

 Let's send Larry Olson to Fuller Seminary for a Drive-Buy DMin. WELS will grow like kudzu, I tell ya, like kudzu.

At Snowbird, another insurance shindig, WELS President Mischke conferred with Herb Chilstrom (ELCA), and Bohlmann (LCMS). The diversity programs in ELCA, LCMS, and WELS came out of Snowbird too.

 No one appreciates diversity more than WELS Church and Change Your Gender. Cross-dressing is not just for prep, but for college, seminary, and the pastorate.

As they say, everything is learning, whether it is bad learning (hanging out with bums) or good learning (studying the Word of God). They learned to diversity traditional Christians out of the church, how to drive men out of the seminary. They learned their lessons well, even though the Scriptures teach us to trust the Word of God rather than the wisdom of men.

What Is Worse? - ELCA or the Synod Leaders Enabling ELCA?

Mark and Avoid Jeske is just what ELCA needs as an enabler. His posse of WELS millionaires keeps him safe from the consequences of his vast betrayals. Jeske is equal or superior to Synod Presidents because he works with all synods - ELCA-WELS-LCMS - not wasting time with little sects. He can gather money more efficiently from big sects. Key to characters on the bus to perdition, left to right: WELS DP who kicked out St. John's and helped steal it back, Broken Angel - notorious ex-DP of the Anything Goes District, Ski, Jeske, Gausewitz thrown under the bus.

The LCMS-WELS-ELS-Little Sects are far worse than ELCA, because they stand back and murmur that their big, failing sister synod is so bad, so radical. They act as if God thanks them for preserving the truth, when their trotters are in the same pig trough, grunting and squealing for some more Thrivent grants.

Lutherans feed Thrivent with their insurance and investment dollars, excited to get some of it back in the form of lavish grants to the leaders who betray them on a daily basis. Matt the Fatt allowed that Missouri got $50 to $60 million a year from Thivent. As we say about the Arkansas football coach - $3 million a year and he still loses! They get enormous sums, which only grease the skids of their downward plunging sleds.

Where are your synod leaders this winter? They are wintering in the Caribbean at luxury resorts, courtesy of Thrivent. Missouri does it; WELS does it; ELCA does it. They plan together too, which is costly and cumbersome, but so worth it for giant grants.

No one wants to bell the cat, because they all want to be cool cats spending those grants.

ELCA Hits Bottom - First Things Expose by Dr. Robert Benne - Not from The Onion. I Apologize for the Nadia Ring Photo, But People Should Know the Truth.

 Just remember - these three apostates love working with ELCA via Thrivent: Matt the Fatt, Mirthless Mark, and Pope John the Malefactor. Mark and Avoid Jeske stirs the Thrivent brew with ELCA lady pastors and demonic laughter. He misspells the name of his ELCA-WELS-LCMS conferences, which should read - Change and Die!

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/10/elca-hits-bottom

ELCA HITS BOTTOM

by Robert BenneOctober 2018Robert Benne is the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion Emeritus and research associate at Roanoke College.

Below are some sections. Please read the entire article carefully, because the author had a long teaching career with the LCA and finally left ELCA in 2010 to be part of the NALC.

 This happened at the church where the meetings were taking place, after the key vote that caused Benne to leave ELCA. In CN, I wrote about this debacle already developing in 1987.

"We left after the cataclysmic ELCA assembly of 2009 accepted the blessing of gay unions (which quickly became the acceptance of gay marriage), the ordination of “married” gays, and a social statement on ­sexuality that was ambivalent about the institution of marriage and the place of sexual relations within it. (The last item was accompanied by a rogue tornado that knocked off the steeple of a nearby ELCA church!)"

"Whatever doubts I had were extinguished by recent events in the ELCA. The glaring departure from classic Christian teaching is so stunning it is scarcely believable. At the 2018 ELCA Youth Gathering held in Houston in late June, 31,000 youngsters of high school age listened to the most radical speakers the ELCA could possibly put forward. The prime keynoter was Nadia Bolz-­Weber, the tattooed and feisty founding pastor of an ELCA congregation called House for All Sinners and Saints. She has risen to become the featured celebrity of the ELCA and darling of progressive elites from NPR to the BBC."

 Diversity is only good and blessed when it is selective.

"These two keynoters not only reject traditional Christian notions of sexual identity; they also challenge classic teachings on sexual morality. Both signed a petition that was concocted by an organization called “Naked and Unashamed” (I’m not making this up) based at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, where I (blushingly) taught for seventeen years. The petition calls for the ELCA to stop “privileging marriage as the only acceptable form of sexual relationality” and to start “editing out language that perpetuates heteronormativity and sexual oppression” from its guiding documents. Fortunately, neither spoke about their notions of sexual morality to the ­hormone-driven teenagers who cheered them on. Needless to say, both support Planned Parenthood and a woman’s “right to choose.”

ELCA seminary student, Luther, Anders Nelson,lip-synched his heart out in the chapel.

"A third set of keynoters was a mother and her eleven-year-old child, the latter having “transitioned” from boy to girl. The mother, an ELCA pastor’s wife, opined that her child, though biologically a boy, “deeply knows herself to be a girl.” “She wasn’t a boy; we just didn’t know that yet.” The child’s congregation had a renaming ­ceremony on the tenth anniversary of “her” baptism, bestowing the name “Rebekah.”

"Then Rebekah spoke to the teens: “Being transgender is about being who God made me to be. God does not make ­mistakes. . . ."

 An ELCA professor of Confessional Theology was fast-tracked into the pastorate so he could be the first married bishop, like the disaster in The Episcopal Church USA that ended in divorce.

***

GJ - My message to everyone who was silent or abusive when I left the LCA before its doomed merger - I told you so. I published about it with all the sources in 1987. WELS was openly hostile about my little effort, so I published it in Christian News.

Later I wrote a series of articles for CN that Otten suggested for NPH:

Liberalism, Its Cause and Cure. 

The book sold very well and went into three editions, but NPH pulled the title and gave me permission to reprint it. Valleskey no lika - in fact, there was a big fight to keep it from being printed in the first place.

The message of the Fourth Gospel is this - If we believe, then we also witness to the truth, no matter what.

 Amazon printed the book, but it is better to order it from me at the author's price.

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