Yankee Stadium all-religious religious service.
He was temporarily suspended by Missouri.
Dan Preus refused to deal with it, so Wally Schulz wrote the report suspending Benke.
Schulz was canned and Benke was restored.
A few LCMS pastors started ELDONA as a result.
DP Al Benke:
My understanding of Time of Grace as an urban outreach venture was colored some by standing in that revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt in Milwaukee with Mark Jeske as he pointed out where the church and ministries were located and what they do in terms of school and neighborhood mission. But, having received and read the Time of Grace Magazine this week, it is also plainly a ministry of teaching. And I found the teaching in the magazine to be straightforward-ly Lutheran. I don't know who the concerned folks are in WELS, but the teaching I read on Baptism was all about, well, grace.
My own view would be that from the Missouri perspective Mark Jeske and Time of Grace would be a great vessel to bring about closer cooperation between the two denominations not only in extrenals but in teaching. Mission-oriented, urban, word and deed, and highly visible. Along with promoting the necessity of the 10 year Koinonia process in Missouri, I am going to spend some of my energy promoting the inextricable connections between confessional and missional in Missouri. Mark Jeske - contemporary worship forms and all - is a great example in my opinion of that inextricable connection. Their plan is to have a new Time of Grace station in LA, which again I think is fantastic. Multi-site outreach shepherded in this way is another appropriate and necessary part of the missional/confessional intersection. This site, alpb, is dramatically to almost completely unrepresented when it comes to the missional (no, I don't like the word either) or large church perspective. In that regard, the alpb is pretty much homogeneous and on the Missouri side of the dialog is missing a ton of highly energized practitioners, some of them doing work like that of Mark Jeske.
