[Dear readers: Due to the interrelated & inseparable nature of the subject matter, this article will be longer than usual. We have provided the following outline to assist you. You may access any portion that you choose by clicking on it. We will provide the outline again at the bottom of the page as well.
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 1: Disobedience in Family Relationships
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 2: Disobedience in Biblical Due Process
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 3: Disobedience in Financial Support
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 4: Final Rebuttals
DECEMBER UPDATE
Read the summary from Juli’s 11/25/24 post-op phone visit with her NY neurosurgeon
Dear Family & Friends, 12-09-24
We are being forced to make an urgent plea for financial help due to our current extreme circumstances. We apologize for the desperate tone, but it is warranted. At this time, we are unable to explain all the details leading up to this moment, but we plan to do so in the near future. But for now, time is of the essence.
First, as you may know, Juli & I (and my parents) recently returned from NY area for Juli to undergo numerous outpatient appointments with specialists, as well as two diagnostic surgical tests in the operating room. God graciously provided for Juli to be able to complete all the scheduled medical procedures, but this almost didn’t happen for various reasons that we will explain here in this article.
Because of these reasons, while we are grateful that Juli was able to complete her full slate of tests, we unfortunately had to leave NY without fulfilling our previously agreed upon financial obligations, and we feel that our Christian witness is at stake if we don’t rectify this immediately. So we will share only the necessary details to quickly update you and leave the rest for a later time.
Back in late August, Juli received a Second Opinion Letter from her NY neurosurgeon. He had reviewed her Sept. 2023 MRI and the requisite 40-page exhaustive questionnaire & history form sent by his office. His conclusions were that Juli was likely to have CCI (craniocervical instability) and occult tethered cord (OTC), as well as elevated CSF fluid pressure in her brain, and that she needed to fly to NY to undergo invasive testing for these. While we were pleased that this long-awaited letter had arrived, and also brought with it the hope of a definitive diagnosis and potential treatments, we knew that we had a very limited amount of time to raise the necessary funds and plan & execute a trip before the onset of cold weather in the Northeast.
Another factor making our job even more complicated was Juli’s lack of medical insurance. Right now, she is only covered by Oregon Medicaid, which does not cover medical care outside of the state.
(Back in 1989, she received full federal SSDI & SSI, including Medicare, and she continued on these until the year 2000. When her SSDI review came up for review that year, the M.E. doctor who had helped her get approved over a decade prior was unavailable. Thus, without a knowledgeable M.D. (a Federal requirement) to vouch for her, we decided that it was not worth the time, significant physical exertion, or the paltry income she received from the two government programs SSDI & SSI to pursue a renewal. Of course, her medical condition only worsened over time. Only recently [Aug 2024] did we discover that, at the very least, she should be able to qualify for SSI disability, and perhaps even retroactive coverage with SSDI, even though she has never worked since March, 1989. So she just applied in August, but she must await 9 months for approval and eventual Medicare coverage.)
Thus, Juli was considered a self-pay patient for the NY neurosurgeon, Dr. Paolo Bolognese, and the hospital, Mount Sinai South Nassau. The cost for the two O.R. surgical tests (Invasive Cranial Traction and Intracranial Pressure Bolt) was set at $25,000. This included the surgeon’s fee, anesthesia fee, and hospital fee. The amount was due two days before the November 15 surgery date. If the funds were not paid, the surgeries would be canceled.
We immediately began raising funds, as did my parents. However, when our departure date arrived, we did not yet have the full amount required to complete the trip, including the $25,000 for the surgical tests. Since our flights were already paid for, and we had already reached out to various contacts to try to arrange a loan, we decided to make the trip and trust God’s merciful provision.
One reason why we felt so strongly that we should move ahead despite the uncertainty is that, in order for Juli to make this trip, she had already risked her life, or at least what little fragile health she still had, to fulfill the medical requirements. For example, in order to enable her to endure the waiting periods in the hospitals and doctors’ offices and avoid triggering her spinal compression pain (by being upright for too long), we had to buy a wide-seat, reclining wheelchair ($600) to enable her to rest on her side, fully flat (180 degrees).
Unfortunately, due to our unfamiliarity with the dangers of this type of wheelchair, Juli slid off the chair onto her head while in the waiting room at Meridian Park Hospital on October 16. Fortunately, the floor was carpeted, and Juli was not seriously harmed (confirmed after a quick trip to the E.R. for a CT scan of the brain), but this vignette also foreshadows the upcoming fiascos, great and small, that were still to come just for her to make it to NY.
When the due date for the $25,000 payment came on November 13, we literally had almost no money to pay it. The reasons are many, including massive, unexpected expenses in NY and failure to procure a personal loan as planned. The surgery date was sure to be canceled. I begged the neurosurgeon’s assistant and the hospital administrators to reconsider, given all the medical tests and clearances that Juli had already successfully completed in both OR and NY to certify her readiness to undergo the surgical procedures, not to mention the risks to her life.
In response, Dr. Bolognese, the neurosurgeon, kindly agreed to temporarily waive his portion of the prepayment fees, leaving just the hospital & anesthesia costs. But this still amounted to $10,000 (which we did not have), due now a day later, on Thursday, November 14. After I (Paul) made numerous desperate phone calls to the neurosurgeon’s office and the hospital, the Lord moved their hearts to allow us to work out a different financial solution—one that mercifully allowed Juli to proceed to the surgeries as scheduled.
There is much more to this story, but here is the critical piece of information: Based on my (Paul’s) subsequent conversations with the parties involved, including Dr. Bolognese on Monday, November 25, this arrangement has been very detrimental to Juli’s neurosurgeon. He has had a sterling 20-year reputation of sacrificing his time and effort to help the most challenging of neurosurgery cases that come to him, and now his intervention on Juli’s behalf is complicating his situation.
All throughout our contacts with Dr. Bolognese’s staff, beginning in June 2023, we have sought to be a witness for Christ. Despite our disability and poverty (and Juli’s lack of Medicare insurance), we have expressed our trust in God’s faithful provision for those who honor him. And now, because of the disobedience of Juli’s dad (explained in our previous article, we have been prevented from receiving financial support from our church and Juli’s family members that could have easily reached the $10,000 target.
This is a scandal before God and man. Here is a pastor’s daughter, who has served her father and his church faithfully for over 30 years—including up to this very day, by means of our research & discernment articles here on our blog and on the radio ministry website blog—and yet this pastor is denying his own profession of faith in Christ by failing to provide for her (1 Tim. 5:8) or even to urge others to do so.
Ironically, Mount Sinai South Nassau, the hospital to which we still owe the $25,000 (minus a minuscule downpayment), was ironically founded and opened as The Jews’ Hospital in 1855, though it became nonsectarian about a decade later. However, many of the doctors, nurses and hospital staff we interacted with, understandably, had Jewish last names.
So now, here’s a Christian patient (Juli) going to a Jewish hospital (in many senses, it still is) professing a love for Christ, but her own father (a pastor) won’t even help raise support for her surgeries? And stiffs the surgeon and hospital with the bill?! What irony?!
In Romans 2:17-24, the Apostle Paul rebuked the hypocrisy of his unbelieving Jewish countrymen for proudly professing their love for God’s law yet living worse than the heathen they so looked down upon:
17But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God, 18and know His will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law, 19and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, 20a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, 21you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal? 22You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? 23You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? 24For “THE NAME OF GOD IS BLASPHEMED AMONG THE GENTILES BECAUSE OF YOU,” just as it is written. NASB 1995 version
Well, in this case, it is professing Christians who are making a mockery of the Gospel in front of unbelieving Jews. What kind of witness have Pastor Jim and Lake Bible Church given, in many different parts of this country now, by failing to obey his own teaching from God’s Word regarding providing for his own family (1 Timothy 5:8: “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”)?
At this point, it is necessary to deal head-on with the unbiblical justifications that the Chairman of the Board, Mike Sheffield, and Pastor Jim have used to excuse his disobedience to his own teaching from various passages in God’s Word regarding 1) family relationships, 2) biblical due process in church membership matters, and 3) providing for one’s own family member in need.
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 1: Disobedience in Family Relationships
In order to do this, we must first study Pastor Jim’s teaching regarding the behavior of pastors in their families.
The LBC Constitution, in Section 3 (b) (i) on p.6, states that the Senior Pastor “shall serve as spiritual leader of the church demonstrating complete submission to His Lordship and qualification as an elder according to 1 Timothy 3:17 [this is typo, should be 3:1-7] and Titus 1:5-16.” These two passages stipulate that a pastor must be above reproach within the church, and also have a good reputation with unbelievers, beginning with his marriage and family life (note the bolded phrases and verses):
1 Timothy 3:1-7
1It is a trustworthy statement: if any man aspires to the office of overseer, it is a fine work he desires to do. 2An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. 4He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity 5(but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?), 6and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. 7And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.
Titus 1:5-9
5For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, 6namely, if any man is above reproach, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. 7For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, 8but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, 9holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.
As you have already seen from our earlier articles, and will see further from the following evidence, Pastor Jim began to mistreat his own wife and daughter starting in 2015 due to an unspecified health problem. When this evidence is compared against Pastor Jim’s lifetime of faithful obedience to the Word of God, you will rightly conclude that this departure constitutes a loss of his biblical qualifications for the office of pastor.
