Showing posts with label ELCA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ELCA. Show all posts

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Lutheran Church Has "Outrageous Obsession With Israel": Christian Media Analyst - JNS BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

First Immanuel Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon. (Wikimedia Commons)

Lutheran Church Has "Outrageous Obsession With Israel": Christian Media Analyst

“Behold, God is mighty, yet He despiseth not any; He is mighty in strength of understanding.” Job 36:5 (The Israel Bible™)
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S., passed two Israel-related resolutions earlier this month at its triennial assembly in New Orleans, La. One resolution established an “investment screen” that will recommend where Lutherans should invest their money with regard to Israel and the Palestinians. The other urged a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel unless Israel meets a series of conditions and calls for the immediate U.S. recognition of “the state of Palestine.”
Dexter Van Zile, a Catholic pro-Israel activist, who monitors and analyzes the Christian media for the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said, “the Lutheran Church has an outrageous obsession with Israel.” He told JNS.org the group “has been beating up on Israel for a long time, and this is just the latest example.”
ELCA logo
ELCA logo
David Brog, of Christians United for Israel, said in a statement that the resolutions “blame Israel and only Israel for the conflict in the Middle East. Such one-sided scapegoating of the Jewish state will only fuel further Palestinian rejection and violence.”
Lutheran student activist Austin Reid told JNS.org the church’s resolutions “send a message of discrimination against Israel and neglect to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for misguiding the Palestinian people.” Reid is an Emerson Fellow at StandWithUs and attends the ELCA-affiliated Capital University in Ohio.
Other observers are more hopeful.
The church setting up an “investment screen,” rather than directly calling for a boycott of Israeli products, is a positive development, according to Emily Soloff, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) associate director of Interreligious and Intergroup relations.
Soloff, who attended the Lutheran conference, called the resolutions “problematic” and come across as one-sided. But, she emphasized, the assembly did not adopt the explicitly pro-BDS language which was proposed by a number of individual church synods, or branches.
Rabbi David Sandmel, director of interfaith affairs for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), conducted a workshop on Lutheran-Jewish relations at the New Orleans conference. He said he was “not thrilled” by the resolutions, but whether the investment screen will lead to divestment “depends on how [it] is structured, and that is not spelled out.” He added that the Jewish community “should not leap to conclusions while the jury is still out.”
Will “screen” lead to divestment?
Some Israel advocates are pessimistic about the “investment screen.”
“[It] is just a step away from boycotting,” CAMERA’s Van Zile said. “The Lutherans seem to be doing something similar to what the Presbyterians did a few years ago. First, they set up criteria that would disqualify Israel from investments. Then they declared they can’t invest in Israel because it doesn’t meet the criteria.”
An investment screen translates to divestment from Israel, according to the website, Exposing the ELCA, run by Conservative Lutheran dissidents.
“This resolution will be used by the ELCA to divest from Israel and select companies that do business with Israel.”
They go further. The resolution says the investment screen must develop “human rights social criteria,” which will determine where the church’s social-purpose funds should be invested. This is based on concerns raised in an official Lutheran church report.
ELCA members vote at the triennial assembly in New Orleans, La. held Aug. 8-13. (ELCA)
ELCA members vote at the triennial assembly in New Orleans, La. held Aug. 8-13. (ELCA)
The report, called the ELCA Middle East Strategy is a 2005 church document that recommended “making consumer decisions that favor support to those in greatest need, e.g. Palestinian providers as distinct from Israel settlers on Palestinian territory.”
The document accused Israel of fostering an “environment of oppression,” and claimed that Israel’s security fence “poses an imminent threat to the future of the church in the Holy Land.” The document also complained about the “destructive effect” of Israeli policies on “the ability of Palestinians to marry and raise families.”
The marriage and families reference could lay the groundwork for falsely accusing Israel of “genocide,” according to some experts. Article two of the definition of genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948 includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a targeted] group.”
The language choice raises the danger that the Lutheran church “may falsely allege, or at least imply, that Israel is guilty of genocide,” Prof. Elihu Richter, director of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention, told JNS.org. That allegation could then be used as a basis for denying U.S. aid to Israel and justifying a Lutheran boycott of Israeli companies or products.
Ignoring Palestinian abuses
The second ELCA resolution calls on the Obama administration to present a plan for establishing an “independent” and “viable” Palestinian state, with a “shared Jerusalem” as its capital. The Lutherans also urge the president to extend diplomatic recognition to the “state of Palestine” immediately, rather than wait for the issue to be negotiated between the parties, as the U.S. and Israel prefer.
On U.S. aid to Israel, the resolution asserts the U.S. should halt all military and financial assistance unless Israel agrees to “comply with internationally recognized human rights standards as specified in existing U.S. law, stop settlement building and the expansion of existing settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, end its occupation of Palestinian territory, and enable an independent Palestinian state.”
