{"id":1444,"date":"2001-12-09T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-12-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/12\/09\/2001-12-09-lutheran-priest-faces-expulsion-for-praying-with-other-faiths\/"},"modified":"2001-12-09T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-12-09T12:00:00","slug":"2001-12-09-lutheran-priest-faces-expulsion-for-praying-with-other-faiths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/12\/09\/2001-12-09-lutheran-priest-faces-expulsion-for-praying-with-other-faiths\/","title":{"rendered":"Lutheran Priest Faces Expulsion for Praying with Other Faiths"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A45061-2001Dec2.html\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, December 8, 2001: To the Rev. David Benke, the ceremony at Yankee Stadium a month ago was a blessing, an opportunity to join other religious and civic leaders in offering comfort to a nation raw from the 9\/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. He joined the celebrities and politicians on stage to sing patriotic songs and to pray. But some fellow clergymen took quite a different view: They saw his participation in an interfaith event as heresy. Last week, six pastors from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the nation&#8217;s second-largest Lutheran denomination, filed formal charges calling for Benke&#8217;s expulsion from the church. Benke &#8220;participated in idolatry by participating with non-Christians,&#8221; one of the dissident pastors, the Rev. David Oberdieck said, objecting to Benke&#8217;s &#8220;syncretism,&#8221; or promoting the view that all religions are equal. Benke insists that the Yankee Stadium ceremony was not a formal worship service, and thus was not off-limits to Missouri Synod members. A Hindu priest was part of the service, along with Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Christians.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, December 8, 2001: To the Rev. David Benke, the ceremony at Yankee Stadium a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}