First, let us explain some background on the godly pattern of family accountability that Pastor Jim originally set and maintained for the first 57 ½ years of his ministry. As we explained in our January 30, 2023 letter to the Elders (p.8):
In the past, as Pastor Jim explains in 2 Timothy 2:6, his family members (he mentions Olsie, Kristi & Juli here) have either reminded or corrected him with his own teaching when necessary:
https://www.thefinalwordradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TFW21-028-Tue-Feb-9.mp3 Begin @14:00, until 18:10
Now here is a brief excerpt from the transcript:
@14:00, Now, that brings us to more exhortation for Timothy in this mini pastoral manual in chapter two, verse six. Using a completely different agrarian metaphor, the apostle says, the hard-working farmer, Timothy, ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops. Now, what’s all that mean? Well, here, he’s looking at the Christian ministry under the image of a farmer. Proverbs chapter 27, verse 18, says, “He who tends his fig tree will eat of its fruit.” The Apostle may very well have had that in mind. The principle here is that when we work faithfully, and we tend diligently to God’s crops, it’s a law of farming life that the farmer himself rightfully reaps the benefit before anyone else. When we take care of God’s people, God’s people have a way of taking care of us. What I teach my people, that input into their lives, has a wonderful way, I have found at critical times, of coming back to me, the farmer, coming back to me to teach and support me. @15:11
(Pastor Jim then gives his first illustration of this principle, when two women whom he discipled gently rebuked him for not following his own teaching. Then, he continues:)
@17:38 This is not the last time that I’ve had that experience of being the beneficiary of my own teaching coming right back to me when I’ve lost perspective. And my own wife is one of the best examples of that, and my daughters. What I have taught them, sometimes they need to repeat back to me: “Dad you remember you have always taught that so and so.” “Yes, I stand rebuked.” Ends 18:05
Now let’s review the chronology in order to remember when Pastor Jim began emotionally abusing his own wife and daughter (and son-in-law), and how this eventually changed his lifelong godly pattern described above. As we wrote to the Board of Elders on 1-30-23, p.3:
But as alluded to in the excerpt from the letter above, due to an unspecified health problem that became manifest in 2015, Pastor Jim has been becoming more and more emotionally & spiritually abusive toward the weakest members of his family: his wife Olsie, and his totally disabled, bedridden daughter & now-totally disabled son-in-law.
And as we wrote in our previous article:
For example, early in that year, Olsie shockingly informed *us that Pastor Jim had recently begun unfairly blaming her for two of her health problems that she had not caused, nor was she able to reverse them just because they were frustrating to him.
(*By the way, according to Pastor Jim’s teaching from Scripture, two or three witnesses who are of godly character and of sound mind constitute biblically valid testimony. In the OT, someone could be convicted and sentenced to death by this testimony (Deut. 17:6). Listen to 1 Timothy 5:17-20.)
This news was completely unthinkable to us prior to this. And we would have had no way to know this if Olsie hadn’t told us.
Then Pastor Jim’s emotional and spiritual abuse of us became more pronounced in January 2017, when Juli wrote a detailed, exhaustive 25-page letter attempting to correct some of the false accusations he was making. In the process, she rebuked him (p.4) for blaming Olsie for one of the health problems that was not her fault. This was the first time Juli had brought it up to him.
Unsurprisingly, he never denied the truthfulness of Olsie’s accusation, he just avoided the subject. No innocent person receiving an email such as Juli’s, containing his wife’s serious accusation, would hesitate for a second to deny it.
This was therefore the implicit admission of guilt, as described to the Board of Elders on p.3 of our 1-30-23 letter:
Let me add here that Jim has even freely admitted twice to being emotionally abusive toward Olsie, both times in 2017 (once implicitly and once explicitly).
(BTW: The explicit admission of guilt would occur a few months later when Juli called her dad on his cel phone, while he was in the car, and confronted him with his false allegation that I (Paul) had been “abusive” toward Olsie. His response was, “Well, I can be abusive.” By this time, we had already received many eyewitness accounts of this behavior, beyond just our own and Olsie’s.)
But instead of being compassionate toward his wife, as he had always been before, he was unrepentant. In addition, Pastor Jim began treating us differently, more guardedly than before. Perhaps Juli’s rebuke tipped him off that Olsie had told us two years prior about his brand-new pattern of being verbally abusive toward her. She later confirmed to me that he was livid with her for revealing a problem within their marriage to us.
Thus, it was not surprising that several months later, Pastor Jim began falsely accusing us (temporarily) of attempting to hurt his ministry at LBC. As we wrote in our previous article:
P.S. A footnote to the Board of Elders at LBC: Pastor Jim’s spiritually abusive actions in 2017 led him to falsely accuse us of somehow “trying to divide this church” and “backdooring” him (two separate occasions). He subsequently discovered that he was acting on incorrect information, and he apologized. This led to our temporary recusal from TFW, JAB and LBC for about 10 days in May/June 2017.
As a consequence of these unjustified accusations, which he was eventually forced to retract after receiving all the facts, Pastor Jim created a widening conflict with us that was unthinkable just a few years before.
As a result, he somehow took the opportunity to unbiblically remove us as “active” members of LBC, without our knowledge or any biblical due process. We will deal with this again below.
Then in early 2020, we became aware of a permanent change in Pastor Jim, after 57 ½ years of godly obedience in ministry, when Olsie (whom we described as a “trusted emissary” in an earlier article) gave us this startling information:
But in January 2020, Pastor Jim informed us through a trusted emissary that he was no longer healthy enough to supervise all of the doctrinal content being taught at LBC, as he had always done beforehand. He stated that he was now unable to handle the emotional pressure of holding LBC’s ministry leaders accountable for their strict adherence to God’s Word.
This news represented a grave departure from Pastor Jim’s lifelong biblical commitment to prioritizing the teaching component (including correcting false doctrine) of pastoral ministry.
So when Olsie informed me of Pastor Jim’s dereliction of pastoral duty, I asked her why she didn’t try to stop him, since in his 2 Tim. 2:6 sermon above, and in countless other sermons, he has praised and thanked her for intervening when he was about to unknowingly sabotage his own ministry. Her response was this:
“I don’t think I could do that. I don’t think our marriage could withstand that right now.”
Notice that she did not defend the legitimacy of his decision (she actually had been pushing him to exercise more oversight over doctrine in various LBC ministries along with us). Instead, she also verified that he was not just disobeying God’s Word regarding his pastoral obligations, but he was failing to live up to his lifelong pattern of being a godly husband and allowing his wife to correct him. In the final program of his Marriage without Regret series, Be Centered on Christ, Pastor Jim discusses the need for accountability:
@16:00 To be safe, in our marriages, we need a transcendent love that binds us to one another when temptation is too strong for our own love to hold us in tether. A spouse centered on Christ cannot mistreat you, at least not for long. I cannot be treating Christ right and simultaneously be doing wrong by my brother or by my mate. First John, chapter four, verse 20, tells us that I cannot love Christ, I cannot love God and hate my brother or my mate. If I abused my spouse, the Lord will not even hear my prayers. That’s in first Peter three (v.7).
So if it is important to me to be right with God, it has to be important to me to be right with my mate; you can’t have one without the other. You know, when things get sideways, there will always be forgiveness and reconciliation if we are centered to preeminently upon Christ. Think about that. Things will once in a while, get a little sideways. But you know, there will always be forgiveness and reconciliation.
Sometimes, over our more than 50 years of marriage, my wife and I have gotten a little sideways, you know, not down in divorce territory, or separation territory or anything like that. And mostly, that would be my bad, not hers, given the intense and impatient kind of individual I am by nature. She knows, after all these years what I know that walking with God is my priority, being Christ-centered. So I’ve got to get it right with her. Because I can’t be wrong with her and be right with Christ. I can’t be centered on Him if I’m mistreating her. @17:57
@20:50, SIXTH: Each one of the partners needs to hold the other accountable. When you’re up to your armpits in alligators, as the old saying goes, it’s hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp. Remember what life’s project is for us Christians: it is to follow Christ, it is to be centered on Christ. But sometimes, life is coming at us from 17 different ways at once and getting very hard. Hold each other accountable and remember what the game plan is, it is to be centered on Christ and adjust. Ends @21:25
Thus, when Chairman Mike claimed that Pastor Jim’s conflict with us, his daughter & son-in-law, was merely a “family matter,” this is clearly unbiblical, as you have seen above. (BTW: He did this immediately after Pastor Jim committed his infamous, cruel act of defamation against me, Paul, on Sunday morning, April 7, 2024.)
@24:26, Elder Chairman, Mike Sheffield: “We all know it may or may not work. So Hi, I’m Mike Sheffield. I am the chairman of the board. And I want to thank Jim for his steadfastness and transparency in this matter. I just wanted to come up and confirm for all of you that the elders have indeed been involved with this for some years now, actually. Since I’ve become chairman of the board, which is about three years now, I’ve received innumerable letters and documents from Paul, each confirming that this is a vindictive individual bent on destroying his father-in-law. The elders have investigated his accusations, and have concluded that there’s no foundation to any of them.
Jim and Olsie actually have been dealing with this for such a long time. And they’ve done so without any retribution to Paul or Juli. The elder board has full confidence in how Jim has dealt with this issue. And we’re in full support of him and continuing to deal with what really is a family matter and not a church one. I’m sorry that you’ve all been involved in this, but we wanted you to know, our church body, that we continue to have full support of Jim and Olsie through this onslaught.
Now that you have read Chairman Mike’s remarks, we will demonstrate that he made other claims that were false and/or unbiblical as well, not just about this being a “family matter.” However, before we go on to those, we must first complete the full biblical analysis of his statement, “And we’re in full support of him and continuing to deal with what really is a family matter and not a church one.”
Since we have met the biblical standard (as specified in our previous article) of two or three witnesses of sound mind and godly character (Juli, Olsie & me) who certify that Pastor Jim began acting in a heretofore unthinkable, cruel way in 2015 toward his family, this is most certainly a church matter and not a mere “family matter” for him to adjudicate privately. Thus, if this remained or progressed after 2015 (as all three of the above witnesses have testified), it certainly constituted a disqualification for the office of pastor.
Yet even if it were a mere “family matter,” as the Chairman claims, you will see from this document containing a week-long 2022 email chain, when Juli insisted that Pastor Jim prove his false allegations before the family, that he was disobedient to his own teaching to seek peace and harmony even in this venue. So his failure to be a godly leader of his own family is also disqualifying. (Small redactions of irrelevant content have been made to this document.)
