Community Apology
January 6, 2018
On January 2nd we received a letter signed by John Love, dated November 17, 2017 from Laurie True.
It is called “an open letter”. In it John Love, the current Moderator of the council at Ashland UCC, asserts many dishonest things (which I address in my response to John, below). But, first I want to extend an apology to the community for toxic messages promoted by Ashland United Church of Christ.
Ashland UCC should be sorry for perpetuating lies designed to breed baseless fear in the community.
In John Love’s open letter he writes:
“They have accused staff and congregants of “corruption,” of being a “fascist church,” “unethical,” “publicly dishonest,” “abusive,” an “exercise in hypocrisy,” and so on. One has verbally attacked and physically intimidated members of our congregation in a variety of public settings—a coffee shop, the Growers’ Market, and on public sidewalks.”
The first sentence is the most honest of the letter. The second sentence however is potent with deceit. It is designed to create fear. This goes to the very heart of the injustice and destruction of community that is the foundation of Rev. Kukuk’s ministry and the deceitful spirit that is spreading into the larger community from Ashland UCC.
Let me assure everyone reading this that I am intentionally and thoroughly committed to non-violence. I do not and have not resorted to physical violence or intimidation.
I believe that John used the term “physically intimidated” to breed hysteria. I don’t think that at 5’4’’ my silver haired, asking of questions, was actually physically intimidating. I do believe that people felt put on the spot, when I called them on their behaviors. The idea that Daniel and I are violent is a cover that church leadership likes to promote to hide the ethical misconduct of their minister and her policies. I realize now that they have promoted an idea that it is criminal for me to talk to anyone I used to go to church with. Just because church people want to believe it, speaking to someone and harassment are not the same thing.
Let me cut through the b.s. and be perfectly clear: I take personal responsibility for my actions and behaviors and it is not in my nature to escalate conflict. I am consciously in touch with my genuine aggression and I find productive ways to channel it (this site for example).
Non violence is an ethic that both Daniel and I live by. Our exhaustive efforts at civil discourse with church leadership are documented on this site and were always rejected. No one has to fear physical violence from us, or any kind of “unwarranted attack”. That is a story made up by church clergy and council to justify their shunning, amputation and banning their scapegoats. The story concocted by Rev. Kukuk and furthered now by so many, has no basis in reality. It simply benefits their minister for the community to be afraid of us. Let that sink in. John Love seems to operate from the position that whatever Rev. Kukuk wants, she should get.
I am aware that using language like “attack” and “physical intimidation” breed fear and contempt in the community and that no church should be involved in introducing such groundless, destructive thoughts into the collective consciousness. But Ashland UCC, has entirely lost its way. Warning community to this sad reality is the point of this entire site.
Rest assured community: There is nothing to fear from the amputated scapegoats, unless you fear illumination. We are so very sorry that you have been led to believe otherwise. That was wrong.
Committed to Jesus’ Third Way:
L Citizen & Daniel Sperry
January 7, 2018
John,
Wednesday night I received a link to your letter dated November 17, 2017. It has taken me several days to process the new level to which you have stooped, in the name of church. It is disconcerting that you were able to get 50 people from the church, to sign on to your inane letter. Apparently, you thought using the names and reputations of as many people as possible to back up your accumulated dishonesty was the best way to show your strength and righteousness.
I’m glad I finally got a chance to see it. Because your letter makes many false claims and many of the statements are based on false assumptions. Let’s really look at what you offered in November and manipulated decent folks into signing.
You claim:
“Central to our faith is our belief that Christ calls us to participate in God’s reign of justice, peace, and compassion on earth.”
Now John, based on the behavior of you, your council friends and especially your clergy, you are not at all interested in justice, peace or compassion. You bully. You slander. You lie. You cannot and will not have a conversation with the folks you claim you are being victimized by.
Never the less, you claim:
“We seek to live out an inclusive vision in which all may safely and respectfully participate in every aspect of the church’s life.”
I believe that the church used to seek an “inclusive vision”, but that was before Christina. You cannot claim that Rev. Kukuk is a woman who holds an inclusive vision. She amputated us based on lies. She turned the whole community upside down with her strategies of enemy making. It is her ethical misconduct that cannot be discussed. There is nothing safe or respectful about Rev. Kukuk’s behavior. There is nothing respectful about your behavior, John. Lying is not respectful. Using your “church friends” to back up your lies, is neither safe, nor respectful. And banning people from church property to cover for the ethical misconduct of your deceitful minister is institutionalized pathology.
