The first is a letter written in 1982 by then President of the United Church of Christ Avery Post warning the denomination about the IRD, imploring them not to wait for this organization to launch its attacks in our local congregations. The second is this Executive Summary.

Sheldon and I are often called `Conspiracy Theorists' - a derisive term when used by our detractors who intend to discredit our research and diminish the impact of our message.

We have come to embrace the term: it is exactly what we are. We are not shy about it anymore. There is a conspiracy to dismantle our churches, to demoralize our denominational leaders, and to diminish the impact of the voice of social conscience, moderation, and liberality that has come to characterize much of Protestant Christianity throughout the history of America.

At any of the public hearings I conduct about this, the simple recitation of tactics outlined in the document I have discovered to be quite sufficient to make the case of conspiracy. I will use the next few weeks to share the content of this document with you.

First, in order to theorize about a conspiracy, there must be partners willing to ally themselves with one another as co-conspirators. Let's take the opportunity today to name and identify them. (In the coming days, we will also need to identify their common goal, in other words that which compels them to ally themselves with one another against a common enemy or target; their tactics, strategies, and tools of implementation; their end game).

There are a number of places in this internal document that name those with whom the IRD will form an alliance. At the top of the second page, we see this:

Grassroots Expansion -- IRD's three denominational committees are Episcopal Action, United Methodist Action and Presbyterian Action. All three empower conservative church members with reporting about their church structure that they will not otherwise hear. IRD is giving special attention to reform of the United Methodist Church, America's third largest religious body, and the largest denomination under Religious Left control. UM Action Briefing currently goes to 275,000 households. Its circulation is expected to be over 500,000 by the start of 2004. Episcopal Action places a key role in the American Anglican Council, an alliance of nearly all the conservative Episcopal renewal groups. Presbyterian Action operates within the Presbyterian renewal movement as a source of proposals to restructure church agencies and re-orient their social message. The circulation for Episcopal Action and Presbyterian Action should grown from 8,000 to 36,000 in the next four years.

They are naming at this point three of their own committees, each of which has a network of allied individuals who are empowered by them "with reporting about their church structure that they will not otherwise hear." Please make note of the kinds of numbers they have and intend to build into their network.

This would be consistent with our own experience. In every church in which we enter, we discover a group of people who call themselves a "Research Committee." Their responsibility is to uncover the untold truth about the denomination, and their reports are derivations on the same theme: the evil liberals have stolen the denomination. The origins of these reports are always left unnamed, and met the almost universal response: "we downloaded them from the internet."

Just two paragraphs further into the document, we read this:

Association for Church Renewal/Next Generation Project -- We are a chief organizer of this coalition of conservative/evangelical renewal groups in all the major mainline churches. The association allows us to synchronize strategies across denominational lines and to counteract the influence of liberal ecumenical groups, such as the National and World Councils of Churches. Key to the longer-range success of the church reform movement is recruiting a younger generation of reformers. The IRD has the experience, expertise, connections and vision to recruit and train young church members for this task.

Pay attention to that opening statement: "We are a chief organizer of this coalition..." Many renewalists make the claim that they have no connection to the IRD, or that the connection does not manifest itself in any tangible way. Here, though, the IRD states clearly that they are a chief organizer of this `coalition' (their language.) Further, as we have long argued and the co-conspirators have long denied, they write that this Association "allows us to synchronize strategies across denominational lines." To find out who these renewalists are that have allied themselves in order to synchronize their strategies across denominational lilnes, check out the IRD website page that lists them, and come back in the following weeks to read more about what this alliance creates for  their trained activists.
NO, there is no conspiracy here! Again, in their own words, the IRD has the "experience, expertise, connections, and vision to recruit and train..."

Recruit and train: next week I want simply to track the use of that latter verb throughout this document - train. It is important we do that, since one of the primary roles of the IRD is to train activists (their language) to be deployed in out local churches.

For now, though, let me restate the case clearly and succinctly: this is a conspiracy. An alliance has been formed between the IRD and renewal groups deployed in all of the major Protestant denominations. Their goal is to diminish, demoralize, and demean them.