It’s been over a year since I bade readers and fellow sojourners farewell from the battlefield in Fin.  While I’ve been working on my dissertation, teaching Latin and having a baby, the plodding wheels of the NM Classical steamroller have continued to slowly, inefficiently crush everything in their way: Simon Templar, mostly.

I’ll outline briefly in bullet points what has happened in the past year, and then introduce you to veritaspraebita’s new feature, VeraVox.  For those of you who are new here, before reading this outline, please check out the Introduction, and Table of Contents, along with the latter posts of 2017 to get yourself up to speed.  I will include a few events from earlier in the ‘process’ for additional context:

–Early September, 2016: ST severs ties (‘fires’) initial Oversight Committee for numerous failings, including lack of transparency, obfuscation, overreach of mandate, and antagonistic conduct.

–Mid-Late September, 2016: representative of the OC delivers libellous report about ST to Classis; ST is forced out of the ‘Executive Session’ by an ad hoc voice vote (thus was not allowed to hear what was said about him; only learned the content when he solicited a copy of that report from the Clerk of Classis and received it some weeks later).  ST’s character and integrity was also called into question publicly by the notorious Church Visitor 21 and a member of the OC. (See Open Letter to Classis, Oct. 2016.)

–December, 2016: the CIC recommends that Classis defrock ST (for failure to bow to the whims of the OC).

–December 2016 to January 2017: ST’s counsellor intervenes, persuades the CIC to allow Pastor-Church Resources personnel and himself to oversee ST, recommends continued counselling and a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education at Pine Rest in Grand Rapids, MI.

–Summer, 2017: ST completes quarter of CPE.

–September, 2017: ST’s counsellor and supervisors at Pine Rest recommend ST be declared eligible for a call by Classis Northern Michigan.  For reasons known only to themselves, the CIC rejects this recommendation, and, ah, ermmmm, wants him to stick around and…do some stuff.   Like the ‘busy work’ you do when you have a substitute teacher in your algebra class.

–November, 2017: ST gets a list of recommendations which the CIC brainstormed at their meeting in October after the Classis meeting in September at which they and Classis rejected the recommendations of the professionals who had actually been working with ST over the preceding year (two of the CIC had not had any contact with him in that time, one of them had never even met him).  They rejected the recommendation of the informed, qualified people without having a plan of their own.  Or a justification for their decision.  One of the tasks for ST in this list was to do a critical ’empathetic’ reading on Exhibit B., ignoring its truth value and its real significance in the unfolding of the original events at Aetna.  (NB: Exhibit B. was discussed by ST and the CNM regional pastor in September; he was the one who trotted it out at the October CIC meeting.)

–January-August 2018: ST liaises with Pastor-Church Resources (who have declared their wariness to get involved; more on this in a later post) and Classis Zeeland for guidance and support in pursuing both progress (escape from Limbo) and some sort of resolution with members of CNM.  The air needed to be cleared. especially after the debilitating and works-gumming circulation of and acting upon bad information.  This culminated in a meeting between ST, the CIC of CNM, and two pastors of Classis Zeeland.  I may get persmission to share ST’s complete Time Line of Events at a later date.

Result: the Classis Northern Michigan guys still don’t get it.  And the regional pastor warned ST that, regarding his credentials and his desire to be declared eligible, ‘some’ in ‘Classis’ won’t go for it.  On what basis, since this whole mess is now so old it’s got cobwebs on it and predates the tenure of many, and since the CIC itself is ignorant of even its own failings, much less what happened at Aetna, how can ‘Classis’ be in a position to declare or decide anything?  But we are not surprised.  This is where we stand now.

Note 1: Someone recently asked ST if Church Order was consulted/followed in Aetna council’s initial suspension of him in late October 2015.  He wrote to the current Aetna council about a month ago to find out.  For those of you who’ve ‘been around’ on this blog, you know what kind of rubbish reply he got–‘get lost’, in semi-professional lingo.

Note 2: I recorded this post two weeks ago, on the 18th of September.  There are a few important bits of news that we will hopefully be able to discuss in the next post, which will cover Rules of Disclosure, and the Ethically-Challenged-Executive-Session Meme.

With that in mind, allow me, in this first episode of VeraVox, to offer a bit of commentary on these more recent developments, and issue an invitation to Classis Northern Michigan.  Have a listen (it’s about 36 minutes), and please suggest songs for future bumper music in the comments!  Thank you for your patience, one and all–maintaining baby, house and dissertation forces projects like this onto the back burner.

(Big, big thanks to the IT Schmo, who gave me a crash course on my amateur sound-editing software and prevented this from being aired on the All Humiliation Network!)

REVISION UPDATE (11 October 2018): in the best interests of a third party, I have removed segment 3, in which I discussed a recent event at one of the local farms and how it is symptomatic of the ‘toxic subculture’ of the area.  I will cover this topic in a later instalment of VeraVox.  I have also added our sign-off ‘call sign’: IUSQUE FASQUE.