You further claim:
“One has verbally attacked and physically intimidated members of our congregation in a variety of public settings—a coffee shop, the Growers’ Market, and on public sidewalks.”
Here you are speaking of my attempts at street accountability. I know accountability is a dirty word at Ashland UCC these days, but it remains true that accountability for people in positions of power is fundamental to justice - and there is no justice at your church.
I believe that you used the term “physically intimidated” simply to mislead and breed fear. I don’t believe that at 5’4’’ my silver haired, asking of questions, was truly physically intimidating. I do believe that people felt put on the spot, when I called them on their behaviors. I believe they want to go along with your claim that my talking to anyone from the church constitutes harassment, but that is really just privileged, white fragility, not actual harassment.
Let’s get specific, at the Growers’ Market I asked Joanna Niemann, “How did it feel lying about me to the whole church?”
Joanna immediately claimed I was harassing her, but the truth is, I sincerely wanted to know why she was willing to be so destructive and dishonest. This is called natural consequences.
Within seconds she said, “I’m calling the police.”
I said, “Please do! I want to talk to them about your fascist church.”
She looked concerned, reconsidered and put her phone down…
I asked her other questions among them:
“How do you feel being a fraud in the community?
Do you feel badly for taking money from me to teach things you don’t have integrity with?
How do you justify calling yourself an expert in Restorative Circles and holding no integrity with the principles of Restorative Circles?”
These questions could not be more warranted. Joanna refused to answer anything and looked at her phone for rescue. If you lie about people in public settings and you see those people around town, it is a natural consequence that the people you have been lying about, might feel they have a bone to pick with you.
When you claim to be an expert of Restorative Circles and you promote none of the actual principles of Restorative Circles, and the result of your lies destroys someone else life in community. It should be expected that your amputated former student would want to ask you about your deception when she encounters you in public.
Joanna has aided Rev. Kukuk in suppressing a conflict, thereby feeding the initial power imbalances and helping to expand the conflict to multiple conflicts. Joanna used her persona of “expert” of social justice to endorse Rev. Kukuk’s false claim that Daniel and I are not capable of civil discourse and therefore not worthy of a Restorative Circle. This is entirely untrue. Joanna, apparently, made her assessment of our abilities based on Christina’s agenda and her desire to ingratiate herself to the new minister, because she didn’t talk to us. Joanna’s input helped justify Rev. Kukuk’s slanderous conviction of us. Now Joanna is on the church council and John has characterized our encounter as “an unwarranted attack”.
I see Joanna’s behavior as the very antithesis of non violent or socially just. I have found Joanna’s behavior egregiously destructive to me personally and to justice, the church and community in general. Therefore, I asked questions of her at the Growers’ Market.
Apparently, Joanna, you and 50 others, believe that asking Joanna about her deceptions constitutes an “attack”. I believe Joanna felt attacked simply because she knows what a heinous thing she has done to me. She knows how infuriated I have every right to be, over the life shattering lies she told. She knows the magnitude of the injustice she has enabled. So when I show up in front of her at the Market, she’s scared, that’s natural consequences.
I submit that Joanna felt attacked because she is guilty of slanderous behavior against me and Daniel and she didn’t like hearing about it. She felt embarrassed, she is committed to hiding these ugly realities about herself. At her church everyone is hiding ugly realities. It seems as though, Joanna feels that she should be universally protected from her lies, like she is protected at her church.
But John, Joanna should be embarrassed, so should you.
You continue:
“While we continue to wish them peace, we will no longer remain silent.”
This statement is laughable. You, your clergy and your council friends do not and never have wished us peace. You have slandered us continuously as you shunned us. Then without ever talking to us, you amputated us from the Body of Christ, all the while relentlessly assassinating our characters. In your letter you stoop lower than I have seen before, in attempting to breed baseless fears further into the community.
Do you know the definition of “peace” John? Peace is not what your church is doing.
You claim you “will no longer remain silent.”
Really, how so? You write a fraudulent letter and get 50 of your “faith community friends” to sign onto it and then you present it as your holy defense. To whom?
Who are you accusing? Where did you send the letter?