So then, as you can see, Pastor Jim was disobedient to his own teaching about giving us the requisite biblical due process in ANY venue, whether family or church.
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 2: Disobedience in Biblical Due Process
The next unbiblical justification used by Chairman Mike and Pastor Jim concerns the denial of biblical due process regarding our church membership. In 2023, we discovered that our membership had been changed from “active” to “inactive” status back in 2017, essentially demoting us into members in name only. As a result, we were denied biblical due process, even if this was technically allowed by the “letter of the law” in certain sections of LBC’s Constitution.
It’s necessary at this juncture to remind our readers of Pastor Jim’s position regarding church ordinances and matters such as church membership. The former are biblical (Baptism and Marriage) and the latter is non-biblical, but it is not unbiblical. It is a useful tool, but it is not equal to, nor superior to, God’s revealed Word. Pastor Jim made these matters crystal clear in his position paper written in late 2019, which encapsulated his perspective and teaching on these matters during his entire ministry, as you will see below.
As a refresher course on how NOT to conduct the ministry of the church, here is a quote from our earlier article summarizing Pastor Jim’s excellent teaching on the Book of Haggai, using his first official sermon as Interim Pastor at LBC in 1990 and a TFW program that recently posted to our website. The excerpt is from the latter:
@11:55, 4) This brings me to a fourth application of the things that we see in Haggai, the Prophet: No amount of religious ceremonies or rituals, no matter how appropriate in themselves (I’m thinking in modern terms, baptism as appropriate, observing communion is appropriate, attending church is appropriate; “Neglect, not the assembling of yourselves together and so much the more, don’t neglect it, as you see the day the day of the Lord approaching, were taught, and Hebrews chapter 10, verse 25.” All of these things are appropriate in and of themselves.)
But no amount of religious ceremony or rituals, no matter how appropriate in themselves, can make one right who is polluted by willful disobedience to God’s commands. People delude themselves in that way. We can go to church, we can pray up a storm. But if we’re lifting up defiled hands, unholy hands, the careful observance of these rituals does not make us right. It cannot compensate for that.
[Illustration:] I remember years ago seems like another lifetime when I was in my first church out of seminary. I had a man on that church who was a deacon, it was a Baptist church, what are called elders and most other churches were called deacons in that church. He was a major pain in the differential, you know what I mean?
But like many of his type, he was a man whose hands were defiled. He was not really a good man, and he was unfit for his office. But the deacons were deacons for life, so he had tenure, so to speak, and there was no getting rid of him and I had to deal with him and some others of his own ilk.
But boy, was he rigorous about the Lord’s Supper. He was not rigorous about personal holiness, but people like that sometimes will compensate. And they make their reputation as a person of piety by being very tight and rigorous on matters of ritual. Boy, you’ve got to baptize by immersion. And I believe in baptism by immersion.
But you would think that heaven was going to riot if you’re baptized any other way. When it came to communion, if you offered communion, as I did one Sunday, to a man who had, this was unbelievable, who had just received Christ, but he hadn’t become a member of our church yet. Oh, did that rattle his cage, and he accosted me outside the church after the service, “How come you offered that man communion when he wasn’t even a member of the church?” And I said, “Brother, I do believe if the Lord Jesus Christ were there, he wouldn’t have been the least bit concerned about whether the man was a member of our church or not, is only concerned about whether he was a member of the kingdom of God. And when that man came to Christ today and confess Christ before this people and sat down on the front row, I asked you to serve him because now he has a brother in the Lord. Well, that seems obvious, I’m sure to virtually everybody out there who hears what I’m saying.
But some people don’t get it. They do not understand that no amount of religious ceremony or rituals can make one right. That’s what this man didn’t understand about himself, a man polluted by willful disobedience to God’s command, but he tried to compensate by being very legalistic about all of these details of church ritual and church membership. A lot of nonsense.
So then, we see that people have a tendency to emphasize external, non-biblical requirements (such as church membership) more than obedience to God’s explicitly revealed will in His Word.
As we described above, we found out in 2023 that our church membership had been secretly changed from “active” to “inactive” back in 2017, with no due biblical process, no communication about what our alleged offenses were, no opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, etc.
Not only was this demotion damaging to our Christian testimony, but it had a much more severe impact on us more than on an average member. That is because the leadership at LBC had periodically, over the previous 24 years, provided generous amounts of money through its Deacons’ Fund to help pay for our extremely costly medical expenses. Thus, in 2017 we incurred a financial punishment without even knowing that it happened, or why.
In addition, when Pastor Jim informed me about this loss of funding from the church in 2017, he used a phony excuse, dishonestly portraying it as a result of his difficulty in explaining all the technical and medical details of our expenditures, instead of telling us that truth—that he had unbiblically caused, or permitted, us to be demoted to “inactive.”
When I reminded him that our financial needs were too great long-term to be able to rely upon only our four parents, he glibly said, “God will provide.” Well, as you have seen from our earlier article, his glib promise rang hollow after he himself decided to disobey his own teaching from God’s Word and deprive his own daughter and son-in-law of food and medicine. More on this later.
So then, what was the cause of the demotion to “inactive”? This was briefly mentioned in our previous article:
P.S. A footnote to the Board of Elders at LBC: Pastor Jim’s spiritually abusive actions in 2017 led him to falsely accuse us of somehow “trying to divide this church” and “backdooring” him (two separate occasions). He subsequently discovered that he was acting on incorrect information, and he apologized. This led to our temporary recusal from TFW, JAB and LBC for about 10 days in May/June 2017.
However, once this was resolved, we resumed work with all three entities (at various levels), and we helped Pastor Jim fend off the infiltration of false teaching in September 2017, leading to his decision to preach “one of the most important sermons of my pastorate” in October 2017. He credited us privately with saving the church from a serious upheaval due to the threat of the false doctrine.
So therefore, we were unfairly demoted to “inactive” member status without our knowledge. And we were never afforded biblical due process to understand what was stealthily being done to us, since it was not handled properly by Pastor Jim himself, as it ought to have been. Yet we have continued to serve LBC up to this moment, funding the website ourselves where many research & discernment articles are housed, in order to provide a resource for LBC people.
First, we are now informing the public that we repeatedly challenged this decision once we found out it in Feb/March 2023. And since we were originally denied biblical due process, to begin with, in 2017, this matter should have been reopened in 2023 for a full re-hearing of the facts, if not an immediately reversal. However, the Board of Elders gave its (unjust) final decision on April 24, 2023:
While we initially said that we accepted the Board’s decision (but not agreed with it) and would not continue to bring it up, we soon realized that they were not simply acting unbiblically by failing to reopen it, but in reality, they were using their decision as a weapon in their overall strategy to deny us any biblical due process at all, to force us to leave the church.
As you can also see, we have also been accused of harming the unity of the fellowship of believers simply because we have tried to hold Pastor Jim accountable for his sinful actions against his wife and family. To this day, the Board of Elders has refused to provide the biblically required specific charges necessary to prove their vague assertions. This is yet another example of failure to grant biblical due process, regardless of our membership status.
It appears as if the Chairman and members of the Board have not been listening to TFW very much. Pastor Jim has often preached passionately about the need during moments of doctrinal peril to suspend the usual preference for peace and harmony in the Body, including in Colossians 3:15 (listen from to 9:25-15:15, excerpts below):
@10:13, Now, folks, there is a godless peace, which people sometimes achieve in their minds, but that godless peace rests on finding the lowest common denominator, and that will involve sacrificing the truth, the revelation of God, on the altar of expediency. For example, when religious denominations, maybe they’re riven by strife over fundamental issues, they agree to preserve their outward or institutional union at the expense of spiritual unity, and thus they make peace with grievous heresy. Then everybody goes home happy because they have preserved their union and perhaps also their pensions. That’s not what Paul is talking about.
What he’s talking about, when he says in verse 15, ‘Let the peace of God rule in your hearts,’ he’s talking about that peace, that fundamental sense of well-being, that fundamental sense of prosperity, happiness and sense of harmony with God and concord with one another, that our union with Christ alone can impart to the soul. He says, ‘let it rule in your hearts.’ Live and work with one another, he’s admonishing us, in such a way that we don’t disturb this peace. Live and work with one another in such a way that it pervades our being, and that will only happen if we walk in love.
The Apostle is saying, ‘Let the peace of Christ function as an umpire between you.’ Now, what does that mean? Well, if the peace of God blows the whistle and says what you’re doing is disturbing me, then let that whistle be a kind of red light to take a step back, revise your ways in such a manner that whatever you do, it will not wreck your inner sense of peace, harmony, tranquility with Christ.
@12:06, You know, it’s possible that at times, we have to take outward actions, I said, outward actions, that disturb, threaten to upset, the harmony between members of the body, members of the Christian family. You’ll find that, especially if you’re a church leader, a pastor, but just to make sure, if you are any part of that outward disturbance, just make sure that you do nothing yourself that has the peace of Christ within whistling you for a foul.
That is so important, because we are called in one Body, and we are members of one another. When the members of the body are not working in harmony, and when we’re so at odds that there is no peace, then the Body is diseased and dysfunctional and is not able to fulfill its proper functions. Hopefully, we want no part of this disharmony, for it dishonors Christ the head of the Body. It robs you of His peace in your heart. So the advice here is, make sure that you preserve that and back off of any adventures or behaviors that put the peace of Christ on tilt.
@13:15 As I say, sometimes, particularly if you’re in leadership, you have to do things, you have to take stands, that the outward peace of the body may be disturbed. You have to ruffle feathers, but you must do it in such a way that your conscience is completely at home with it. You recognize that there is a godless peace: In order to preserve outward peace, you’ve got to give on the truth. You’ve got to trim it. You’ve got to pull in your horns. You can’t assert God’s ways, because they are interfering with man’s way, and man’s determined to have his way. And if you go out there and try to take a stand, then sometimes that has to happen, you just have to let things go Boom! I’ve been there. I’ve done that. It’s not comfortable, it’s not good, but you have to operate in such a way in those circumstances that the peace of God reigns in your heart. You know you’re firm by the Spirit. I did not do what was easy. I did not do what is comfortable. And I don’t like the outward situation, the disharmony and the confusion, but I know that I have the peace of Christ in my heart. I did what was right in the sight of God. Sometimes that is necessary.
