Posted by SB on 4/13/2002, 2:24 pm

8. LUTHERAN PASTOR RESIGNS. For the third time Rev. Rod Broding has left a job after being accused of sexual improprieties. The Lutheran pastor resigned from First Lutheran Church in Pine River following accusations he admitted to sexual misconduct there, but denies earlier accusations. Bishop Roger Munson, who oversees the Northeastern Minnesota synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said, “The church will assist in providing counseling to work through this turmoil and pain so that healing and wholeness can be experienced in their lives.” Source: Star Tribune 10/22/92. 9. LUTHERAN PRINCIPAL ACCUSED. Denying charges of indecent liberties with a student is John P. Rossow, who resigned in March as principal of Central Lutheran Christian School, Tacoma. Now a senior, the youth said Russow took him on outings and French kissed him for hours when he was a 5th grader, and tried to masturbate him at a state park after plying him with whiskey. A teenager said, “He had kids at his house a lot.” Source: Morning News Tribune 4/8/92. 10. “NOT A TIME FOR JUDGMENT.” The arrest of Brookfield minister Richard O. Bidwell for lewd and lascivious conduct is “not a time for judgment” but “a time when we in the Christian community need to offer our support and our prayers,” opines Rev. Kenneth Wheeler, an official with the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Bidwell, pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church, married with children, was arrested at a park in the afternoon with his genitals exposed, in the company of another exposed man. Source: Milwaukee Sentinel 7/14/92. 11. LUTHERAN TEACHER CHARGED. Arrested for sexually assaulting boys at John Calvin Christian School in Burlington, Ontario is Theodore Richard Vanderveen, 30, who taught 4th grade for four years. Source: Spectator 3/2/92. 12. LUTHERAN TEACHER CHARGED. St. Paul’s Lutheran elementary-school teacher Gerald. J. Bauer, Jr., 31, was charged with molesting a student, 12, during a visit to his home. The Farmington Hills teacher was charged with 1st- and 2nd-degree criminal sexual conduct. Source: Detroit Free Press 2/13/93. 13. MOLESTER STILL LISTED IN CHURCH ANNUAL. A Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor who admitted to sexually molesting a Duluth boy and who is being sued for molestation by three others, is still listed as a pastor in good standing in the synod’s 1993 Lutheran Annual. Rev. Daniel Reeb admitted in 1991 that he molested a parishioner, 13, several times in the 1960s and made official testimony about it to church officials. His victim and several others have filed lawsuits. Reeb resigned a year ago, but was put on “restricted status” and can still preach. He moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Source: News-Tribune 3/3/93. 14. LUTHERAN PASTOR ADMITS SEX WITH BOY. Cloquet pastor Wayne Vetter of Zion Lutheran Church pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual contact with a juvenile. He is in counseling for sexual abuse and is expected to be sentenced to a correctional center. He served ministries in Madison, Wis., and Grand Forks, N.D. A man came forward to say Vetter had molested him in Grand Forks, but the statute of limitations has expired. Vetter admitted to a habit of anonymous sex in public places. Source: Duluth News-Tribune 3/19/93. Will that be enough for now, or do you need some more? In each case above, the persons involved still claim the Lutheran Church as a “positive formative influence upon them.” And I tell you, I would never have taken such a below-the-belt punch as to blame the Lutheran Church for any of the above, as you are doing with Chapel and the three cases you list, including Zaitzeff. And yes, doing that adds up to blaming the Chapel for them. I just say that the Lutheran Church didn’t stop the things described in the articles above, as the Chapel didn’t stop the things described in the news articles we’ve all read. So far the score is 0-0. And you forgot to look in the New Testament. What about the case (I don’t have time to look it up right now; you can if you want) about the demon-possessed woman who followed Paul and Timothy around (I think that’s the two it was, if I’m not mistaken) shouting in her demon-crazed tone of voice, “These people are bringing you the message of salvation! Listen to them!” She appeared to be claiming that their message was a positive influence on her, and that was the very thing the demon in her was using to try to discredit the gospel. You know what? It doesn’t matter what any demons can lead anybody to say in favor of the gospel or any particular church to try to discredit them with their personal lives. All demons do is lie (or, in the cases where they tell the truth, they’re doing it in such situations for the purpose of deceiving). You’re not going to learn truth that way. “I was not talking about what kind of people they