You are silent about all the facts. And you don’t mention the intention behind your “open letter”, which is to distract from the enormous cluster of ugly policies and corruption that you and leadership have been up to for nearly two years. You don’t want to have a reputation for what your church actually does. You feel it is better for “minding the gap” (bringing in money) for people to continue to believe you foster an inclusive community. Your letter was written in an effort to protect your propaganda and of course your reverend.
Then this:
“Each time a member of our community yields to expressions of hatred, our community is weakened.”
I agree with this statement and I do see that Rev. Kukuk’s ministry has spread an ugly weakness throughout the community. Y’all are extremely motivated to mischaracterize everything about yourselves, your church, me and Daniel. When you can’t be honest, when you can’t communicate directly, when you use language to manipulate and mislead, you are weak. How do you not see that the aggressively, deceptive style of church that Rev. Kukuk is teaching you, has weakened “our community?” This is a serious question John, I wish you would at least consider answering it.
Then you claim:
“We must stand up to it wherever it shows itself – and especially when it happens in our own community.”
So your answer to our publishing your corruption, which you characterize as “attacks”, is to “stand up to it wherever it shows itself.”
How is your letter standing up?
You don’t name us, you don’t name your ministers, you didn’t send your letter to us and you forever and always refuse to answer the questions we ask. You have stood for nothing other than Rev. Kukuk, thereby betraying us all.
You wrap up with:
“We will not allow this behavior to interfere with the sanctity of our church or the work of our faith community.”
It has been painfully obvious for quite some time (and your letter further proves the point) that you have completely jettisoned anything remotely resembling sanctity in your faith community. When you unite against your neighbors, you are not following Christ. Christ’s message was, “love thy neighbor”. Can you remember that?
It is because I believe in the teachings of Christ that your behavior on behalf of “the church” is so utterly offensive. You actively mislead people to fear us as a way of protecting your minister from any accountability for her deceitful and toxic leadership.
You and your church have gotten it completely backwards and your letter proves that you are attempting to drag as many people as possible backwards with you.
The truth is John, your minister is a very sick woman. Rev. Kukuk is a pathological liar and she has infected everything and everyone with lies. You can deny and pretend and create messages all you want, there is still an infection in the Body of Christ. You cannot clean up the church with Christina as your leader. She needs to be relieved of her duties and be quarantined for a while. She is seriously ill and she has made spreading what ails her a ministry. With your letter you have had 50 of your friends sign on to an infection. You have broadcast this infection to try to make people afraid, in order to protect your leader. Please consider these facts. She is sick John. You can no longer hide or deny that fact. It’s time to change course.
Illumination!
~ L Citizen
For Our Community...
A Message About Ashland UCC, The Ashland Community, and Two Concerned Citizens
Greetings to everyone who has arrived here on this site!
If you live in Ashland, you may know me as the guy who plays cello in Lithia Park, during the warm months. I have been a full-time musician and composer for about the last ten years of my life. I made the decision to pursue music as a living about two years after I first arrived in Ashland, in 2006. So I come to you as a member of the community for some time. L and I would not be putting this website up if we did not have a problem - for the community - that needs attention.
There are many, many things about the situation that we are bringing to you that are not known.
Further along, below, I am going to try to do my best to formulate what may be the arguments that have been made against us by the leaders of the Ashland UCC church, so that you can have at least some perspective about why this is even happening.
At the root of the whole troubling mess is the fact that people who are responsible for what has happened are either completely unwilling to communicate about it, or they are making up large smokescreen-type stories that only add to the confusion, making it impossible for you to take action.
What We Do Know…
The place to start is with what we do know; what is not even controversial. What we do know is that in October of 2016, the Council of the church decided to ban us from their property.
The consequence of that is that every community event that goes on there - and this includes weddings, funerals, community sing-alongs, informative meetings about sustainability, twelve step meetings, concerts by local artists, fundraisers - all of these are off limits for us.
What this also means is that every time any such event appears on our calendar, if we want to go, we have two choices: avoid this topic, or attempt to explain to the organizer of the event why it is unfortunate that they have chosen this place to have their event, because some people will not be able to attend - and maybe they would like everyone to be welcome!
Then the next question that comes up is one about our credibility. I can tell you in a few sentences this and that about why we are banned, but what on earth really could we have done to deserve such punishment? Can you even believe anything I am saying? After all, I am the one who has been banned. Doesn’t that make me instantly less credible?
