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| "Everyone in the world is forgiven, kiddies, except those who deny this precious dogma. We must kick those blasphemers out, in love." |
The following are tactics used by WELS leaders to keep people in line. Raise your hand if you have surrendered to one or more of these tricks.
- Giving a call that someone cannot refuse, just what he always wanted.
- Having a friend or relative offer friendly advice, to cease and desist.
- Asking about the source and trashing the source at once.
- Spreading lies about the person who is seeing the light, to encourage everyone to shun that individual.
- Forcing the person to apologize "for all the hurt caused" and "for wounding the brothers," then using that coerced response to say the individual was completely wrong and has retracted.
- Telling one story to a person, and another story to a different person, making it seem like the source is a liar who just makes things up.
- Questioning the individual's sanity - always useful and effective, especially in an abusive cult like WELS. Anyone against drunkenness and adultery has to be crazy.
- Letting someone overhear an outrageous lie so it is repeated and then denounced to "prove" the person is a slanderer who cannot be trusted.
- Giving someone a confidential audience with the Pope, Mark Schroeder, with the provision that nothing can be repeated. That gives Schroeder the license to say anything he wants. If it is repeated, the supplicant is denounced as a lying, promise-breaking son of Ichabod.
- Offering a story to a trusted friend, who repeats it and makes it sound accurate. If that story is not checked out, the story makes the object of the trick to be a horrible liar. In one case, a district leader was "in trouble for adultery." That was checked out and not true, so it was never published. If it had been published it would have been grounds for legal action. So who is the slanderer? The synod is, because they will do anything to silence dissent.
- In an ironic contrast, when accurate stories are told or published, they are heatedly denied, making the source sound terrible. A synod VP said he left the ministry for a job in a store because he was sick and needed less tension in his life. In truth, he offered to sleep with a woman as part of his counseling technique. She squawked and he was forced out. The synod record bore this out, removed "for cause." He even told his relatives I was lying and one pastor-relative pounced on me like a hobo on a hotdog. I sent him the xerox and he said, "We checked it out and he was lying to everyone. He is a real mess right now." (Paraphrase)
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| WELS will tolerate anything except the truth. |