So let the peace of God, like an umpire, rule in your heart whatever you do in relationship with others, try to do it in such a way that you feel that peace of God. You feel that peace of Christ reigning in your heart and the Holy Spirit is not blowing the whistle and saying, ‘Foul, foul, you messed up there!’ and something you have to apologize for, something you have to repent of. Well, it’s always better to repent than not to repent, but the idea is to walk in such a way that the peace of God like an umpire rules in your heart, even if you have to disturb sometimes the outward peace. We were called in one body, and try to keep that body as harmonious as possible and be thankful. Ends @15:15
So as you can see from Pastor Jim’s own words, when doctrinal truth is being compromised, there may be a need to temporarily disturb the peace and harmony of a church. That has been, and still remains, the situation at LBC.
Thus, now that the Board of Elders has issued its (unjust) final decision, our only recourse is to demonstrate to the public that they were unwilling to obey Pastor Jim’s teaching in this regard. We must not remain silent any longer.
In our April 17, 2023 response to the Board, we had explained one of the areas (which we have subsequently concluded was the ONLY area) in which we disobeyed God’s Word to any degree in the way we approached the Board about Pastor Jim’s abusive behavior (failure to obtain a copy of the Constitution and follow it as closely as possible, as explained below). This is irrelevant to the topic of this article, but it must be explained so the reader will comprehend the context below.
As you will see, in the process of explaining ourselves to the Board, we will describe the lack of biblical due process afforded to us in 2017 when we committed a still-unknown offense (though we suspect we know what lame excuse Pastor Jim and the Board used to make us “inactive members” back then.)
First, let me explain that a key factor in our faulty approach to the Board was our unintended but culpable lack of awareness of the details of the LBC Constitution. I believe that Olsie probably gave me a copy of the updated version (6/25/17) after it was approved. It’s even possible that she suggested that I read it. I think that I do remember doing so, in a cursory manner, perhaps just looking at the doctrinal section on p.1-2 (as seen in the pdf provided to me by Stacy on 4/12/23) and then the new provisions on p.7 under (iii) and (c).
However, at no time (June 2017) did Jim or Olsie ever instruct us (that we remember) that we had already violated any provision affecting our membership or any other. Had they done so (if that had been permissible), we would have immediately rectified it. In addition, we did not receive notification from the Board, which again, may not have been required.
Unfortunately, I did not keep track of that document, and thus have not seen it in many years.
[Note: As explained above, Pastor Jim had instructed Olsie in 2017 to personally discuss a church discipline matter against us on his behalf. This is unbiblical because she is not a church pastor or officer. In addition, she did not even stipulate up-front that this was a church discipline matter, nor did she specify exactly what we said or did that was wrong. Instead, she said something to me like, “Jimmy needs you to apologize for what you said.” I replied, “I have nothing to apologize for.”
I presumed that she was referring to our email to Jim and TFW staff indicating that we would be unable to continue serving in that ministry, and the books ministry (JAB) and LBC as well, even though we were not involved in any LBC activities or ministries at that time. Here is the text of the short email in question that I had sent Pastor Jim to preface our attached resignation letter (both below):
Tuesday, 5/30/17, 10:21 a.m.
Jim,
I won’t even bother to defend us from your latest false accusation because it doesn’t matter now anyway. Find enclosed in this email our letter of resignation from all Lake, Truth Encounters and TFW ministries. In the letter, I forgot to stipulate that our $400 monthly income should be diverted to those who will carry on our work.
Paul
Letter from Paul & Juli:
“Dear Pastor Jim and TFW staff,
We regret to inform you that, due to our failing health, we are unable to continue serving in The Final Word ministry (and Truth Encounters) at this time. Thus, we need to take an unspecified leave of absence in order to focus our limited time and energy on our current environmental crisis in the plumbing system and to get rest in order to recover. The time pressures of keeping up with the editing for various books and radio programs and features have become overwhelming.
We will turn over all completed work, including Facebook sentences, radio edits, etc., up through the end of Acts 16. This should provide enough time for you to find replacement workers for our duties. We will also finish all projects currently underway, such as the website topics and the final edits on Polishing.
We apologize for any stress this may cause the staff. We have tried to hold it together, but must now step aside and let others carry on our work. We look forward to resuming our participation in TFW and other ministries when our health allows.
In Christ,
Paul & Juli Grose
The reason why we had to recuse ourselves was twofold: 1) our health had drastically deteriorated due to Pastor Jim’s newly begun (2017) spiritual abuse that occurred after Juli rebuked him for emotionally abusing her mom, and 2) our trust in Pastor Jim’s spiritual leadership had been severely damaged.
1) As we explained above, Pastor Jim failed to do his due diligence when he received erroneous reports about either or both of us, and lashed out uncharacteristically at us without giving us biblical due process and or even trying to find out if they were true. This included (on two separate occasions) saying that we were “trying to divide this church” for simply following his teaching and other ministry instructions, and that Juli was trying to “backdoor” him to get her way regarding something at the church, when neither accusation was true.
2) Thus, these false accusations, even though he eventually apologized, severely damaged our trust in Pastor Jim’s spiritual leadership, since we had served him faithfully for decades as volunteers using our “widow’s mite” of energy and never given him reason to question our integrity or ministry wisdom. Thus, we felt the need to protest in some manner.
However, we did not feel free to approach the Board of Elders with this because, in fact, the latter accusation referenced above arose due to the actions of one of the Elders himself, who had unbiblically countermanded Pastor Jim’s 2010 explicit ban of a notorious false women’s teacher, Beth Moore, who had denied the Gospel of Christ as early as 2005! So since we had no recourse with the Board, we chose instead to briefly withdraw from all 3 ministries (even though we were not currently active in LBC per se at that very moment), hoping that this would convict Pastor Jim of his sinful habit.
Someone may ask, “Why did you bother to mention LBC if you weren’t involved in any ministries anyway?” The reason was this: Due to Pastor Jim’s escalating abusive behavior, we needed to indicate to him that he had lost our trust as our leader across all his ministries, not just in the one specific area. Also, Jim’s false accusations arose out of his failure to ensure doctrinal fidelity in certain LBC ministries, not in radio & books. So if we continued to work with him in the radio & books (TFW and JAB), while he was being disobedient in LBC-related matters, we would have left the wrong impression.
Of course, we hoped that this would be only temporary, and it was. But we suspect that even though Jim found out that this latter accusation (“backdooring him”) was also untrue, he secretly used our document (written during a 10-day conflict in which he was the offender, not us) to remove us from the “active members” rolls at LBC.
It also should be obvious to the public that, had we been healthy and able to attend services and LBC ministries normally, this secret demotion would not have been possible. Thus, Pastor Jim took advantage of our inability to be physically present to hide from us his dishonest and unbiblical actions. This deliberate abuse of the disabled violates Leviticus 19:13-16:
13‘You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning. 14‘You shall not curse a deaf man, nor place a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall revere your God; I am the LORD.
15‘You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly. 16‘You shall not go about as a slanderer among your people, and you are not to act against the life of your neighbor; I am the LORD. NASB 1995 version
Therefore, in 2017, we were unaware that anything seriously wrong had occurred, and we gladly resumed work on TFW after Jim apologized by the end of the 10 days, signaling to him that our trust in his spiritual leadership had been restored
The next example of Chairman Mike’s unbiblical justification for denying us biblical due process is evident in this portion of his remarks quoted earlier (see bolded):
I just wanted to come up and confirm for all of you that the elders have indeed been involved with this for some years now, actually. Since I’ve become chairman of the board, which is about three years now, I’ve received innumerable letters and documents from Paul, each confirming that this is a vindictive individual bent on destroying his father-in-law. The elders have investigated his accusations, and have concluded that there’s no foundation to any of them.
As we laid out in our weeklong email chain document cited earlier, Pastor Jim explicitly teaches that 1) every believer deserves biblical due process, not just pastors, and 2) those who judge (pastors/elders) must investigate thoroughly—according to God’s Word, not just the “letter of the law” in LBC’s Constitution:
We have spent the last 19 months begging to receive the biblical due process that Jim here guarantees to every member of a church (he begins discussing v.19 @ 15 min. in). Here’s more of the computerized transcript, starting at 17:10:
“Every faithful pastor has been through that, if he’s been in the Ministry very long, I would imagine. And those things are very painful. But that’s the Devil’s work and those are the Devil’s minions. But you’ve got to be very careful about accrediting such people. Timothy is given a heads up. Such things happen to pastors and Church leaders much too often. They’re always people who want to settle a score with a pastor. Pastor may have held them accountable and stood in their way in some matter, so now they want to get even. So due process is what God wants. And I might add, friends, that if the principle here applies to one in a pastoral position like Timothy, the spirit of it morally applies to every member of a Church. Do not even entertain an accusation against your pastor or any other Church leader without confirmation of two or three reliable witnesses.
