Sovereign Grace

Pay No Attention to the Doctrine Behind the Curtain

 By John Immel

(For those of you who don’t care about the specifics of the SGM phenomena, give me a minute. This is going somewhere.)

 Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!

Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.

Wake up – sleepy head

Rub your eyes, get out of bed.

Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.

She’s gone where the goblins go,

Below – below – below. Yo-ho,

let’s open up and sing and ring the bells out.

Ding Dong’ the merry-oh,

sing it high,

sing it low.

Let them know

The Wicked Witch is dead! 

So some time has passed since Vicar Charles Joseph headed off to sit in the bad preacher doghouse. Rumor has it that the doghouse has traveled to other states and other countries south of the border where he is speaking in behalf of the very church he said he should not be leading. Or maybe that was just the local church he had committed grave sins against, and the universal church is fair game for his metaphysical mayhem.  

Anyway, for a few days the blogging world tried to hum a few bars of the song in the Wizard of Oz: “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.” People seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief: “See, we really aren’t crazy!  It really is bad in Sovereign Grace Ministries.  It really is!”  

Joshua Harris, beta big dog for the SGM Vatican in Gaithersburg, Maryland, took to the plexiglass podium and admitted that yes, there were grave sins in the church. It really was as bad as it seemed. We don’t answer fools, but God was disciplining US because He loved US.  

SGM admitting they are wrong?  Why, how could it be?  

People broke out in group hugs, speaking of grace and love and mercy and nodding sagely as people thought this was God finally showing up. Why, if the CJ Mini Me was willing to say it was bad, very bad, then surely this was a sign that the bucket of WikiLeaks in the face had really worked:  

“Ding Dong the Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!”  

Armed with ruby slippers, a flood of outrage-filled articles poured forth taking El Primo Doctrinal Mover and Shaker to task. If it wasn’t for his faulty Bible interpretation, his Bible proof-texting, a host of church polity mishaps, and his temerity for seeking to place himself in the same category as John Calvin, all these thing would not have happened. 

“Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.” 

SGM WikiLeaks seemed to embolden a few more victims to take their story public: yet another story of molestation swept under the pervasive depravity rug and another parent villainized for a lack of love and grace and forgiveness showed up on www.sgmsurvivors.com. Rumor has it that this story hit very, very close to SGM Vatican home. The CLC faithful were summoned to a members’ only meeting. The women are in an uproar; the men are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to proof-text their masculinity to get their theologically deficient wives back in line. The pastors are doing their gossip and slander two-step all the while woeing and tumulting about the great sinfulness of man and the great evils of human ego. 

“Wake up – sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.” 

With only a few exceptions—from those on the “anti-SGM” side of the blogging world—Brent Detwiler was heralded as a hero with the pooper-scooper for the SGM dirt and applauded for his courage to face down the green-faced villain of Gaithersburg, Maryland.  

“Don’t you talk mean about Brent! Don’t you dare remember he was one of them for decades! Brent, please come in. Yes, make yourself at home. You are one of US now.  Besides, we need you to tell us we are OK. We can’t know anything unless a pastor makes it clear for us. We can’t understand what is really happening unless a leader tells us. We are so confused. Can we get you some hot cocoa?  Yes, tell us how hurt you are. We are very hurt. So you must be hurt. Brent, tell us where you hurt. Is it in your heart? Is it in your soul?  We are hugging you.  Brent?  Brent?  Brent, aren’t you going to tell us?” 

Denigration of those dastardly bloggers in their underwear daring to speak ill of SGM leaders all but forgotten, Brent slid into the kiddie end of the cyber pool ready to take his side of the story public. Floaties firmly around his arms, like God before Balaam, the very blogs he denounced for a failure of attitude, and gossip and slander became his voice to the world.  See! I’m not apostate! I’m not evil!  I did it right! But CJ, this is all his doing!  It’s him! 

“Ding Dong’ the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.” 

When a house didn’t drop on his head for the rational larceny of joining the blogging world, Brent was encouraged to take his kiddy pool backstroke into the lap lanes. With the debut of brentdetwiler.com, he came out splashing; the mist was felt all over the blogosphere. Tim Challies took his blogging towel to Rat Fink Brent D concerning his documents; yet another Neo-Reformed shill weighing in on the general impropriety of reading the leaky PDFs. Rat Fink Brent D defended himself by pointing out that “two anti-SGM blogs” had been in existence for years before the documents, so he really didn’t have a personal vendetta.  

