Crown of Life, Corona, WELS, has already taken its offering report off the website. Is someone reading Ichabod?
Damage Control at the Love Shack swings into action, again. They have plenty of practice.
If a few hundred people reported what was going on, a lot of things would stop.
Breaking News
Pastor Rick described his actions on his own blog:
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Offering Link Removed...file this under "just plain strange"
I was alerted that a pastor with an ax to grind against the WELS and for some reason against Crown of Life had posted on his blog a link to the offerings statement on our church website. The content of the link was the monthly offerings summary for general and designated offerings. No individual offerings were mentioned, just the summary that we do for the District Mission Board. We buried this in our church website but alerted members how to find it since it was really an in-house thing and meant for COL members. We didn't and in retrospect probably should have pass-worded it. However, since this person decided that he would link to it, I asked our webmaster to remove that page. There was no information in it that isn't available in the WELS Statistical Report which is a public document, nothing privileged or private. However, that wasn't the first page on our church site that we wanted guests to visit and since our "statistics" indicated that they were, it's now gone.As for the man who did this, I don't know him personally. A web search revealed that he was a pastor in WELS for a short time, as well as a couple of other church bodies, and now is the pastor of an independent congregation. I will not mention his name so as not to give more attention to him than he already seems to crave. Why would he do such a strange thing? Who knows but in my opinion, it was definitely a no-class act on his part. COLers, I will send you a quarterly update letter by USPS with the offerings info. Sorry, but we didn't think that someone somewhere would act in such a way, especially someone who calls himself a pastor.
Pastor Rick - Class Incarnate
I have to marvel at the consistency of WELS pastoral behavior. Deception tactics learned at GA (their secret hazing ritual) are never forgotten. Pastor Rick published his gushing-red-ink offering reports on his church website, with a clear link to them. I did not find the link, but another information maven did.
Pastor Rick did something both odd and foolish, publishing the offering information on his church website. Instead of apologizing to the congregation, he blew a cloud of smoke. He also took off the list of books just read, which led with Willow Creek's Hybel and that master of apostate self-indulgence, Leonard Sweet. The reading list was on his blog and is now gone. Why? Isn't he proud of his reading list?
Pastor Rick does not know me, so why does he cover his tracks with his disparaging remarks? I am flatterred and encouraged. He cannot make a case for his favorite theologians or the fruit of his Church Growth agenda. My friend read the offering figures and said, "It looks to me like Crown of Life Ministries is going broke faster than the synod unless the last three months have been good."
I copy things and link them on my blog because WELS pastors are so quick to deceive people and say, "I never said that. It never happened."
I created my Megatron quotation database because President-in-Waiting Wayne Mueller denied there was any Church Growth Movement in WELS. I soon had 500 quotations, many of them leaked to me from various WELS pastors. Robert Preus sent a CG poster to Herman Otten. On it he wrote, "WELS is worse than Missouri on this."
Remember those words of Dr. Preus, o partisans of WELS, the next time The Love Shack denies something.
