Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down - The Fate of the Mainline Denominations - Including ELCA, WELS, LCMS, ELS, CLC (sic), ELDONA

The baby of the family loves to laugh and entertain others.

The Leman Birth Order Book is significant because personalities affect what happens in various institutions. Domineering first-born males tend to get a lot done, but the ultimate effect is not always good. One long-term General Motors worker said that type of leader ruined his company.

In church politics, that has meant leaders - if thwarted by opposition - who would retaliate by punishing anyone who questioned them, especially those who endangered their imagined infallibility.

AKA - the Untouchables.  Make missions flakier than ever before - No problem! Teach Calvinism at the seminary - No problem! Publish debates with the Holy Spirit - No problem! Promote Church Growth disasters - No problem! Copy and paste from Fuller - No problem! Kick the mother church out and steal it back - No problem!

Real leaders want able cohorts who work with integrity. Second-rate leaders need third-rate lackeys who will do anything to remain in their protected jobs (sinecures).

The trouble with the Scriptures as the ruling norm? - the Word displaces the infallibility of the leaders. That is intolerable to them, so citing the Word (unless distorted their way) is a sin.

The Second Reformation - The Deformation

Readers, you have witnessed the Second Reformation - which will be known by a better word - The Deformation.

The Deformation began with the Great Depression. Savvy leaders used the financial crisis (caused by the gubmint and the Fed) to blame the Christian Church. The Christian Church was too passive when it should have been involved in changing and improving society.

The secretive and very influential Brotherhood of the Kingdom, 1892 (Rauschenbusch) leveraged their initial success and began making the old, mainline denominations see social activism as the real mission of the Church. Rochester Seminary made Rauschenbusch a true, rationalistic liberal - and he taught there later. Rauschenbusch rejected all the traditional Christian doctrines, so he is very much honored today as a saint in the Episcopal calendar.

They named their Deformation -  The Social Gospel Movement. As readers will see, it shared many similar elements with the Church Growth Movement of the future (aka The Death Rattle):

• Anti-inerrancy.
• Rejecting the basic Christian articles of faith.
• Advocating universal salvation because of the grace of God. Faith cannot be a contingency, or grace is not universal. Yes, that sounds just like the pinheads in Objective Justification.
• Loving the new, scientific study of the Bible (historical-critical method).
• Undermining the canon by rejecting the traditional text of the Bible and steadily erasing verses and sections of the New Testament.
• The Quest for the Historical Jesus (and they have yet to find Him).
• Spending offering money on government lobbying, passing laws to make America socialist - and it worked.
• Unity comes from sharing the agenda of the group - the rest be damned.

All the accomplishments of the Brotherhood, and its sterile offspring - The Social Gospel Movement - are taken for granted in the big churches today. The agenda is far more Left-wing and kinky, but the foundation is the same.

How Is Church Growth Another Version?

Fuller Seminary was founded to teach a weakened version of inerrancy, which is really the errancy of the Bible. The Scriptures are only correct in doctrine, not in history and geography. If only the Holy Spirit knew as much as those hair-splitting, thimble-rigging fraudsters.

Every denomination and seminary has adopted this Church Growth Movement. What does that say about the quality of the content and the ethics of those leaders? Donald McGavran, a liberal in a Left-wing denomination (Disciples), gave it a clever name. It is a brand, a tattoo, a meme, all rolled into one blob.

One Church Growth idea was to use the congregations to support Planned Parenthood.

Once the Growthers began criticized for being too inward, they began advocating social activism (as if infanticide was not enough). The last gasp of Pietism has always been rationalistic social activism. Look at Oberlin, for whom Oberlin College is named. He gave sermons on getting inoculated and building bridges.

The Deformation's Goals

1. Once women's ordination is added to the Ten Commandments, work toward LBGTQ+ ordination.
2. Refuse to discuss any Bible using the traditional text (King James and modernized editions of the KJV).
3. Work on religious projects with all denominations, the move to all religions.
4. Protect dangerous, drunken incompetents and slime critics.
5. Grab the big bucks for the leaders' salaries and benefits, let the missions and little churches starve.
6. Make everyone forget the faithful leaders of the past.

WELS kicked Gausewitz under the bus so they could teach Objective Justification to all the children, using Luther's Catechism. They read the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward wrong. They should emulate his zeal, not his dishonesty.