And who is doing the banning? The respected, kind and altogether exemplary people of the Ashland UCC Church, who’s claim to fame is their social justice commitment and their history of inclusivity. Who are you going to believe?
Why Should You Care?
There are reasons not to care about us. I will give them to you. We are just two people in the community! Of course, you may have sympathy, and you may have a decent enough feeling about us. We haven’t wronged you personally, so maybe you feel the best course is to just stay out of the conflict and move ahead with your meeting plans, because after all, this doesn’t have anything to do with you, or your cause, and you can’t be responsible for the mistakes or difficulties of others, at least, not now, not while you are busy with other things.
This is fair enough, and I understand this. But here is a bigger thing to care about than just about us, L and I, two people in the community. Something to care about is whether you are participating in a dishonest system that lives inside this town.
What I am going to suggest is that you consider this possibility: people in your community, the people who are connected to the church, who you may be considering renting a room for your event from, or interacting about other things with, are being dishonest. But not, let’s say, just being dishonest personally. Rather, they are taking part in a group deception that actually fosters more confusion and more lies. I want you to become curious about whether this is healthy for you, and your community.
I am making an assumption that, given the facts, something about this whole situation is going to strike you as being very, very wrong and creepy, and you may decide that you don’t want to be a part of that.
That is my claim. I know I haven’t made a case for that yet, but that is the reason why reading this material matters, because it has to do with the effect of habitual lying in social situations that involve you. It has to do with how society breaks down when people are in the habit of making things up that aren’t true and expecting you to go along with them.
Does Honesty Matter To You?
If you thought of honesty or what we call “truth”, as living on a continuum, from perpetually deceptive and dishonest to being as close as you possibly can be to making your words match up with your actions, where would you place yourself on that continuum? More toward the honest side or more toward the dishonest side?
There are many people who do not want to get involved in a discussion about why truth matters. You may know that you are being dishonest as a matter of course, and you may have certain kinds of personal justifications for that. In the great documentary, Dishonesty: The Truth About Lies, social scientist Dan Ariely makes the case that 80% of people lie on a fairly regular basis and, for the most part, benefit from that.
That concerns me, and it should concern you. If it does, there is much to learn from these pages, about what happened. If it doesn’t, none of what is written here is going to be of much interest, unless you are one of the people who has actually been involved in the deceptive, confusing, disingenuous behavior, and you see this writing as an attempt to undermine a public scenario that you have been trying to hold up as real, to justify really poor judgement on your part. In that sense, what I write may come as a threat, to a false worldview that you have been holding up.
The folks I am really trying to address, though, are the ones who care about the quality of communication in our community. Both “communication” and “community” have as their root Old English and Old French derivatives that point to “the commons” or “to make common”.
I am addressing that instinct in you that understands that we need to be able to communicate to share a common space and to get through life together in that common space.
In a community, where we all share space, social interactions of different kinds, transact business, organize around community causes, being honest is a fundamental good. Talking with each other honestly is how we learn new things, how we work out solutions to challenges that are coming up, how we manage to construct lives that support each other, through the inevitable trials of being human.
The truth matters. Talking about it matters. The truth is not necessarily owned by any one person, but discovered by each of us trying to arrive at it with conscientious reflection, and testing our ideas out with others in the common arena.
If I am wrong about anything I write here, I expect to be challenged on it. But make your argument! Tell me why. Tell me why dishonesty should be dismissed. And don’t tell me, “Everybody lies”, because that is not much of an argument. It is not a solution. It is an excuse.
And tragedy is often a death by a thousand cuts.
As many beautiful things as our little town has going for it, if we don’t care about whether we are treating each other honestly, we can expect various kinds of failure to become routine. We can expect more of the uneasy, vaguely disheartening acceptance of cruelty that runs rampant in our country now. We here in Ashland think we are better than that. But are we?
What is the Church claiming?
All right. Here we are. I am saying that this web site came about because the Ashland UCC Church decided to ban us from their property, for reasons their leaders are not willing to state in clear terms, and that the two Pastors, Rev. Christina Kukuk, Paula Sohl and the whole Council of the church, as well as the staff, and all the congregants are involved in a giant deception that involves you every time you consider having a meeting at the church.
So what is the church claiming?
In their certified letter informing us about this, they are claiming that there are “irreconcilable differences after significant and lengthy attempts at mediation and continued inappropriate behavior on your part”.