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Sovereign Grace

Montgomery County Kissy Face

SGM and MDCo Preachers

sitting in a tree

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

First comes love.

Then comes marriage.

Then comes carnage that no one disparage.

That would be Montgomery County Maryland, the home of the manifest evil Sovereign Grace Tyrannies; just so there is no confusion.

Keep your pucker on, boys, it suits you! Or is it ignorance that suits you? Well, it has to be self -imposed ignorance because it is impossible that people living in Montgomery County Maryland and the surrounding metroplex do not know of CLC/PDI/SGM. If the church is even a little bit contemporary, I’d lay odds that half of the praise and worship roster was written by someone at Sovereign Grace Tyrannies.

I am talking to you, pastors in the DC Metroplex, and for that matter, all you church “leaders”–any county, any state, any country–where Sovereign Grace Tyrannies are perpetrated and the spiritual carnage limps into your counseling sessions for some serious triage. You KNOW the stories.

So here is the question: where are YOU? Puckering up at the SGM backside?

Noel’s Story… kiss, kiss, kiss

Jim and Carol’s Story… kiss, kiss, kiss

Free Bird’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

Keith’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

musicman’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

Butterfly’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

Julie’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

db’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

Kim’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

Ryan’s…kiss, kiss, kiss

The list goes on, and on, and on. Stories PLURAL that have been shared on www.sgmsurvivors.com …kiss, kiss, kiss

And more stories on www.sgmrefuge.com … kiss, kiss, kiss.

Despicable account of husbands more interested in the affirmations of men than the love and loyalty and counsel of their wives; single moms browbeaten into “Disciplining” their children absent context or consideration for the child’s mental, emotional, or spiritual struggles.  Children abused and perpetrators shielded in the name of forgiveness.   Whispers of Suicides, people who’ve despaired their interactions to the point of death, covered up and marginalized. People confronted with extraordinary pain and suffering, counseled that seeking help and healing was a function of their sin and selfish deception. Repeated accounts where the pursuit of “sound doctrine” is the primary source of family splits: doctrine is the highest importance and of no consequence depending on pastoral purpose. Submission is equated with personal transparency and Authority is the power to dictate personality. Young men with callings railroaded out the door of the church for the smallest perceived doctrinal failings–all profound alleged tales of absolute Sovereign Grace Tyranny’s pastoral oppression.

“But those stories didn’t happen in Montgomery County Maryland…”

Oh, cut it out.

Pastors are notoriously nosy, rooting around in people’s lives if it suits their purpose. We have entire doctrines that mandate pew-sitter transparency to leadership temerity. And don’t pretend for a minute that the stories recounted on the blogosphere are not identical to the ones you have heard in your tithe purchased offices. You have heard the stories fresh, seen the tears, seen the frustrations spill out over your church offices–presided over families falling apart, and the lives crumbling under the pressure of being outcast for fantastically twisted reasons, despairing of their very sanity in the mistreatment. And the hallmark is that the elements of the story, the methods employed to bully and silence and manipulate remain stunningly consistent no matter how the names change or the details differ.

And here is the reality. I talked to a number of you MCo MD “leaders” almost a decade ago when I distributed copies of Blight in the Vineyard, way back when most people were too terrified to detail their interaction with then PDI and long before the blogosphere gave enough anonymity for many to start saying Sovereign Grace Ministries sucks and no one was selling T-shirts. When I sat in your office and detailed my own story… and then we talked candidly, you told me of your “concerns” for the consistency of the story and the observed the aftermath.

So what can be the reason for the lip-puckering silence? Is it admiration? Do you look with longing at the multi Million Dollar CLC campus on Muncaster Mill Rd and wish that you could do the same? Have you bought into the notion that they really are the standard? They really have mastered the essence of Christianity? Or is it that you preach your own brand of submission and authority and perpetrate some of the same insanity?  You cannot judge because that would indict you?

Here it is. I am baffled by the absence of you preachers that thump the pulpit regularly for Submission and Authority and Covering and Oversight rushing to champion the cause of the abused masses at the hands of Sovereign Grace Ministries. Here is your golden opportunity to show yourself consistent with your very doctrine.

