It's likely that I lost a heap of sympathy across CGGC in late 2012 when I sent out an email in a furious response to the 2013 Credentialing Proposal saying that it was the result of a "popish process" led by the current CGGC E.D..
If you are one of the dozens to whom I sent that intemperate note, and if you remember it, you'll recall that I actually observed that, at times, CGGC mountaintoppers claim authority over the CGGC that Roman Catholic Popes don't claim within their institution.
I actually went so far as to apologize to the Popes of history for lumping them in with recent CGGC authoritarians.
Needless to say, at the moment, I was highly agitated. And, while I apologize for the tone of that note, I stand by my assessment of the Credentials Document. It has mired us in Medieval, church-focused ways and impeded any effort to focus us on the Kingdom.
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What does the adjective popish mean?
As that sort of term does, it means many things.
Specifically...
...In the context of the ERC 2015 old, New Strategic Plan and the new, New Strategic Plan now percolating among ERC mountaintoppers, it has to do with the Middle Ages idea that some in the church are providers of religious products and services to be consumed by others.
One way to understand the admission of the mountaintoppers at Conference in 2017, as it has been conveyed to me...
...is that in 2015 the mountaintoppers regarded themselves as providers of religious products and services at the top of a pyramid scheme that functions very much like Mary Kay, or Amway in which everyone below them will fall in line and consume and, in turn, sell the religious product they were selling.
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Their Pastor as Parish Priest idea of how the local church runs is an integral part of that scheme.
Pastors provide religious products and services to the laity, who are on the bottom of the pyramid, and are the ultimate consumers.
In the mountaintoppers' scheme, theoretically, then, the pastor parish priests consume the religious products and services developed by those in the hierarchy...
...and, ultimately, those lower in the hierarchy consume the products and services by higher ranking CGGC bureaucrats so that when the Executive Director belches, everyone, all the way down the mountain and into the deepest CGGC valley, says, "Excuse me."
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So, in 2015, and this is vastly oversimplified. There is much more involved, but...
...the mountaintoppers produced their latest religious product, the old, New Strategic Plan...
...and, the consumers didn't buy it. They never have bought it. But, the degree of putrefication and decline of the Conference has become do great that now it matters.
HOW DARE THEY!?
So, by 2017, the mountaintoppers appeared at Conference admitting that the old, New Strategic Plan was only "words on paper."
Their admission meant, whether they get it or not, that, in at least this one instance, they realize that they aren't popes.
This is an important moment for the ERC because it might lead to a crisis moment in which the mountaintoppers experience the godly sorrow that produces the sort of repentance that leads to salvation.
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So far, that hasn't happened.
The hierarchs have merely reached into their old bag of failed tricks and pulled out another Strategic Plan.
They're still behaving popishly in the way that allows them to regard themselves as providers of religious products and services to be consumed further down the mountain...
...not, as Jesus described the greatest in the Kingdom as those who are slaves of all.
We must repent and change our ways.
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