Rapture-Ready Evangelicals Impersonate Army Officers
By Chris Rodda Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 08:42:09 PM EST
A few days ago, a tip was sent to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) research department to check out an organization called Marshall Minutes Military Ministries. MRFF has investigated a seemingly endless stream of evangelical ministries and para-church organizations operating within the military, from small Mom and Pop church groups to large scale, military-wide operations like Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry, who are well on their way to accomplishing their goal of turning our military into a force of "government-paid missionaries for Christ." Marshall Minutes, however, had escaped our attention -- until now.
Marshall Minutes is run by Michael G. Marshall of the Armed Forces Baptist Missions (AFBM), an organization on "A Worldwide Quest for the Souls of Men and Women in Uniform and their families." AFBM's primary means of evangelizing the military is "church planting," establishing churches near military bases and then opening "Military Service Centers" to help these churches "reach young, single military men and women with the Gospel of Christ." Marshall Minutes' particular "field white for the harvest" is the Milwaukee Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), where new recruits are tested and processed before being sent to basic training, and the ministry plans to "plant" a church near the Great Lakes Naval Base in late 2008 or early 2009.
Nothing seemed all that unusual about Marshall Minutes, and I was about to just add this one to our files as yet another example of the many similar military ministries that exist on or near just about every military installation, when a link on their website caught my eye -- a link to military recommendations. This link led to two letters of endorsement from military officers, recommending Michael Marshall to other commanders -- one from Lt. Col. Ronald L. Jackson, Jr. on Department of the Air Force letterhead, and one from Maj. Alan C. Shaw on Department of Defense letterhead. The letter from Maj. Shaw, written as commander of the Milwaukee MEPS in July 2007, listed among Marshall's qualifications that he held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Service Command (USSC). I naturally assumed that the USSC was a U.S. military entity, but had never heard of it before, so I looked it up.
What I found is that the USSC was a private "disaster relief" organization with no official military affiliation. USSC no longer seems to be an active organization, but appears to have recently been replaced by something called the United States Operational Support Command (USOSC), another private organization with a deceptively official sounding name, founded by Michael Marshall and full of former USSC members. But it's not the misleading names of these organizations that makes them significant enough for me to be writing this piece about them. Unofficial organizations with official sounding names are a dime a dozen. Many have logos that incorporate images such as the Great Seal of the United States, and some use ".us" rather than ".com" or ".org" URLs for their websites to further the impression that they are government entities. What's different about the USOSC, and formerly the USSC, is that their members wear military uniforms and rank. This is not only deceptive. IT'S ILLEGAL!
Title 10 of the U.S. Code strictly prohibits any person who isn't a member of the armed forces from wearing "the uniform, or a distinctive part of the uniform, of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps" or "a uniform any part of which is similar to a distinctive part of the uniform of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps." There are some exceptions to this law, but none of them would apply to the USSC or USOSC. Even the members of these organizations who are former or retired military, and permitted under certain circumstances to wear the uniform of their former service, are breaking the law. Those who qualify under these exceptions can only wear the uniform of the branch they served in, and cannot, of course, wear the insignia of a higher rank than they held in the military. The USSC and USOSC use the same rank structure as the U.S. Army, but have their own commissioning and promotion qualifications under which most enlisted members seem to hold the rank of sergeant major, and colonels and generals abound. When in their Class "A" and Class "B" uniforms, those USOSC members who did serve in the military wear all the genuine military ribbons and medals they earned during their service; they get more ribbons from the USOSC; and former USSC members add their USSC ribbons. The result is a chest full of ribbons like you'd see on a real general.
more...
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/6/13/20429/1751
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