“Now, there are some things you cannot witness. An individual. A pastor might be accused of being proud or conceited or full of himself or whatever. You can’t witness that. You can sense that. You can feel that, and you may sense and feel entirely wrongly. You may misinterpret what you think you’re observing. Those things can’t be witnessed. But if a pastor is stoned, if he’s drunk, you can witness that. If a pastor is unfaithful, or if a pastor is mishandling money or the funds of the Church, all of that is subject to witness. And those things are verifiable. A perception is not a witness because perceptions do not qualify as behaviors that two or three people can see at the same time and all confirm. This is very important, what we’re saying here, they are just subjective feelings about actions. They may or may not be accurate. Two or three of us can see someone murdered, and we can bear witness to the fact. Two or three of us cannot be certain, however, that someone had murder on his mind unless he told us so. Two or three of us can bear witness to the fact that we found a Church leader at a hotel in a faraway town in the embrace of a woman, not his wife. However, we cannot testify, absent from those observable facts, should we have happened to see a pastor merely in the company somewhere of another woman, that he had lost in his heart may have been his sister, for heaven’s sake, you see what I mean?” 19:40
As you both know, we have been accused of lying, disrespect, and mistreatment of Olsie. Jim points out that Paul’s cites Deuteronomy 19, where Moses prescribes that the priests and judges who are in office shall investigate thoroughly. That has never happened. And it must, or else Juli & I will be either dead or irrecoverably relapsed , and discredited as godly lay ministry leaders either way. Deut. 19:15-20:
15A lone witness is not sufficient to establish any wrongdoing or sin against a man, regardless of what offense he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
16If a false witness testifies against someone, accusing him of a crime, 17both parties to the dispute must stand in the presence of the LORD, before the priests and judges who are in office at that time. 18The judges shall investigate thoroughly, and if the witness is proven to be a liar who has falsely accused his brother, 19you must do to him as he intended to do to his brother. So you must purge the evil from among you. 20Then the rest of the people will hear and be afraid, and they will never again do anything so evil among you.
In addition, we have insisted upon being held accountable in a church discipline forum to prove our innocence. Yet we have heard nothing. Crickets.
If the members of the Board had been obedient to Pastor Jim’s teaching from God’s Word, they would have investigated fully. How do we know that they did not do so? By the simple fact that they did not insist upon getting all the possible evidence first, then cross-examining us about the timestamped evidence of Pastor Jim’s misbehavior contained in our “innumerable letters and documents,” which were also backed up the scriptural standard of “two or three witnesses” (of a sound mind and godly character), Olsie, Juli and me).
The Elders also did not allow us to cross-examine anyone, such as Pastor Jim or others, to ensure that the truth came out, thus guaranteeing the predetermined outcome they wanted.
In addition, the Board has conveniently used our demotion to “inactive” status to deny us standing before them (per the Constitution), thus preventing us from even gaining a hearing.
Even though these predictable fleshly tactics are used by leaders to try to hide from biblical accountability, we must examine the reasons why these justifications were wrong, at any level.
First, when someone comes forward to present evidence before the Board about the misbehavior of a pastor/elder/director, it is unbiblical to automatically penalize the informant for any alleged violations that resulted in a demotion to “inactive” status, especially if the informant was unaware of, or protests, the decision. The full testimony should be heard and considered on its own merits, as well as investigated and cross-examined, before the informant’s testimony and evidence should be discounted.
After all, would the Board refuse to hear or automatically dismiss the testimony of a Christian just because he attended another church, or a concerned unbeliever, who was bringing forth evidence against a pastor/elder/director? Unlikely.
This would be all the more true if the informant(s) were members of the pastor’s/elder’s/director’s own family. One would expect the Board to want to know all the information before making a decision, but they clearly did not. This violates Pastor Jim’s teaching from Genesis 18:13-19:1:
@6:40, Well, Abram is truly God’s friend, fully on God’s side, and in alignment with God’s purposes through him. So to Abraham, God confides not only a deeper knowledge of Himself, but a knowledge of His plans. And in the process, the Lord will test, as in the case of Moses, and tune Abraham’s godly heart to His own, in the exercise of justice and mercy, just like a father training a son to his ways.
The importance of this follows in verses 18 through 20. In His great grace, God has chosen Abraham as the conduit of His purposes through Israel, Abraham’s descendants. It’s not just important that Abraham continued to walk in personal faithfulness with God’s covenant. But it’s also important that in the process, Abraham be for his descendants, a standard bearer of the ways of the Lord. And that means that God was preparing Abraham to be a mentor and an exemplar in what is right and just. The better Abraham’s example, and teaching, gets rooted in His descendants, the more secure will be God’s promise in fulfilling for Israel, and through Israel, what God promised to their great patriarch. @7: 58 “Righteousness, justice, and Mercy 101” begins right here and God’s imminent dealing with the wicked of Sodom.
Verse 20, then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah, a neighbor city, so close together, is so great, and their sins so grievous, that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”
Now, this was what I said a couple of minutes ago, we need to talk about. Here is the Lord appearing in a theophany with two angels disguised as mere men. @8:41
And God Almighty says, “I will go down and see…” That’s not intended to tell us that God is not omniscient, all knowing; it’s not intended to be understood that His knowledge of human affairs is limited. That misses the point by miles. This whole experience is divinely designed for the need of the moment, divinely designed for teaching Abraham and Sarah.
Here’s the deal: Appearing to him with two angels, the three of them disguised as three men, serves God’s purpose better than otherwise. God’s teaching point here is that He, God, is a just God who judges people on the basis of thorough knowledge of the situation. And for Abraham, His friend and servant, it means that Abraham should follow suit and teach his descendants to be like God, to be just, not casual, not superficial or lackadaisical, in meting out penalties for alleged wrongdoing.
By this action, and by these words, “I will go down and see,” God wants Abraham to know that His ways in the matter of justice, and in this episode, serves well to underscore that serving up justice in human affairs is a very serious matter that must be undertaken on the basis of justifying evidence.
In God’s case, He makes no mistakes when He punishes. He says, “If not, I will know.” So that’s the point. God is omniscient. But by this demonstration, appearing to Abraham as a man, He’s getting across this message, that when He judges, He judges rightly, and He knows all the facts. 10:33
So Chairman Mike and the Board did not “investigate fully” according to Pastor Jim’s teaching from God’s Word. Therefore, there is no possible way that they could reach the conclusion that “there’s no foundation to any of them” [our true accusations against Pastor Jim that were biblically witnessed and documented with timestamps].
In addition to Chairman Mike’s other false statements, do you also notice that he deliberately misrepresents the authorship/ownership of the “innumerable letters and documents” and the participation of Juli in his false narrative?
@24:26, Elder Chairman, Mike Sheffield: “We all know it may or may not work. So Hi, I’m Mike Sheffield. I am the Chairman of the Board. And I want to thank Jim for his steadfastness and transparency in this matter. I just wanted to come up and confirm for all of you that the elders have indeed been involved with this for some years now, actually. Since I’ve become chairman of the board, which is about three years now, I’ve received innumerable letters and documents from Paul, each confirming that this is a vindictive individual bent on destroying his father-in-law. The elders have investigated his accusations, and have concluded that there’s no foundation to any of them.
According to the Chairman, 1) I (Paul) am the sole (or at least primary) proponent of the true accusations against Pastor Jim, and in addition, 2) I do so for nefarious motives.
We will deal with the latter accusation first: Pastor Jim expressly forbids the unsubstantiated imputation of impure motives to others’ actions in his 1 Timothy 5:19 sermon cited above:
“Now, there are some things you cannot witness. An individual. A pastor might be accused of being proud or conceited or full of himself or whatever. You can’t witness that. You can sense that. You can feel that, and you may sense and feel entirely wrongly. You may misinterpret what you think you’re observing. Those things can’t be witnessed. But if a pastor is stoned, if he’s drunk, you can witness that. If a pastor is unfaithful, or if a pastor is mishandling money or the funds of the Church, all of that is subject to witness. And those things are verifiable. A perception is not a witness because perceptions do not qualify as behaviors that two or three people can see at the same time and all confirm. This is very important, what we’re saying here, they are just subjective feelings about actions. They may or may not be accurate. Two or three of us can see someone murdered, and we can bear witness to the fact. Two or three of us cannot be certain, however, that someone had murder on his mind unless he told us so. Two or three of us can bear witness to the fact that we found a Church leader at a hotel in a faraway town in the embrace of a woman, not his wife. However, we cannot testify, absent from those observable facts, should we have happened to see a pastor merely in the company somewhere of another woman, that he had lost in his heart may have been his sister, for heaven’s sake, you see what I mean?” 19:40
Secondly, Chairman Mike twists his false narrative further to create the impression that Juli had no role in planning and executing this attempt at biblical accountability for her father.
In doing so, he conveniently failed to mention several things: 1) Juli herself wrote, and also assisted me in preparing, documentation of Pastor Jim’s disobedience beginning in 2015. She also helped me (Paul) prepare the specific resources she wanted to present to the Board for several years prior to our first contact on 1/30/23, 2) Juli made voice recordings on Christmas Eve and early Christmas Day 2022 to persuade Chairman Mike and the Elder Board to intervene in her parents’ health. The Chairman confirmed receipt of the transcript of Juli’s voicemails and assured us that he had presented it to the Board along with the other copious documentation, and 3) Juli signed our 1/30/23 letter, and the original copy was sent by legal courier to the Chairman on that date, and he signed a document certifying its receipt.
Therefore, since the Chairman and the Board have failed in their biblical and constitutional duty to investigate thoroughly a matter as serious as the abuse of the pastor’s wife and family, we must turn to the public and present the evidence they blinded their eyes to.
We will link the same transcript of Juli’s voicemails that was delivered to the Chairman on 1/30/23 (accompanied by the offer to the Board of the actual recordings themselves, for verification purposes) so the public can decide whether or not the Board has failed and what to do about it.
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 3: Disobedience in Financial Support
The next unbiblical justification for Pastor Jim’s disobedience from Chairman Mike is this:
Jim and Olsie actually have been dealing with this for such a long time. And they’ve done so without any retribution to Paul or Juli. The elder board has full confidence in how Jim has dealt with this issue.
First, this is an utter falsehood. The reality is that Pastor Jim has caused Juli to be ostracized from nearly every member of her family, including the more distant ones, and even from all of her father’s former students and acquaintances whom Juli also knew, or knew of. In other words, not a single person who knew both Jim and Juli will now come to her defense because of the false accusations he has spread far and wide about her.
But even more deadly than this is the fact that Pastor Jim’s (and sadly, Olsie’s as well) false accusations, which began “out of nowhere” in 2015 when they were 77 ½ and 76 years old respectively, eventually forced us from “simple” poverty into total bankruptcy.