were before they met Christ, but what kind of people they were helped to become by the churches they became a part of.” Well, whatever you’re talking about, you need to apply your arguments about the Chapel and the Lutheran Church evenly. What arguments you make about one you must also apply to the other. “First I’m angry, then in the next paragraph I…have no passions?” All right, I corrected that above. LESS passions than some people, even though I didn’t name you personally as being “passionless,” because I don’t know you. That was a succinct word I chose to use—and if I went by a definition listed in one dictionary, “lacking strong emotion or feeling”—I could stand by it, because it doesn’t say “lacking ANY emotion or feeling,” but since in our English language a noun followed by the suffix “-less” is usually understood to mean “lacking any” of the noun, I will qualify. In that sense, I carelessly used it as a hyperbole (and “people with ‘no passions’ ”), and literally speaking, what I mean is “those who have LESS passions than others.” My case is consistent. And angry? Without meaning any discourtesy to you, yes, I think you appear to be, Steve. And in the comment about the dove clock, I was not implying that “peace is somehow bad,” but, as I said, brotherly love and peace, etc. at the expense of failing to fulfill God’s instructions adds up to a bad thing, though in themselves, these are good things. That is the point I was making. Marvin ____________________ Replies for Marvin Posted by Steve B. On 9/24/2001, 10:41 am Marvin, Maybe I am a little bit angry—angy at myself for falling for the whole bag of mawkish Pentecostal emotional tricks when I should have known better, and for wasting more than ten years of my life while I had my face rubbed harder and harder in the fact that the Pentecostal approach is a dreadful trap for anyone serious about an actual life of discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ. But I am not angry at you, nor at anyone else on this board. Certainly not as angry as you are at me for merely relating my personal experience and the lessons I feel I have learned from it, with the help of the Lord. For you see, in the posting that began this thread, I was not really trying to assign any sort of “blame” or build any sort of “case,” as you seem to think I was, but merely reflecting on the situation in which I find myself, 23 years after first encountering the Pentecostal world at Community Chapel in 1978—now in 2001 it’s as many years after 1978 as I was old at that time. And the year of 1978 was also the last time I had visited my grandmother’s farm, to which I returned this past summer. Walking around that farm, absolutely flooded with memories, I was struck by the distance I had come spiritually since the last time I had been there, but also by how much more disordered and ineffectual, on a daily real-life basis, my spiritual life had been since that time. The contrast between my own life and the life of my Lutheran grandparents weighed sadly upon me. I’m not planning on returning to the Lutheran church, nor holding it up as the best example today of what a church body should be. I probably disagree with and dislike sacramental theology and liturgy as much as you do. But I can’t help but observe the contrast in the spiritual lives between the people I knew in the Lutheran church and the people I knew in the Pentecostal church. The people I’ve kept in touch with from the Lutheran church are much more stable and mature than the people I’ve kept in touch with from Community Chapel. That’s all I’m saying. I didn’t have to search the entire Internet to find examples of whacko theories espoused by ex-Chapel members (like you did for Lutherans you don’t even know), I found them just by reading the postings on this board from people who were at the Chapel the same time I was, many of whom I knew personally. I’m not saying that nobody from the Chapel days has been stable, but I am saying that the ones that I can immediately think of as examples of maturity and stability do happen to have had a Lutheran or other denominational background before they came to the Chapel. And I’m not the only one who has observed that. Doesn’t that fact have the least bit of relevance in the light of the fiasco in which we participated? But as to what you actually write.... You say “But the people with more passions—it’s a fact—they have a greater enjoyment of the good things they have in their lives, and on top of that, it’s also a fact that it can lead them to getting things done more.” Where do you find these “facts”? My observations of life have led me to question them. Just because the reactions of “people with passions” are seen more readily on the surface does not mean they enjoy things more. In reality, I’ve seen that this can mean their enjoyment of things is very shallow and based on sensual gratification only, not on understanding. (Continued)