What do you give in return for the submission of the masses to your considered leadership? What? Be specific? Covering from Bad Ideas?  Covering from Demons? Covering from Wolf Religion?

You are frauds. All of you! Every single last one of you who stand in the pulpit and demand submission for this wonderful spiritual fiction called covering. And when the opportunity to actually cover, actually defend the sheep…what do you do? What actions have you taken?

I am going to keep saying it until one and all see the doctrine of submission and authority and spiritual covering for the fraud that it is. Submission is always a church-member specific action meaning that members are obligated to submit their minds and resources to one guy in one location. Authority is always for the express function of dictating the content of truth and mandating action. Covering NEVER has a church leader specific outcome.

“Don’t date the church…” is really euphemism for “I do Christianity better than anyone else and it is infidelity to go down the street and find out if I’m lying.” Therefore, preachers can never be judged.

This is the heart of the submission and authority doctrine: an excuse to justify sectarianism. The lack of action on the part of MDCo Preachers to get in the game and do some qualitative and quantitative “Covering” is evidence of the fraud and part and parcel for the real motivation behind the doctrine.

Dale O’shields, do you preach submission and authority? Your church is practically next door. How could you not know what is happening? How could you not?

Charles  Schmitt, I know you’ve suffered the stories of tyranny discussed on www.sgmrefuge.com www.sgmsurvivors.com and on occasion here: www.spiritualtyranny.com. I know you have tremendous compassion for those who have suffered under the spiritual tyranny of Sovereign Grace Ministers. I know it meant a lot to you to reconcile with Larry Tomczak and Che Ahn. But how much longer will you be silent? Have you ever preached submission to authority and covering? When will it no longer be enough to just extend compassion to those of have suffered? When will you refuse to be silent? You know the methods these men use to destroy a man, and to crush his will. You’ve suffered this process. You read my book and know the details of their ongoing tyranny. You’ve heard the stories over and over and over. How much longer will you be silent?

Dwayne Brewington. I’ve talked to you. What did you tell me? You just don’t understand the issues? How can you be ignorant of the very body of doctrine that calls you a heretic? I know the doctrine of submission and authority and covering comes out of your pulpit. Ignorance is NO EXCUSE for failing to cover, failing to defend! You have a faith vision for an INTERNATIONAL ministry. How can you not avail yourself to the issues affecting Christians in your own backyard? If you are protecting, if you are covering folks, it is your job to understand the issues. Come on Dwayne, get your faith hommies to put their confession on the line. Show the world that faith is good for something more than the late model Bimmer. You’ve got a faith molehill right over on Muncaster Mill. Get in the game, brother–represent!

Greg Zetts.  How long can you let this disaster persist? I’ve talked to you too. I know you live and die by this doctrine of submission and authority and covering. How many times did the EX-CLCers arrive on your doorstep? How many times did you hear details of the carnage pour from people’s lives?! It isn’t enough to wring your hands and say you’ll pray. How many times did you cover them? You call yourself a Pastor of pastors. What does that mean exactly? How many more sermons on the evils of celebrating Christmas does a congregation need to hear before your “leadership team” gets a sense of proportion? How many times did you show up on CJ’s doorstep asking for an account of the mistreatment? Have you ever?

The only reasons I don’t name more names with more websites is because I have forgotten how many men I approached with copies Blight in the Vineyard long ago losing track of the ignored phone calls or the rebuffs.

How many other pastors in Montgomery County Maryland have turned a blind eye, and a deaf ear, and with a straight face preached that it is your unique place in the body to filter true doctrine and protect the sheep? Have you called “Sound Doctrine” central and demanded an explanation? Have you preached with fervor into CJ Mahaney’s ear about your position of covering and demanded to know what is happening over at SGM gives you great concern?

What is the answer? You can’t be bothered? It isn’t your calling? You don’t feel led?

This is why the whole doctrine of covering and submission is an enormous fiction. These are all excuses. You cannot have it both ways. Get to protecting and covering–i.e. get your timid butt in gear and figure out how to stop the madness. There isn’t anything coming out of that stupid prophecy mic that a 12-year-old shouldn’t be able to discern. If your flock can’t tell the good from the bad yet, another sermon on submission and authority ain’t gonna fix it.

It’s time to step up and address an obvious list of abuses coming from a single ministry in your own backyard.