Sadly, due to Pastor Jim’s refusal to care for his wife, as he did his own body (Eph. 5:28) and seek medical attention for her in 2015 when, by both of their admission, her health problems severely jeopardized her ability to continue as our caregiver, Olsie continued to make false accusations, especially in 2018, as Juli referred to in her voicemail transcripts.
Juli begged her mom to get medical attention at that time, but Olsie would never follow through, especially because Pastor Jim discouraged it. As a result, when Olsie made a new false accusation in 2020 and failed to repent (and Pastor Jim followed suit, with his verbal sins on 8/6/20 and 8/11/20, and failed to repent), this caused severe damage to my (Paul’s) health, especially with my intractable heart-pounding symptoms. If something didn’t change, I was going to relapse the point of no return, or even die.
Consequently, in order to vindicate ourselves and preserve my (Paul’s) life, we literally had to divest ourselves of ANY financial support from Jim & Olsie, either current ($4-5,000/month for special food, medicine and medical care) or future, including Juli’s inheritance worth $750,000-$1 million at the time. Since Jim & Olsie had made me the Successor Trustee of the Andrews Family Trust back in 2007, we had to hire a Living Trust attorney to advise us and draft the necessary documents.
(The only things we requested from Jim & Olsie were the leadership/ownership of the ministries we already had been given [TFW] or had purchased [JAB] after nearly two decades of faithful, mostly volunteer service.)
When even this desperate step failed to bring repentance, I (Paul) was also forced to liquidate my 20-year-long investment in a Roth IRA in March 2022, worth about $50,000, but it had to be sold hastily for only about $44,000. This was our only retirement funding, and now we had to live off it.
In addition, because of the incessant emotional stress caused by Jim & Olsie’s disobedience, as well our loss of Olsie as our caregiver, I (Paul) was no longer able to keep my paid TFW job in the summer of 2022. At the time, my parents were unable to help us for about 1 month’s time because they both got Covid, and they also had to move. Thus, we had no caregiver whatsoever during that time, requiring me to do all the cleaning and dishwashing duties, and so I ultimately relapsed severely and had to apply for disability. (Thankfully, both Jim & Olsie asked me to continue to advise my fellow TFW workers on a volunteer basis even after I had to stop working. This happened twice in 2023, on January 17 and in the summertime.)
So to summarize, because of Jim & Olsie’s disobedience in August 2020, within just two years’ time, we had lost 1) our monthly support of $4-6,000 from Jim & Olsie, 2) Juli’s inheritance valued at between $750,000 and 1 million, 3) my Roth IRA, which we now had to live on, and 4) my TFW job, which paid $1100/month, and 5) my health, such as it was. So we went from “just” being poor and on Medicaid and Food stamps, to now being bankrupt, no retirement, no job, and no disability payments yet for at least 1 ½ years.
Meanwhile, Juli’s health also spiraled out of control because of the emotional stress caused by her mom failing to repent on August 6, 2020 for breaking her three agreed-upon promises (required to protect our fragile medical health and in order to fulfill basic Christian duty). At the time, Juli was actually at the zenith of her health and physical functioning (walking, doing tasks by herself), at least as compared to the previous decade.
But because Juli was being falsely accused again by both of her parents for mistreating her mom, as well as pushing herself beyond her limits to try to help me (Paul) keep our house in order after Olsie’s spiteful departure, Juli lost her newfound capacity to function after just a few months.
Finally, the decision of the Board to not only ignore our pleas for help and requests for investigation of Pastor Jim, but also then to blame us as the victimizers instead of the victims in March/April 2023, resulted in Juli’s cervical spine/brainstem (and the connective tissues that support them) breaking down more quickly and in unexpected, dangerous ways. This ultimately led to the need for immediate X-ray, then MRI imaging, in order to prepare the documentation for Dr. Bolognese in NY.
(To be sure, Juli would have likely needed to take this step eventually anyway, given her 1976 horseback riding accident,but when she first learned about CCI (craniocervical instability) in 2018 or 2019, she discovered that there were non-surgical approaches that should be tried first, if at all possible. Now with her health in a complete tailspin, we did not have the luxury of a gradual approach.)
Next, Pastor Jim (with Chairman Mike’s support) is using his false allegation of theft of the websites he gave us years ago to discourage LBC people (who are our only personal contacts for the past 30+ years) from giving to us financially, as we specified in our previous article:
How could any Christian, let alone a pastor, justify his cruel actions of “apostate abandonment” (described in Part 13)? He is not only refusing to obey his own teaching from 1 Timothy 5:8, but he is clearly discouraging those LBC members (who are the primary source of Christian fellowship and ministry opportunities into which Juli & I have invested ourselves for the past 30 years) from giving to us financially because of his refusal to admit his own unlawful actions (as described in Part 13 and Elders, Part 1).
Here is an excerpt from an email I (Paul) received from my dad, Gordon, after he and my mom met with Jim & Olsie in July 2024:
We also talked about possible donors to help. Neither family has resources to assist. They explained their finances to us, and that of their family. Jim believed most LBC people would be reluctant to step in because of the conflict over The Final Word.
Thus, because of Pastor Jim’s decision to continue violating man’s (civil) law regarding website ownership, he has created a cruel legal impasse, using it to blame us and therefore deny us support of any kind, including raising support for us from others.
This now brings us back, full circle, to where we began this article: our inability to fulfill our obligation to the neurosurgeon and hospital and prepay the $25,000 that we had agreed upon. So you can clearly see now that Pastor Jim’s disobedience, permitted to continue by the Board of Elders even when credible evidence was presented by godly witnesses, has resulted in a disgrace to the name of Christ in front of unbelievers.
As we also pointed out in our previous article, there is also no other source of funding for us to turn to, since all other avenues have been exhausted:
In addition, their rationalizations ring even more hollow when examined in the harsh light of the new reality: all other relatives, contacts and resources have been fully exhausted. Yet even though Pastor Jim knows this information, he still refuses to obey his own teaching from God’s Word and provide for his own daughter (to the best of his ability), either directly or indirectly.
So now, we are forced to broaden our desperate requests for financial support to anyone who will have mercy, not just Christians or those familiar with Pastor Jim’s ministries. Again, this family abuse and abandonment is a clear disqualification for ministry (since Pastor Jim retains his “Emeritus” status and plans to continue writing books and running FWR—his new name for The Final Word Radio). We here repeat our request for help from the public to bring this to the attention of the Board Members of The Final Word Radio, since we do not know who they currently are.
Now we must rebut a specious argument about finances from one of Pastor Jim’s supporters: The claim is that once a woman gets married, the financial responsibility for her belongs to her husband (and her husband’s family) for the rest of her life. While this is generally true, it is being deceptively used to skirt the crystal-clear threat of apostasy to anyone who abandons his family member (specifically, aging parents) in 1 Timothy 5:8: “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”)
However, this unbiblical rationalization will not work. First, it does not account for legitimate exceptions to that principle that occur in this situation. The woman, in this case, is disabled, cannot work and has exorbitant medical expenses because of her disease and disability. But while it doesn’t matter how & why this is the case, Juli’s neurosurgeon did identify up to 3 genetic anomalies/malformations that have resulted in pain and disease in Juli since birth. Obviously, we know where those genes came from. Therefore, given the extreme burden imposed upon the woman’s husband, out of mercy, the woman’s family should do as much as possible to help financially.
In addition, in our case, the husband is NOW also so severely disabled such that he cannot work. Thus, the woman’s family has an even greater obligation to make up the difference since the husband’s family cannot.
Second, the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 5:3-4 makes it clear that the duty of the adult child to care for his/her aging parent is out of reciprocal duty for the same care given in childhood:
3Honor widows who are widows indeed; 4but if any widow has children or grandchildren, they must first learn to practice piety in regard to their own family and to make some return to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God. NASB 1995 version
Therefore, if the secondary (reciprocal) duty of the child to the parent stems from the primary (original) duty of the parent to the child, and that secondary duty remains until the death of the parent, then by all means, the duty of the parent also remains throughout the life of the child. It’s simple biblical logic.
Thus, Pastor Jim’s unbiblical rationalizations to deny financial support to his own daughter fall flat on their face in the light of God’s Word. Beyond that, they are cruel and scandalous to the Gospel. Even unbelievers don’t condone such wickedness.
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 4: Final Rebuttals
We will close this article by answering some objections we have received from several of Pastor Jim’s defenders. One assertion is that Juli & I are obligated to submit to the leadership of Pastor Jim and the Board of Elders without question, even though he has committed blatant sin, witnessed by 3 credible, godly people: Olsie, Juli and me. We are told to just move on, if we don’t trust him anymore.
There are several problems with that, but the worst is this: Pastor Jim himself teaches clearly in 1 Peter 5:5-11 that Christians are NOT to submit to a pastor or elder(s) when they sin or command someone else to disobey God’s Word:
@7:00, I come from a baptistic tradition. I was raised as a Baptist and I, of course, I’m not in any way ashamed of that. In many ways, I’m proud of that tradition. But one thing I’ve never been proud of was its congregational form of government. And in some places it’s more extreme than others. But it was often a case of the inmates running the asylum–no idea that spiritual leaders had God-given authority and that those who professed to know Christ and who were members of a given body are obliged before God for Christ’s sake to yield to the authority of their church leaders.
Of course, there are church leaders who have and still do greatly abuse any authority that they might be perceived to have. But you deal with that in all arenas of life anywhere where authority is present. And usually those people hit a wall somewhere along the line. Nevertheless, before God, it’s our responsibility when we have church leaders to be subject to them. And it is their responsibility, yes, to lead, even to rule, to give directions.
It’s our obligation, those of us who follow, to follow their lead unless clearly their lead runs out of bounds of the Scriptures. And like the rulers of the Jews, the Sanhedrin, in the times of the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles, were mandating that the apostles no longer preach in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this was clearly contrary to Jesus’ directives to them. And so they said, “Well, you’ll have to judge for yourselves whether it is better to obey God or to obey you.”
