Or, more to the point: What happens when your dysfunction demands that you have a scapegoat and you kill off the one you have?
I try not to overestimate my significance.
When, according to unsubstantiated, but widely spread, rumor, the ERC, in session, voted to recall my credentials, most of the people who voted to defrock me wouldn't have been able to pick me out of a lineup. Most of them had not even heard my name before those Conference sessions...
...and don't remember it now.
Yet, as still unsubstantiated rumor has it, time was set aside in the Conference agenda to debate my status in the Conference.
Several years earlier, I had been summoned to appear before the ERC Standing Committee to answer charges, presented by George Jensen, in a letter that, printed out, was 21 pages long...
21 stinkin pages. Can you imagine!?!!???!
I was important enough to inspire a 21 page indictment...
...and, of course, to inspire the subpoena to appear before the ERC's most elite body of hierarchs, the committee that continually stands.
And, important enough for the Standing Committee to revisit the matter of my still, to this day, unspecified, offense(s) against whom? against what?
And, important enough to inspire an attempt by the committee that stands to get the ERC Ad Council to recall my ordination, under the cover of darkness, during an end-of-Conference session special meeting.
Clearly, I'm nothing more than a nobody in the real ERC world, among the people who have no access to the peaks of the mountain.
But, on the mountaintop, I...
...was...
...a significant irritant...
...a bug that needed to be squashed.
And, I was squashed.
Back in the day, I was the scapegoat.
I was the whipping boy.
I was the villain...
...blamed, by the hierarchs, for Conference misfires and mistakes, for its faults and failings.
So, they presented me to the Conference as an offense, presumably a reason for its malaise...
...for its numerical decline and spiritual decay...though nothing, so far as I know, was specified.
And, I was whacked...in the most public way...in its most public setting.
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But, in reality, I was not the problem, even a problem. I was nothing more than their whipping boy of the moment.
I wasn't the problem. I wasn't the cause of decline and decay.
So, nothing in the real world changed.
The spiritual decay continued.
More disturbingly, I suspect, for the Shepherd Mafia, than the spiritual decay, the numerical decline continued.
What to do, what to do?
The whole Conference had declared me worthy of shaming and blaming...
...in the first Conference-in-session defrocking in decades.
Yet, all the problems remained. Worsened, even.
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What to do?
The genuinely Christ-obedient act would have been for the Conference hierarchs to repent and turn from fallen ways.
The alternative? The unrepentant act that suits ERC dysfunction?
Create a new scapegoat.
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Has anyone else noticed how quickly, after the hierarchs' focus shifted from me, that Kevin Richardson was placed on the ERC Hot Seat? And, began...
...really, and amazingly...
...to sing my song...
...that the ERC is in trouble? That our decline and decay has become a crisis? That the Conference must change?
Have you noticed that it was virtually immediately after I was bug-squashed that talk of a new New Strategic Plan began and that Kevin began to hope aloud, rather sadly I think, that he'd be given the chance to lead it?
(Did anyone, for a moment, seriously think he'd be given that chance?)
No,...
...in the ERC dysfunction of these days, there must be a scapegoat.
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Kevin's mistake, I believe, is that he, well, really, led the effort to bug-squash me. Ironically, he's the one who stood before the Conference to argue that I be squashed. Or, so I'm told.
When I was gone, it was a slam-dunk that Kevin was the obvious choice to be my replacement.
And, almost immediately, he became my replacement...
...the new scapegoat.
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Sadly, for Kevin, he was fired.
Think about it:
Kevin became the first person, in the nearly 60 years there's been a paid, highest-ranking Conference hierarch here, to be...
...fired.
And, even more sadly: KEVIN IS STILL THE SCAPEGOAT.
He's still the one to blame.
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Two comments:
1. Being the scapegoat fits me. I didn't mind it, even expected it. Being the scapegoat suits my calling, as it did Elijah's and John the Baptist's. It even enhanced my ministry to the Conference.
Being the scapegoat doesn't suit Kevin, poor guy.
All Kevin wanted to do, as I see it, was to be true to the institutional values of the ERC.
He WAS true to those values, and with all his heart.
And, in the fullness of time, when the hierarchs needed a new scapegoat, Kevin was chosen.
He was rejected by the hierarchs. He was fired.
He was pooped on...Diarrhea pooped!
Having been the scapegoat, my heart breaks for Kevin.
My defrocking freed me from being the ERC scapegoat, though I was happy to be it.
Kevin's firing enhanced his position as scapegoat...
...and, he may be the Conference whipping boy for years to come...perhaps forever, depending on how far into the future the ERC tanks.
Kevin will wear the role of scapegoat with gentility and grace, though I'm certain that it will rip at his heart.
I love you, Kevin, and I hate what they did to you.
2. The ERC doesn't need a new scapegoat.
It needs to repent.
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