Let’s break this down. Just one step at a time. I am going to go ahead and agree that we have irreconcilable differences. How can you rcncile your differences when someone won't speak to you, honestly and directly? If the church is asserting something, clearly and definitively, which is the reson for our banning, we have no idea what it is.
But accepting that on it’s face, why is the conclusion, then, that we should be banned from all community events on their property? What sort of irreconcilable differences would lead to the conclusion that we should be publicly banned? Shouldn’t publicly banning someone require a stronger explanation of what the irreconcilable differences are about?
You can go ahead and cook up stories in your own mind about what those irreconcilable differences are, that would require protecting everyone who ever goes to a meeting on their property from us. Let your imagination go wild. Because you probably will not get any clear explanation from the church about what justifies that action.
“ After significant and lengthy attempts at mediation”. This makes it sound like the church leaders spent months trying to negotiate a resolution to an extremely complicated problem with unbelievably uncooperative and stubborn people. At least it does to me. They were trying. They did all they could. That is what they want you to believe.
Here is the truth: They wanted us to be quiet. They wanted us to stop bringing up the thing that Brad Roupp did, and then the thing that Paula Sohl did, and then the thing that Rev. Christina Kukuk did, and then the thing that the whole Council did.
The truth is that they did not want to talk to us, at all, about the wrongdoing that was happening at the church. The precipitating incident appeared small, but as soon as it became clear that people in power were going to be challenged, to account for why they were doing what they were doing, they wanted us to go away and be quiet.
That is one answer to the “significant and lengthy attempts at mediation”. None of the leaders of the church wanted to deal with the questions we were bringing up. You can read the details on the Commentary page. You can look at the Timeline of events. You can view all the documents, all the correspondence. But there is one thread that goes through it all. L and I were dealing with people who purported to be doing things “In the way of Jesus”, or “In Christ’s love”, who were doing their dead level best to not just avoid talking about what happened at the beginning, but to confuse everyone surrounding the situation in ways that would make it impossible for anyone to make any sense of it.
There are many paragraphs on this site devoted to the “mediation” that went on. We can sum all this up by saying that all of the talk about mediation is a farce and a coverup. The actual facts are that in 9 months time, L and I spent a grand total of less than three hours talking to the head of the church, Rev. Christina Kukuk. In no way can this be considered “significant and lengthy attempts at mediation”.
Let's not even inquire why she told the whole congregation that she was spending "25% of her time" over five months, "working on conflict resolution" - which would add up to 200 hours. That is an insane claim, and I don't even know what to chalk it up to. You have to have something big to hide to make a representation like that.
What else do we know about “the mediation”? We know that it was not really mediation between parties who were in conflict, but a pretense of hiring mediators who were in the employ of the church, to come to conclusions about the “irreconcilable” nature of the conflict. To make it 100% clear: There was very little actual mediation that ever took place. One mediator was hired, who seemed to immediately agree that we had been scapegoated - which we were! - and then after she met with Rev. Christina, she suggested that L leave the church. That does not qualify as "mediation".
Later, when the church hired two other mediators under duress because we were threatening to bring the whole situation to the congregation, the mediators mysteriously dithered around for weeks trying to figure out what to do, and then when Rev. Christina publicly abandoned the mediation process, they just as mysteriously declared that no solution was possible. L and I never sat in a room with mediators and leaders of the church, with whom we were in conflict, to “mediate”. Not once. Any suggestion otherwise is a complete fabrication.
Given what we know, I’d ask again: how do you go from this vague thing you are describing, which does not seem to have a shred of truth to it to begin with, "significant and lengthy attempts at mediation” - which is not, in fact, a thing that happened, at all - to “you are henceforth prohibited from entering UCC property”?
What is it that the Ashland UCC church is trying to protect?
Let’s see if we can dig further into what we know about the church’s claim about us. The next part is “continued inappropriate behavior on your part”. All right. Anyone care to explain this? The church is claiming that we behaved inappropriately and that the penalty for this is, a lifetime ban on entering their property.
Anyone want to hazard a guess on what this could be? Because, we don’t know.
That is right. We really don’t know.
Now, wait a minute. I am not saying, we didn’t do anything. We know what we did. We know why they are mad at us. We know why they wished we would go away and never come back.
But we really don’t know, if they were to be honest about what they are claiming about us, what they would actually charge us with, that required them to ban us from the property.