If not, forever let it be said that you don’t cover anybody except your own backside with those puckered lips.

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Pass the Mint Jelly

All tyranny requires these elements to be successful.

******************

A Shepherd and a three sheep walked into a bar

     The Shepherd stands at the door and says: “All manner of temptation is in this den of inequity. Don’t drink the beer, you might get drunk.”
     Sheep One says: “Baahhhhh!”
     Sheep Two says: “Baahhhhh!”
     Sheep Three got drunk.
     The Shepherd said: “Stupid sheep! I shall discipline you! ” He then struck the sheep with his staff and the sheep died. “We shall flee the temptations of this world. Follow me to the Promised Land.”
     The Shepherd and two sheep walked into a forest. The Shepherd says: “Beware of the wolf. He wants to eat you. He hates you. But I love you.”
     Sheep One says: “Baahhhhh!”
     The wolf says: “Sheep Two was very tasty. I love Sheep.”
     The Shepherd says: “Stupid Sheep. It should have listened to my wise counsel. We will flee the danger of the wolves. Follow me to the Promised Land!”
     The Shepherd and a sheep walk into a church: “I led you to safety. Here, in this place, temptation will not get you and the evil wolf will not get you.”
     Sheep One says: “Baahhhhh!”
     The Shepherd says: “I’m hungry. I have worked to protect the sheep. I am entitled to double portions. Let’s have a pot luck dinner.”
     The bartender says: “We have killed all the sacred cows; we are all out of meat.”
The Shepherd replies: “Well, this last sheep is mine; he has been predestined to sacrifice himself. We can eat him.”
     The Bartender says: “What sheep?”
     The Shepherd turns to see Sheep One running out the door. “Where are you going? The world is fraught with peril.”
     Sheep One says: “My epistemology prevents my cognition to successfully identify my own jeopardy, and my own propensity toward self-destruction. Though I have been told I cannot rely on my own judgment, the reality before me is my expenditure is imminent. In other words, I might be stupid but I’m not dumb. The question is not IF I am going to be eaten, but by WHOM.”
     The Shepherd says: “Heretic! Burn him at the stake.”

**************

The problem with expecting metaphors to be explicit truth (even if those metaphors are in the bible) is deciding when the metaphor no longer applies. The question is how much of the metaphor is explicit truth; the general sense of the word picture or is it an entire allegory?

Let’s try this metaphor. The bible says that the righteous are “…as bold as Lions…” and since Male Lions sleep all day, leave hunting to the lioness, and breeds with the multiple pride females, then a righteous man should emulate the actions of the Male Lion? Let the women work and keep the ladies haaaaapppppy!

Come on ladies…you’re good with this doctrine. It is in the bible after all.

>snicker<

You don’t like THAT metaphor as doctrine? Does that metaphor seem to dogmatize animal nature as human action?

Yeah, huh?

The popular starting place for establishing Church Governing authority begins with the ubiquitous commentary that Sheep are stupid and Shepherds protect sheep. God likens humans to sheep; therefore, humans are stupid. Since humans are stupid, they need someone to protect them from themselves. Enter pastor extraordinaire, crook in hand, to protect the stupid people from their own stupidity.

Alexander Strauch advances the Sheep/Pastor metaphor in his book Biblical Eldership: an Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership, with these words (among others): “Protecting the Flock is vitally important because sheep are defenseless animals. They are utterly helpless in the face of wolves, bears, lions, jackals, or robbers. (Strauch page 18)

Why are they defenseless? Metaphorically speaking, the answer seems to be that sheep have no self-awareness. Phillip Keller describes sheep like this:

It reminds me of the behavior of a band of sheep under attack from dogs, cougars, bears, or even wolves. Often in blind fear or stupid unawareness they will stand rooted to the spot watching their companions being cut to shreds. The predator will pounce upon one, then another of the flock racking and tearing them tooth and claw. Meanwhile, other sheep may act as if they did not even hear or recognize the carnage going on around them. It is as though they were totally oblivious to the peril of their own precarious position.

(A Shepherds Look at the Great Shepherd and His Sheep. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981 page  25)

Sheep won’t fight to save their companion? Sheep turn away from carnage? Sheep are indifferent to injustice? Sheep are oblivious to Peril? Sounds like the Lutheran Church in the 1933 Weimar Republic.