We are all our own believer-priest in that regard and we have God’s Word. And when church leaders, whoever they are begin to teach us in such a manner or to direct our walk in such a manner that it runs outside of the doctrinal or the moral boundaries or the ethical boundaries of what the Scripture teaches, then at that point we draw the line. But until then, we are to be subject to our leaders. There ought to be a recognized authority in our church leaders. @9:15
Therefore, after examining all the unbiblical justifications for Pastor Jim’s disobedience made by Chairman Mike and Pastor Jim himself, you can clearly see that neither man is currently devoted to obeying the Word of God. We have explained the health-related causes behind Pastor Jim’s gradual (since 2015), then sudden (in 2020), abandonment of his own teaching.
But Chairman Mike has no such excuse, and he remains highly influential at LBC. Yet he is violating God’s Word in the same exact way Pastor Jim described in the above sermon:
And when church leaders, whoever they are begin to teach us in such a manner or to direct our walk in such a manner that it runs outside of the doctrinal or the moral boundaries or the ethical boundaries of what the Scripture teaches, then at that point we draw the line.
How, then, is Chairman Mike teaching or directing LBC members/attenders contrary to the Scriptures? First, as painstakingly documented above, he is knowingly presenting false information to the church. Second, as specified above, he is perverting justice by failing to follow Pastor Jim’s own teaching from God’s Word regarding biblical due process, especially in our case.
There are many more ways, but the most serious one of all is this: He has used his spiritual leadership as Chairman of the Elder Board to advise people to put their trust in a mere man (in this case, Pastor Jim), more than in the Scriptures.
When announcing the search for a new Senior Pastor on April 28, 2024, Chairman Mike said:
“Yes, John is right. We as elders have been talking, praying, praying, praying, and talking and have come to the conclusion that to maintain the unity that Jim has been talking about, and not only unity but continuity in this congregation. We think it best to start the search, however long that is going to take. Jim has written to me and said that he will remain Senior Pastor until such a replacement is found, which I’m thankful for. And I think we should all be thankful for.
“But we didn’t want it to be kind of, you know, behind closed doors and things like that. We will be searching, I mean, I kind of anticipate this as a long, drawn-out process, but as John said, my desire and all the hearts of the elders’ desire is to not get ahead of the Lord on this. Not get in front of the Spirit. and it’s taken a long time to come to this conclusion, but I think it will take a long time to change also, but we’re asking that you continue to pray, continue to put your trust in the Lord, continue to pray that Jim continues to speak the truth as he has for 34 years and will continue to do so as long as the Lord leaves him here.
“We just appreciate that we have a pastor that we can love, that we can respect, that we can respect his preaching, we never have to doubt that what we’re hearing is the truth, and anybody that follows him is going to have some very large shoes to fill, and those will be criteria that will be out front. And so we just ask, as elders, that you all pray that we will continue to pray, and as this process moves along, we’ll give updates as need be.
“We’ll probably have a little more detail updated as to what the process is exactly going to be at the business meeting on June 30.” 1:29:34
“But how do you know that Chairman Mike actually meant what he said (in the bolded phrase above)? someone may ask. To answer that, we will now post an excerpt from his 10/1/23 email in which he was directing us (among other things) to hand over control of certain portions of the two websites (www.thefinalwordradio.com and www.jimandrewsbooks.com ) to Pastor Jim, which I (Paul) had already researched and discussed twice with my IP (Intellectual Property) lawyer, who informed me that Pastor Jim had already legally given them to me.
While I was awaiting a third discussion with my lawyer, in order to confirm the information just one more time, I received Chairman Mike’s email, and I would not comply with his unbiblical demand to give up my property against my will (and therefore, against civil law). Therefore, applying Pastor Jim’s principle from 1 Peter 5, no Christian is obliged to obey or follow a pastor or elder when being directed to do something unlawful.
In addition, in his 10/1/23 email (paragraph 6), Chairman Mike made a similar statement to his public one above about trusting Pastor Jim, so this paragraph is entirely relevant to understanding the meaning of his public words:
I would also like to give you some unsolicited advice. Based on your complaints of our Pastor at Lake Bible Church, I would suggest you find another pastor to learn from. If I had the issues you have with our pastor I would not want to learn anything from that man as I would not trust him. I would think you should move on. Clearly you feel that he does not “practice what he preaches” and for that reason alone you should not be listening to him. We, as a congregation, however, feel differently and trust that the Lord has called him to preach the Word and we have all grown because of it and we trust him as his teaching has been born out in our lives. You and your wife, however, clearly have a different opinion on that point. I think you should find another pastor/teacher that you feel lives up to his teachings in the Word.
First, for the record, we reject his “straw man” argument, as if there were only two basic options (a 100% fraudulent pastor or a 100% faithful one) instead of at least three. This third option is our truthful depiction of Pastor Jim’s 57 ½ years of basic obedience, followed by 4 ½ of severe disobedience caused by a serious health problem.
Chairman Mike also tries to portray us as having a more limited knowledge of Pastor Jim than he or others at LBC do. This is insulting and ridiculous. Juli has learned and obeyed her father’s teaching since she was quite young (as he himself testified to the congregation in June 2019):
@31:15 Back in 1987 during the spring of her senior year at Wheaton College, our daughter Juli, and many of you know this, came down the initial symptoms of what has turned out to be a 32-year-and-counting battle with what is now called ME/CFS [myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome]. At long last, it’s the subject of major research enterprises to decode it and to cover it all the way from Stanford to Harvard to Norway and every place. I just say this reverently, I hope to God they succeed before it’s too irrelevant.
I cannot begin to tell you the horror stories, but I will simply say that early on, Olsie & I had many and many of those ‘Where’s God?’ moments. As everything went wrong, kept going wrong, in her life, and our lives were turned upside down, and still are, there were and remain many layers, many layers of suffering and mystery in the whole sad saga.
Let me draw you a picture. Here we had, and still have, a daughter and then her husband, they were married the day before they graduated at Wheaton. They were both smart, Paul simply brilliant, there’s no other word for it. Both were musically talented, conservatory-trained in piano performance. Both [were] exceptionally, both even from little kids, exceptionally devout. And both headed for the mission field.
Both had even spent summers preparing for their eventual task: Juli in Kenya, and Paul in Haiti and Papua New Guinea, and he had the French [language] in his pocket to boot. Perfect. Their goal was to settle in some Third-World venue, use their musical talents (Paul had a double-major in ethnomusicology as well as piano performance) to use their skills and talents to help natives express their faith in native hymnology rather than the usual imported Western music you find on the mission fields.
Well, Olsie & I naturally admired their dedication to Christ. Both of us were proud as punch of both of them. And of course, we felt blessed to present them to our God as an offering to His glory [tears up].
Then, owing to this baffling illness, right before our eyes, their lives unraveled. Their mission and vision was torched; life for them quickly became, and has remained, just an exercise in day-to-day survival, as has ours. They weren’t going anywhere. And they weren’t doing flip.
It just became a study in 32 years of total upheaval. Of all the layers of pain and suffering, one thing in particular that Olsie (that’s my little wife right there, for guests) struggled with was this: Here was our daughter, and now her husband, too caught up in the maelstrom of this terrible affliction. Their lives were ripped apart, while it seemed that, oh many times, [while] driving down the road, it would hit her [Olsie] as she saw young people going here and there about their age.
There were all these people in their age range. Many of them, clearly…no thought of God in their minds…here they were running around carefree, in their pretty little cars purchased by their affluent parents, holding their jobs, chasing their dreams, now having children, [while their ] parents were saying, ‘See this, now see this, my grandchildren!’ while the lives of these two [Paul & Juli], two of the finest Christian kids that any parent could ever be privileged to call their own, were totally in the tank and sinking deeper every day.
That, I must tell you, was ‘seed’ for some bitterness and envy, it’s like what the Psalmist is talking about right here. It was so hard for Olsie in particular to watch; I had my issues, she had hers. It was hard for her to be in venues where proud … (nothing wrong with the parents, I’m a proud great-grandfather, ok? very proud, ridiculously so, ok? ) And there were proud parents chattering about the latest and greatest adventures and achievements of their kids, but in many cases, we just happened to know, kids who had not the slightest care for Christ and the things of God. And they were just going on, flying away and flying high, and ours were FLAT!
It was so hard to watch that. ‘Why God? Why do those seem to be blessed who have no heart for You? Give no thought to the things of God?’ ‘Why,’ she would wonder, do they seem to be so blessed and prospered when these kids, so smart, so talented, so devout, just get blasted and pummeled every cotton-pickin’ day?’ On the face of it, God did not seem to be good; you know that from my book, Polishing God’s Monuments. We asked God to fill our cup, and as I put it, it seemed that all He did was eat our lunch.
On the face of it, it did not seem, as the Psalmist says, that God was good to the pure in heart, to those who were sincere and devoted, undivided in their loyalty, but on the contrary, better to those who had no heart for Him at all. Where was God in all this? Though I never heard Olsie express the thought, it would be easy to imagine, in that emotional state, someone saying, ‘If this is the way that God treats those who serve Him best, what advantage is to pull out all the stops and to lay it all on the line if the godless seem to prosper so regularly and the godly get pounded so much of the time?’” Ends 38:50
Therefore, if anyone could attest to Pastor Jim’s godly legacy that began in 1963, it would be Juli, and later, me (Paul), whom Juli introduced to his teaching in 1984. Thus, both of us could agree with the Chairman’s words, up to a certain point:
“We, as a congregation, however, feel differently and trust that the Lord has called him to preach the Word and we have all grown because of it and we trust him as his teaching has been born out in our lives.”