Now I will attempt to make their case for them. I will tell you what we did.
We were accusing the Minister, Rev. Kukuk, of unethical behavior, of lying about us, of not living up to a code of conduct befitting a UCC minister. This is true. We stand accused and plead guilty.
We were attempting to engage other leaders of the church in conversations about their complicity in her unethical behavior.
We were claiming that one of the elders in the church, Brad Roupp, was guilty of irresponsible, bullying behavior towards a volunteer, and should be held to account for that.
All this is true, and we will admit to it.
So...assuming that there is no disagreement about any of this, that in terms of differences, we and the whole church leadership, including both Ministers and the whole church council are completely in agreement: we were doing these things….
Then the question becomes…
And….???
If all this is true, and even if you will agree right along with us, and everyone at church will agree, too: we don’t like this church. We don’t like what they are doing, we think they are supporting a corrupt minister.
Why are we then banned from participation in any community event that is held on the church’s property?
I am giving you the worst case scenario, folks. We will admit to the things we have done that have actually made Rev. Christina Kukuk cry publicly in front of all kinds of people about how wretchedly she has been treated, and that have caused her over and over again to explain to bystanders about how long suffering she has been at the hands of the horrible Daniel and L. We can say, “yes, no doubt, we were trying to say what we thought about the situation that violated everything we believe to be true about what a church is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to serve people and we believe and we told others that she is unfit.”
We say, “Yes”.
And….???
What the church is saying is that we are so dangerous, we need to be banned from the property.
OK. Now we are getting somewhere. Could it be that what the church is really claiming is that the idea that the church is corrupt, that it is only serving a powerful few people who run it, that the leaders of the church care much more about keeping their cold, clutching hands on the reins of their power - the idea of that - is so dangerous, that L and Daniel must be kept away from the property, because…they will talk to other people! And other people might believe them! And that would be very bad!
This is a good argument!
If this is the argument that the church is making, I agree with their argument. Because the truth can be very dangerous. If none of what we were saying were true, none of them would have anything to be afraid of.
“L and Daniel don’t agree with our theology…let’s kick them out of the church, but it is just a difference of opinion about the true nature of heaven, let’s say, so we have nothing to fear, right?”
If that was the argument, then right now, L and Daniel and the whole church leadership would all be fine and we would all be happy campers and go our separate ways and do the things we do. And you would not be reading this.
But that isn’t the argument, folks. The argument that the church is making with their action is that we are so dangerous that we should not be allowed to mix and mingle publicly with anyone on their property, whether it is at a wedding, or a funeral or a benefit for the homeless.
And with their words they are saying nebulous things that are not true - about “significant attempts” and “mediation” - all of which cast us as wildly “inappropriate” and casts them as deeply victimized by us.
I think their argument, their claim, that we are too dangerous to walk on their property is true, because we are carrying an idea that they see as an existential threat: they are abusive, corrupt, lying people who don’t actually care about their parishioners and they will stop at almost nothing - even changing the locks on their doors - to prevent the influence of people who disagree with them from entering their property.
All right. I agree with that. If that is their argument, I agree.
Now, here is the thing. I don’t actually know what their argument is. They won’t talk to me. They won’t talk to me through an intermediary. They won’t talk to me under any circumstances. They won’t talk to me in a house. They won’t talk to me with a mouse. There is something they are very afraid of. But this is the explanation that makes the most sense; the explanation that best fits the facts.
What should you do about it?
This depends on many things that have more to do with you in particular and less to do with what I want. If you want to schedule a meeting, just know that with your rental fee, you are supporting them.
People like this do not like to be found out, and in truth, this idea, that there is something deeply wrong with the people who are running that church, may really feel like an existential threat, because it is true!
I will say what I think a good stance towards this would be. See if you can satisfy yourself as to the truth of this situation. See if you can determine if anything at all about it sounds fishy. If it is possible, at all, that someone connected to the situation might not be telling the whole truth, take note.
We have hereby confessed to all our own sins. If you find others that we have been accused of, bring them up with us. We’d like to set the record straight.
And once you have done your due diligence, as a citizen of our community, when a significant community institution is asking you to believe a set of things that are highly suspect, act accordingly.
Keep your wits about you. There are people out there who do not have your best interests at heart and they will take advantage of you. And some of them might be at the UCC Church in Ashland, Oregon.
All the best!
Daniel Sperry
December, 2017