Pro-Israel activists see those terms as blatantly one-sided. Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, writing in Newsweek, called the ELCA “a church in decline but one whose enthusiasm for attacks on Israel never wanes.” He noted when the Lutherans refer to construction in eastern Jerusalem, they are referring to “just construction by Jews,” with no mention of Palestinian construction in the city. Likewise, the resolution targets U.S. aid to Israel, but ignores U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, which is approximately $500 million annually.
NO to BDS and YES to Israel!
The church’s reference to “human rights standards” likewise reflects a double standard, Abrams writes. “These requirements apply to one single country: Israel. In a world awash in repression and human rights violations, only Israel.”
In its latest annual report on global human rights, the U.S. State Department found that the Palestinian Authority carries out “arbitrary arrests based on political affiliation,” engages in “torture and abuse” of prisoners, “restricts freedom of speech and press…through harassment, intimidation and arrest, discriminates against women,” accuses victims of sexual harassment of “provoking men’s harassing behavior,” and “rarely punishes perpetrators of family violence.”
In the Lutheran resolutions, there was no mention of the PA’s behavior.
The ADL’s Rabbi Sandmel said Palestinian human rights violations were “not mentioned” either by the delegates, who attended his workshop, nor the Lutheran church professionals with whom he spoke individually. It would have been “helpful” and “more balanced” if the Lutherans “showed as much interest in Palestinian violations as they do in Israeli violations,” he added.
Soloff, of the AJC Committee, told JNS.org that she did not hear any delegates discussing Palestinian human rights violations during the sessions she attended. She believes “there was a consciousness of Palestinian corruption” that was not articulated. Soloff said the failure to acknowledge the PA’s human rights abuses was “disappointing,” but “in the larger picture, the ELCA did demonstrate a much more nuanced and balanced approach between Israel and the Palestinians than some other mainline Protestant churches have done.”
Pro-Palestinian activists pleased
Supporters of the resolutions see the ELCA’s positions as consistent with the pro-BDS stance of other churches. The group, Isaiah 58, a Lutheran faction that lobbied for the resolutions, issued a statement declaring, “the ELCA adds its own voice and approach to the growing number of U.S. churches that have endorsed economic acts of conscience in support of Palestinian freedom and human rights.”
The group hailed the “investment screen” resolution as “an important step to ensure that we are not profiting from” Israel’s “nearly half-century-old military occupation of Palestinian lands,” according to a prepared statement.
Similarly, The Electronic Intifada, a leading pro-Palestinian website, praised the resolutions as “a massive shift” demonstrating “the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become the latest U.S. denomination to take economic action against the Israeli occupation.” In 2013 at the previous ELCA assembly, 70 percent of the delegates voted against an “investment screen” resolution, the website pointed out.
Text of the 1994 “Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America to the Jewish Community,” in which the Lutheran Church repudiated Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic writings. (Screenshot from ELCA.org)
Text of the 1994 “Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America to the Jewish Community,” in which the Lutheran Church repudiated Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic writings. (Screenshot from ELCA.org)
Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the United Church of Christ, and the Quakers have all endorsed divesting from Israel. The Episcopal Church has rejected divestment, while the Mennonite Church has delayed a decision until 2017. The United Methodist Church’s pension fund dropped five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio in January. However, in May, the Methodists’ national conference voted to reject BDS.
Future of Lutheran-Jewish relations
The ADL’s Rabbi Sandmel is focused on what he sees as indications that “there is opportunity for conversation [with Lutheran leaders] about some of these issues.” He said “for someone like me, who has pretty close relationships with these folks, it’s important to recognize it’s not just the text of the resolutions that matter, but also their broader context and how the dynamics within the church will affect future contacts between church leaders and the Jewish community.”
Some activists are skeptical about those relationships.
CAMERA’s Van Zile said, “Some Jewish leaders are reluctant to criticize the Lutherans, because they want to maintain good relations with their few remaining allies within the denomination. But nobody should be fooled. The anti-Israel activists within the Lutheran Church have been in the driver’s seat for a long time.”
Still, Sandmel said he’s encouraged that in the background material for the Israel-Palestinian resolutions, the ELCA acknowledged that “some Jewish leaders have interceded with the U.S. government, some directly with the government of Israel” in connection with “the critical funding for the ministries of Augusta Victoria Hospital,” a Lutheran-sponsored medical center in east Jerusalem.
The hospital was in danger of closing in 2014 because the Palestinian Authority refused to pay the more than $25 million that was owed in unpaid bills for treatment of Palestinians whom the PA sent there. ELCA officials successfully lobbied the Obama administration and the European Union to pay the PA’s bill.
It has not been previously reported that Jewish leaders were involved in that lobbying effort, nor have those leaders or their organizations been identified.
The ELCA cited the episode as evidence of the benefits resulting from having the church “serve as a place where the concerns of Palestinian Lutherans and the concerns of American Jews have been in conversation.”

