More Wickedness Comes to Light

In 1992 at New Years, a long and detailed letter from Øyvind Velten was delivered to the mail boxes of many friends in Oslo and other places. Friends in countries outside Norway also received this letter dated January 7, 1992. Øyvind Velten was fairly close to Olaf Bekkevold but wasn’t an especially gifted letter writer. And the handwriting on the envelope was remarkably similar to another person’s hand­writing, and the letters were also date-stamped with that person’s franking machine. It was immediately obvious that Øyvind Velten had not written the letter himself, but that his name was being used to give the letter credibility.

Smith Brothers’ Engineering & Entrepreneurial Company had gone into voluntary liquidation. During this process, my lawyer had used the term “technically bankrupt” regarding our business. Øyvind Velten, or his backers, seized on this to claim that I was personally bankrupt. They wrote the follow­ing heading on their letter: “Unrighteousness, speculations, bankruptcy, lies, backbiting and deceit.”

For the friends, this letter was like water off a duck’s back. However, this attack was a catalyst that hastened a process that had long been in development. At the Wednesday meet­ing on January 15, Sigurd Bratlie not only confronted Øyvind Velten publicly but also confronted Olaf Bekkevold. At that time, a number of people thought that Bratlie had dementia and that his decisions were being influenced by others. He himself poked fun at the fact that some people thought he was becoming senile. At this meeting, however, Sigurd Bratlie stood as a clear, vigorous, sharp-witted and strong leader at the age of 87. He swept Velten down from the music platform and turned directly to Olaf Bekkevold. He asked Bekkevold to repeat once more, before the whole church, his “old prophe­cies” about Kåre and concluded by saying that the whole situ­ation had its roots in envy.

At the Wednesday meeting on February 5, Olaf Bekkevold gave his farewell speech. He said he was not forsaking the church, but that he wanted to hold his own meetings. On the way down from the pulpit, Sigurd Bratlie commented from his chair: “Yes, and things will go even worse with you, brother.”

Bekkevold wanted to be the leader of his own assembly but at the same time remain in the church. This would prove problematic. The church had significant resources without which he wouldn’t be able to manage, and now it was suppos­edly going to become his private fishing pond, from which he could gather people into his own assembly. Sigurd Bratlie de­cided to take a step that is extremely rarely done in the church and officially put Olaf Bekkevold out of the church. A letter stating this was sent to Bekkevold on February 7, 1992.

It was obvious right from the beginning that Olaf Bekkevold couldn’t gather all of these people with their di­verse biblical understandings, interests, agendas and person­alities into a new flock. Many of these people were legalistic. Others were lawless and in agreement with Ole Kristiansen. They wanted to be free from anything that reminded them of legalistic exhortations. Still others used the opportunity to leave so they could carry on with whatever interested them most. To unite all of these together was an impossible task. Olaf Bekkevold was mocked by his own and received a lot of opposition. But it was still a great shock for us in March of 1994 when he was struck down by a serious stroke that left him deprived of his faculties until today.

In a way, I felt partially responsible that these people had left the church. I told Sigurd Bratlie that I was sorry that I had been the reason for so many leaving us, including his own relatives. I remember his response to this so clearly: “You mustn’t think about that at all. Those people wanted some­thing other than what we want. They didn’t want to be dis­ciples, and we should be glad that they left.”

Bratlie’s conclusion was that Olaf Bekkevold had been driven by his envy of me. I too, had noticed this since I moved back to Oslo in 1978, and I also think that envy was the real reason for his fall. My opposers interpreted the events in Oslo from 1988 to 1992 as a deliberate strategy of mine to have Olaf Bekkevold sidelined. I never had any such thoughts and had absolutely no interest in competing with Olaf Bekkevold. On the contrary, the events of that period merely served to expose what Bekkevold’s real problem was.

Sigurd Bratlie corrected the two deviating understandings of the gospel and put them in their place. It also became clear for the entire church that Olaf Bekkevold agreed with both these directions and was unable to acknowledge that they were mutually exclusive. Bekkevold had been a close co­worker of Bratlie, and the impression the rest of us had of these matters was that Bekkevold had stabbed Bratlie in the back. When working with Sigurd Bratlie, I never felt that dis­agreeing with him caused any problem, but he would not tol­erate anyone who sought his own or had another agenda. What Sigurd Bratlie demanded of his co-workers was that they seek what was best for the church and for people. Cer­tainly, Olaf Bekkevold’s involvement in dealing with the mat­ters concerning Leif Olstad and Ole Kristiansen caused him to drift increasingly further away from Bratlie. And it came to a head when Bratlie became convinced that Bekkevold har­bored evil suspicions and grudges against me.

At the same time, Bratlie began to use me to a greater de­gree in his work in the church. For example, he asked me to travel to Holland with David Nielsen. He also asked me to try to find a solution for the situation in Drøbak. My involvement there was not at all colored by any sort of “competition” with Olaf Bekkevold. I wanted whatever was best for the individual and for the church as a whole. On the other hand, my involve­ment was a source of constant irritation for those who wanted that ministry themselves—or at least didn’t want me to have it. Erling Ekholt fell into this category. He expressed both ver­bally and on paper his concerns about Sigurd Bratlie’s using me on various occasions.

My account here of the events from 1988 to 1992 in relation to how Sigurd Bratlie handled the matter is in no way exhaustive nor complete. And this has not been my intention, but I write these things for our instruction—all of us—so we can avoid making the same mistakes again in the future. Sigurd Bratlie was proven correct: what happened became an example for the coming generations.