The Baby Boomers have ruined the visible Lutheran Church, whether we look at the monster called ELCA, or the vipers in WELS, the LCMS, and the Little Sect on the Prairie. Stephanite break-off groups are simply more inbred and more evil but fading fast, thank heavens.
One example is seminary tuition. Once it was almost free, because everyone knew the students were putting off adult income by being in school for an extra four years. The Boomers shifted the burden from their own synods to individual students.
And get this - in the old days, a minister could continue to work as long as he did not commit obvious crimes or run off with the choir director or church treasurer. In other words, the call was honored and the ministers were respected.
Readers - everything is a business in this sense - cash flow and expenses. The Lutheran executives must have their palaces from which they rule with studied corruption and unrepentant evil. Every building has built-in costs, overhead. Long ago, such palaces were not needed, and denominations grew. The Augustan Synod was actually managed the desk in the home of the synod president, long ago.
Get this WELS was run out of an office in the NPH building, with Mischke's wife as the secretary. Now they have a muli-million dollar palace with a large, expensive, lazy, worthless staff, from the synod president on up.
All the synods have shifted the cost of seminary to the students and taken away most of the financial support that once subsidized them. Plenty of money is spent on buildings, to make them more glamorous.
So the students borrow enormous amounts of money, graduate, and hope they have a call to start paying for the loans. The Boomer-Skimmers, who went to school for almost nothing, are really getting paid from those student loans.
No call? Sorry kid, let the buyer beware.
Kicked out by a Church Growth DP? Too bad you did not listen better in seminary. We warned you.
The Boomer Grifters see the synod as their money to loot and spend on themselves. The royal salaries of the CPH president and faux-editor are part of the cost of every hymnal and book sold there.
I can print individual copies of my books (print on demand) for $2 - 8. So what is the actual cost of printing another new hymnal on a large scale? Sure there is overhead for getting it going, but they get that money back right away. From that time on, everyone is paying tribute to the overpaid bosses at CPH.
So-called American missions are another way to use up bundles of money - and another scam of exceptional greed and dishonesty.
The mission board can destroy a congregation as part of their personal vendetta, then sell off the property which the members paid for. The synod makes money from the interest, has a building maintained for them, and they collect the equity when the property is sold off. Where does the money go? None of your business.
How much do they receive in foundation and Thrivent grants? None of your business.
Where do the DPs vacation in the winter. Bug off. They deserve it for being such hard drinkers, I mean, hard workers.
If you want to share the looting, better not mention the robberies taking place on a daily basis.
And here is the bottom line, as they like to say, at the end of the day, the new trite saying - They are looting the synods while driving them fullspeed into liquidation.