Friday, August 19, 2016

WATCH: Lutherans reject Israel 😢 - Ron Cantor


WATCH Lutheran Church in America Stands against Israel

Ron Cantor —  August 19, 2016 

The ELCA, not to be confused with the star of Frozen—that would be Elsa—has taken a brazen stand against Israel. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has voted to divest from Israel and encourage the United States to pull all support until Israel leaves what they call “Palestinian Lands”. I take just over five minutes here to explain that there is no such thing as “Palestinian lands”. M apologies to Methodists everywhere for my mistake at the end 🙂

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Anti-Jewish "hate speech" coming from the Presbyterian Church?!

Dear Family and Friends of Israel,

This is a very sad and disturbing report, especially since this reported "anti-Semitic hate speech" is emanating from one of the "main-line" Christian denominations in the world today:

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2014/05/07/presbyterian-church-gets-in-bed-with-radical-islam.html

It was no accident that Yeshua warned His followers [and us], over and over, "Do not be deceived..." (Matt. 24:5, 11, & 24; Mark 13:6 & 22; Luke 21:8)

The world is in the midst of a battle, folks -- not a battle with "flesh and blood", but a spiritual battle against "principalities and powers, and rulers of darkness..." (Ephesians 6:12) Now, more than ever before, we Believers need to be like the Believers in the ancient city of Berea, who "searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so." (Acts 17:10-11)

Ahava ,
~Bill

By EARL COX, JPOST —
The US government and universities have been infiltrated and influenced by Islamists. Why should we believe mainstream Christian churches in America are exempt? What is surprising is the disturbing depth of deception being proliferated by the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) via their published study guide “Zionism Unsettled.” Some Jewish groups have called its distorted facts and a historical narrative so extreme that they label it “hate” speech. Think on this: hate speech coming out of a Christian church in America–the Presbyterian Church.

American “Zionism” dates back to 1890 and in general is a national movement for returning Jews to their homeland and a resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. After the State of Israel was formed in 1948, Zionism grew to include development of the Jewish state and its protection by supporting Israel’s Defense Forces. Instead of standing with the 70% of Americans polling in support of Jews and Israel, Presbyterians are attacking Zionism, which in turn attacks Israel and puts us all at risk at the hands of Islamic extremists.

Palestinian terrorists fired thousands of rockets towards Israeli homes, schools and businesses over the last decade. The Presbyterian study guide blatantly ignores this fact. The PCUSA vilifies Israel and Zionism, calls for the annihilation of the Jewish State and turns a blind eye away from the culpability of Arab leaders’ responsibility for the adverse plight of their own people. 

The guide calls for a rethinking of the Holocaust with the mindset of including the plight of the Palestinians and the idea that Zionism equals racism. According to the Presbyterians, Zionism is to Palestinians as centuries of Christian anti-Semitism were to the Jews. These ideas place Presbyterians sitting in pews every Sunday in the camp with radical positions on serious issues that could bring about disastrous outcomes.

With skewed facts, Presbyterians, via the chapter on “Evangelicals and Christian Zionism,” portray Christians who support Israel as dangerous and a threat to Middle East peace. Dr. Gary Burge, an evangelical Presbyterian and Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College is the author from whom much of this chapter’s content was gleaned. Burge, admitting to believe in a form of “Replacement Theology,” ignores that it was a root cause of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Did God abandon the Jewish people? Has he broken His promises to them? Did he choose a new people, Christians, to take their place? The very implication that Jews have been rejected, discarded and replaced because of their sin and failures poses a dire danger. It provides an excuse for fanning flames of anti-Semitism that is already spreading across the US and abroad. Do Christians, inspired by Burge, and the Presbyterian Church, desire to be a part of that all over again?

I could go into and debate or refute the arguments that Burge and PCUSA present, such as Replacement Theology, dispensationalism and dual covenant, but the real message is that the Abrahamic Covenant is an everlasting covenant. In effect, because it was a watershed moment in God’s intent to save the world from sin, that everlasting covenant has greatly influenced the course of human history. (Galatians 3:8)

The Presbyterian church may wish they were mainstream by favoring Islam over Judaism; they may wish Christians in support of Israel and the Jewish people were a fringe group, but with 70% of us for Israel the Presbyterian church is now aligned with the most extreme of the radical groups. Sabeel, founded by Naim Ateek, propagates Palestinian Liberation Theology. 

Sabeel’s theology disregards any portion of scripture that disagrees with his anti-Semitic views. Liberation theology started in South America because the Communists knew they couldn’t infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church. So, they branded Liberation Theology to do the trick. Maybe the Presbyterian’s would be wise to research before they publish, because their study guide calls for churches to stop using hymns and liturgy that use the Biblical terms: exodus, covenant, return, blossoming of the desert, Zion and Israel.

Who is walking away from whom? It is the people in the pews of mainstream churches, such as the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American (ELCA) whose members are walking away. Maybe you should do some soul searching and some investigating as to the background of your hierarchal leaders. Most Americans recognize a rat when they see one, hear one, or feel one. They certainly recognize “hate speech” when they see it. 

Holding radical and anti-Semitic positions as in black and white in this disturbing Presbyterian study guide will guarantee more losses. Or, perhaps the infiltration of radicals from Islam and Progressives is so complete, that losses of the faithful and a watered down Bible and belief system is the goal.