Saturday, January 31, 2015

Lesson Learned? Not Quite - How ELCA Leaders Merged Themselves into Self-Destruction

Dr. Dorothy Marple headed too many commissions to count
in creating the ELCA, working with the Lutheran World Federation,
and virtually every aspect of the LCA.


I read constantly about the LCA as we were leaving it. One name came up all the time - Dorothy Marple. When she died, they raved about her work on all the commissions leading up to the organization of The New Lutheran Church:

Retired ELCA pastor Ralph Eckard knew Marple for 48 years, including the 27 years he served as an assistant to LCA presidents and later bishops. "Dorothy and I served as colleagues from 1976 until the merger in 1988," Eckard said. "She was a prodigious worker and a great colleague in every sense of the word. She had a breadth of experience, which she could apply to any situation."
Marple's funeral service is set for Saturday, Aug. 13, at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church, Ambler, Pa. She is survived by a sister, Virginia Reynolds; nine nieces; and a longtime friend, Lois Leffler. http://www.thelutheran.org/blog/index.cfm?person_id=6&blog_id=1571
Obituary - She is survived by a sister, Virginia Reynolds and nine nieces. She is also survided by a long time friend, Dr. Lois Leffler. -
That appears to have been a Boston Marriage between Dorothy and Lois.
One reader likes the research I dig up from the Net. Here is a fairly honest look at the formation of the ELCA, in video. David Preus and James Crumley were both regretful, because they knew the LCMS-Seminex radicals really ran the show or controlled the agenda.
Readers may recall the first gay Lutheran seminary was Seminex, headed by WELS UOJ Stormtrooper Richard Jungkuntz. Looking at the people who ran the show, from Marple to Jungkuntz, it was not surprising that the commission to form ELCA was filled by quotas, not by abilities. Black, female, and gay quotas.
Seminex merged into the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Seminexers took over the agenda again, and torpedoed the budget by having high salaries and no financial support. One of their Seminex professors, Deppe, had been arrested for propositioning a male cop in a park in St. Louis. Was that any reason to keep him from the office of teaching future pastors? No!
ELCA has tried hard to be cheerful about its first 25 years, but the organization has lost the equivalent of The ALC since starting. Yes, indeed, as 29A observed, the ELCA of today is only slightly larger than the LCA of 1987. ELCA headquarter staff kept shrinking until the four divisions themselves were dismantled to save on expenses. (29A is so secretive that he does not even have a name, only a hexadecimal number.)
Condemn the Enablers of Felons - Instead of Focusing on the Felons
Eventually I will get to the point, but some of you are so young that you do not remember the whole Seminex and ELCA merger fiasco. And that's OK, as all the social workers say.
The leaders of the LCMS, WELS, ELS, and CLC (sic) would like you to focus on those felony arrests that actually reach the public stage. They quash most of the scandals, but the leaders can only do so much.
The Olde Synodical Conference is full of maggots,
but the leaders treat them like jewels.
They must see themselves in those felonious faces.

The enablers are the ones who protect the felons, give them another job, move them to another position or state, and cluck their tongues when those people self-destruct again. WELS will move a murderer, a DUI DP, an abusive porno-pastor, an embezzler, just about anyone except someone who questions the infallibility of Holy Mother WELS. Ditto the LCMS and ELS. That dissenting person is beaten like a rented mule and pounded into the ground. Like victors of old, the leaders do their best to wreck the family as well. 
The District Popes and Circuit Popes are bad enough, but the so-called conservatives are worse. They are so intent on preserving the shards of their imaginary church that they will not face how abusive, damaging, and false-teaching it is. How can they crow on their little dung-heaps if someone takes their dung-heap away?
The Episcopalians were stronger in their traditions, though weakened by Calvinistic rationalism, than the Lutherans in ELCA. The ELCA pushed the gay issue monthly, weekly, daily, hourly...until they had their vote for (openly) gay pastors in 2009. Suddenly, the older bishops and senior pastors who fought nothing before, were all OMG! with their hair on fire and began leaving.
"What's this?" the suddenly awakened enabler says.