IRD attacks Mel White

[schoolboi]

If you do not know about the IRD I would encourage you to get acquainted. It is a heavily funded conservative group set on taking control of mainline denominations. They are well on there way at succeeding.

The following article was in a resent email alert from the IRD:

Mel White: Missing Person

Jim Berkley

In following the story about Soulforce and the White House Easter Egg Roll, I came across a news clip featuring Soulforce founder Mel White being interviewed by Tucker Carlson on MSNBC. Or maybe I should say, "A spin-doctoring Mel White being exposed and left without excuse by Tucker Carlson."

It was not a pretty sight, and Mel's disgusted snort in the final seconds spoke volumes. He had been tried and found wanting. Stretch as hard as he could while keeping a straight face, Mel could not successfully paint a slyly plotted political action as a family walk in the park. Nor should he have tried. It simply wasn't honest.

This present Mel White, the Soulforce publicity-seeking activist for all things homosexual, is not the one I remember as my professor and boss. I first met Mel in 1972, when he both taught my initial communications and preaching classes at Fuller Seminary (in Pasadena, CA) and supervised my labor as an audio-visual geek. He had come to Fuller as a former Youth for Christ director in Portland and an up-and-coming producer of innovative Christian films. The guy could communicate, and he taught a generation of Fuller students well.

The theme I remember most from his lessons is that any communication shouldn't be proposition, proposition, proposition. A single proposition needs support - illustrations, stories, restatements, quotations - before one goes on to the next proposition. So the form of a communication should be proposition and then support, support, support. And then another proposition, with supports.

In Mel's life that he allowed us to see at that time, the single most salient proposition seemed to be that Jesus Christ is Lord. He proclaimed it. He lived it. He taught it. He preached it as co-pastor with his wife at the local Covenant Church. He creatively unpacked it in his film ministry. Mel White was pretty much about the proposition that Jesus Christ is Lord. What he did with his life, then, provided support, support, support to that proposition.

But then something changed. I first got wind of it when Mel graciously but a little mysteriously suggested that I as editor might not want to use him in a project I had proposed. Soon after that in 1994, Mel came out as an active, unrepentant homosexual in his book Stranger at the Gate.

I read that book on a long plane flight that included brushing tears from my eyes a few times. Here I was seeing a new major proposition dominating Mel White's life and communication. What he was saying most of all was this: "I am gay, and that takes precedence over everything else."

Since that major shift in propositions, I have with sadness and dismay watched Mel put into place support after support to illustrate his new major proposition: the claim that he could not resist acting on his sexual orientation, an obsessive narcissism that puts Mel's wants ahead of God's will, a pugnacious activism to get in people's faces, and now a dismal, duplicitous, failing effort to try to paper over the fact that his political shenanigans were exposed.

It is a sad thing to have lost the Mel White who brought people to faith in Jesus Christ and so ably communicated the message of Christian discipleship. The only Mel White we seem to have left is the one lamentably flailing around to find self-justification. This Mel is looking for love in all the wrong propositions.

How I miss the Mel White I once knew!


Date: 1/31/2006