Certainly 1) Juli & I know that God called Pastor to Jim to preach the Word, 2) we and others have grown because of it, and yes, 3) we have seen the truthfulness of his teaching as we have lived it out in our own lives. But our trust is conditional, not unconditional, and it is not permanent. It must continue to be earned daily, both in a pastor’s doctrine and in his behavior toward his congregants.
Notice what Pastor Jim preached in Acts 17:1-15 in 2008, saying of the Bereans:
@27:26, Now we notice that these people in Berea were described as more noble-minded. So that meant open-minded than those in Thessalonica. And one of the reasons that Luke describes them as such is because of their litmus test, of a litmus test of validity. They were looking into the Word of God, as Paul taught it.
And their one question was, are these things so? The benchmark of truth for them was simply whether or not what Paul taught was agreeable to what the Old Testament Scriptures taught. And they understood as we should understand that what the Bible teaches God teaches. And that must be the end of the story for any believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it was for these people, or at least a great block of the more so than in Thessalonica.
We must adjust our thinking to the Word of God, and not always be trying, in light of contemporary flavors and influences to reshape the testimony of Scripture, to fit our own preconceived notions. Ends @28:36
Thus, if Luke, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the apostolic authority of the Apostle Paul, praised the Bereans for double-checking Paul’s own teaching, why haven’t Juli & I likewise been praised for holding up Pastor Jim’s teaching and life to the light of God’s Word and pointing out where he has “gone rogue,” as he preemptively warned his grandson Alex at his 2019 Ordination Service in Roseburg?
Does Pastor Jim somehow possess a greater apostolic authority that the Apostle Paul, whom our Risen Lord personally tutored in Arabia, before Paul ever went to Berea? How arrogant were the Bereans to question the word of a truly called, supernaturally mentored apostle like the Apostle Paul! How dare they question him!
Oh, wait, maybe they weren’t arrogant after all. Maybe they were just obeying God’s Word and recognizing that even apostles, yes even those who had seen supernatural visions and walked on water (think of the Apostle Peter), could sin in either their doctrine or behavior or both.
Therefore, the way Chairman Mike frames this issue, in both his email and his public remarks, creates the impression that Pastor Jim is incapable of doing anything seriously wrong. Why? Well, of course, because he has lived a godly life and properly taught biblical doctrine. By now, you should see the logical fallacy in that.
As a result, since Chairman Mike appears to be consistently saying that is impossible for Pastor Jim to ever veer off into sinful conduct or doctrine, we must condemn these words as dangerous to spiritual health of the flock of God at Lake Bible Church. (If Chairman Mike wishes to publicly correct these public words and return his doctrinal position to the biblical standard, we would rejoice at that!)
After all, Pastor Jim himself teaches from God’s Word that every believer, pastors included, are “capable of great sin” (as one of his favorite professors at Dallas, S. Lewis Johnson used to frequently remind his students).
Here is another rebuttal to an unbiblical contention about obedience to authority. The idea is that, because the Board of Elders are biblically and constitutionally in charge of the decisions made about Pastor Jim, etc., as well as the way Juli & I have been treated, anyone outside of LBC should simply “leave it up to the Elders” and stay out of it because they are not members of our church.
First, as we have already proven from Pastor Jim’s lifelong teaching and 2019 position paper, church membership is not a scriptural requirement, though it is a useful tool for maintaining order in the local church. Therefore, anyone teaching this false “wall of protection” from accountability is quite unbiblical.
Secondly, based on the communications from the Board and Pastor Jim’s supporters, we have noticed a startling omission of the biblical teaching about the Body of Christ in its universal sense, that is, all true believers wherever they may be in different churches. Remember what Pastor Jim just taught in 1 Peter 5 above?
We are all our own believer-priest in that regard and we have God’s Word.
Thus, true believers who attend other churches have the biblical right, yes, even the duty, to rebuke the leadership at LBC for disobeying God’s Word.
By the way, did you happen to notice what Pastor Jim said in 2019 above about not just Juli’s lifelong character (portraying her as suffering in godliness up to the present), but also about me (Paul) as well?
Then, owing to this baffling illness, right before our eyes, their lives unraveled. Their mission and vision was torched; life for them quickly became, and has remained, just an exercise in day-to-day survival, as has ours.
How about this?
It was so hard to watch that. ‘Why God? Why do those seem to be blessed who have no heart for You? Give no thought to the things of God?’ ‘Why,’ she would wonder, do they seem to be so blessed and prospered when these kids, so smart, so talented, so devout, just get blasted and pummeled every cotton-pickin’ day?’ On the face of it, God did not seem to be good; you know that from my book, Polishing God’s Monuments. We asked God to fill our cup, and as I put it, it seemed that all He did was eat our lunch.
Notice that he just described us as “devout” and also referenced his book, Polishing God’s Monuments, which contains a glowing biography of both of us.
And what about these words and emotions?
Well, Olsie & I naturally admired their dedication to Christ. Both of us were proud as punch of both of them. And of course, we felt blessed to present them to our God as an offering to His glory [tears up].
Why would Pastor Jim tear up with joy and pride about BOTH of us in 2019, if I (Paul), as he later claimed in 2024, had been responsible for the cognitive decline of his wife, “whose spirit and mind [I had] broken with [my] regular onslaught of mental tortures” beginning a year prior to that, in 2018:
This unfortunate situation, unbeknownst to most of you, developed about 6 years ago. It’s been killing Olsie, who, as you will notice, is not here today, who most of that time has been denied physical access to our daughter, Juli.
Then later in his remarks, he changed the timeframe slightly to include 2017 as well:
All I can say is that 37 years of unbelievable suffering and isolation, I think, have apparently finally broken the mind of this brilliant but now-pitiful shadow of his former self, so that Paul is no longer the amazing person, and I do mean that, amazing, for 30-31 years. Unfortunately, neither is my wife, whose spirit and mind he has broken with his regular onslaught of mental tortures.
So then, according to Pastor Jim in 2024, I was “amazing” for a minimum of 30 years from the start of our suffering in 1987, then I ceased to be “amazing” in either 2017 or 2018, according to Pastor Jim’s 4/7/24 remarks.
Therefore, based on Pastor Jim’s heartfelt, tearful praise for Juli & me in 2019, he was either lying then, or he was lying in 2024 when he tried to pin the blame on his wife’s cognitive decline on someone other than himself (due to his failure to provide ADEQUATE medical care for her). Which one is it? You be the judge.
And while we’re still at it, how is it possible that Chairman Mike, in person, heard Pastor Jim praise our godly character just a few months earlier than this, in February 9, 2019 and not remember it? How could Pastor Jim have uttered these words about us if we were still mistreating Olsie, especially Paul (see his 4//7/24 cruel defamation below)?
4//7/24 All I can say is that 37 years of unbelievable suffering and isolation, I think, have apparently finally broken the mind of this brilliant but now-pitiful shadow of his former self, so that Paul is no longer the amazing person, and I do mean that, amazing, for 30-31 years. Unfortunately, neither is my wife, whose spirit and mind he has broken with his regular onslaught of mental tortures.
@54:15 [The] staff got on me, we were having a little lunch, a couple, three weeks ago. And they asked me something, and they gently rebuked me. One of them even cried a bit. They said, “How are things with your daughter?” A lot of you in this church, you don’t know about it because, I’ve told the staff, they said, “Why don’t’ you talk about it?” I said, “Well, I’m the pastor of this church. There are so many suffering people, and some of them really heavy. And I don’t want to take advantage of my platform to make our pains sufferings elevated above what everybody else is going through.
So Olsie & I were there, and we just kind of clued them up—they’re the staff, so they don’t even know. Now just bear with me a moment:
It is horrible beyond anything you can imagine. And just the other day, I was so mad, and this is just one layer, so mad! going home because I find, I think, we got $90,000 just to dump in front of us. Blame it! And I know why it happened, it makes me mad too, beyond the pain and suffering.
Now the reason I brought that up is that for bearing down on 32 years, Olsie & I are just like you. There are things that come our way and we don’t want it. We don’t want it, and we want to say to the Lord, “Look, I’m tired of this, okay? Lord, I‘m tired of it.”
Now he’s [Paul’s] sick and going downhill. If he’d take off these white stockings he’d wear, it’d be black from here [touching knees] down to his knees.
Lord, stop it! STOP IT! We’ve had enough of this! THEY’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS! THEY’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS! And they’ve been faithful. @57:25
Whoah! He just said that we have been faithful! In 2019! A full year or two into our alleged mistreatment of Olsie!
Did you hear that, Mr. Future Chairman? Were you listening? Why didn’t you remember this on April 7, 2024?
Now you can see the wickedness of the Board of Elders failing to investigate fully, as required from Genesis 18:13-19:1 above, and allowing Pastor Jim to break yet another of man’s (civil) laws (defamation of character) and disgrace the name of Jesus Christ in front of unbelievers all over this country and the world.
Here are the key takeaways from this article:
Due to Pastor Jim’s disobedience, enabled by the LBC Board of Elders and sadly by the congregation at large, his own daughter Juli (and her husband/caregiver Paul) have been left completely destitute, including owing $25,000 to the neurosurgeon and hospital who graciously gave her a last-minute rescue from a catastrophic scenario—to have flown all the way across the country and not be able to complete the crucial diagnostic surgeries required to get her out of bed and able to walk again.
Since the Board and LBC members have failed to provide biblical due process and financial support for us, we have no choice medically but to turn to the general public and beg for money just to purchase the necessary food, medicine and medical care to attempt to stay alive. Also, we have roughly $55-60,000 in debt IN ADDITION to the unpaid hospital bill of $25,000.
Therefore, Juli & I ask anyone willing to read this article to help us in whatever way possible. We anticipate that we will need long-term funding, and we are exploring ways to make that as easy as possible. We are grateful for your time and support.
Thank you,
Paul & Juli
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 1: Disobedience in Family Relationships
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 2: Disobedience in Biblical Due Process
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 3: Disobedience in Financial Support
PUBLIC LETTER, SECTION 4: Final Rebuttals