Gotta LOVE metaphors. Or maybe that is a simile? Who can tell?

Ehem…

To humans, sheep actions appear inexplicable. We find such total passivity and irrationality … stupid. In defense of Ovis idiocy: this critique carries the same injustice as calling rabbits immoral because it breeds with a polygamist’s relentless intensity. How can one be condemned for their nature?

Sheep lack self-awareness. Sticking with the assumption that we live in a dispensation where there is no more revelation, this really isn’t a revelation. And neither is it a revelation that most all herd animals lack self-awareness. Virtually no animal can conceptualize beyond the momentary concretes of daily existence. Sheep behavior is not dramatically different from most herd animal behavior. With few exceptions, herd animals have limited capacity to identify dangers, or individually defend against those dangers. Who hasn’t seen the Discovery Chanel where the herd of Wildebeest runs madly about as a Lion or Hyena hunts the weak and young? And once the predator is successful, the herd will continue to graze within yards of the kill. Virtually no animal has the conceptual ability to extrapolate cause and effect, to identify personal danger in the mishap of another.

No animal but MAN.

And here is the rub. Man is not an animal. He is qualitatively and quantitatively above animals, so metaphors seeking to define human action (Even Bible metaphors) in animal terms are necessarily limited.

It seems strange that one should have to point this out to curtail the enforced implications of the Sheep/Shepherd metaphor. But hey… I do what is necessary.

Animals survive because they adapted themselves TO nature. Conversely, Man survives by adapting nature TO himself. If he fails to adapt nature to himself, man’s life expectancy is measured in days. The tool for adapting nature to himself is his brain; man’s capacity to THINK. Thinking REQUIRES self-awareness. Without self-awareness, man would not survive the daily rigor of his own life, let alone a threat from a predator, or successfully abstract the relationship between another person’s peril and his own precarious position.

Human survival requires two things: Man can think and reality is knowable.

Notice the foundational assumptions built into the 9th commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” While often interpreted to mean don’t lie against your neighbor, this command carries with it a profound epistemological foundation. God’s command presumes that reality is entirely within man’s grasp to know, measure, define, and represent. In a word, reality is objective. And Man has a divine injunction against hiding, subjectivizing, or manipulating reality by fraud.

This means man has a choice. He can choose to think about his existence and render it accurately or he can choose to forfeit his thinking by hiding, subjectivizing, or fraudulently witnessing that reality.

Sheep are by nature passive, oblivious, and defenseless against the swirling, abstract peril of the world.

Man, by nature, has a choice whether to be passive, oblivious, and defenseless against the swirling, abstract peril of the world.

Men think. Sheep need someone to think for them. The standard Brady Bunch bible interpretation says that shepherds watch out for the sheep’s own best interest. But the REALITY is a Shepherd keeps the wolves away so the sheep can be fleeced and turned into lamb chops.

So the choice before Men is: To think . . . or . . . Be served with mint Jelly.

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Made Free

By John Immel

The Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. (John 8: 36)

From the inside, people hunger, yearn, and need

The cry of their soul; to be free indeed

Elusive like a reputation that cannot be bought

Corrupted by death, a hope vainly sought

Indulge my thoughts, my words, my whim

Give me no law, Give me no duty, Give me no sin.

The addict, The alcoholic, The Whore;

Doing as they please, bound by a fleshly door

Man is snared as surely as he lives

By his lusts, passions, enemies, and friends

Indulging his whims, fearing their wrath

Like a dog to its vomit, praise he must have

Freedom’s mother is Choice, its father is Want

Birthed of these parents man can plot his course;

Tyrants tremble, and slaves weep

for the power of choice, the power to keep

The counsel of one’s soul, the determination of desire

To live as one wills, to throw off the mire

To the free Joy no longer wars with grief,

Success is not stolen by failure’s thief

Liberty puts health and Life in the hands

A thrill in the heart where Courage stands

Embracing all, condemned by no expectation

Fearing no God, or man, or mortification

The melody of freedom sings over the shame

Destroys the guilt, and heals the pain

A life of choice: both good and bad

Overcoming the chaos, by word, by will, and hand

IF the Son, therefore shall make you free

To choose what you will, whatever you will be

Copywrite 2003 John Immel.  All rights reserved
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