By TARA REILLY
Pocono Record Writer
[email protected]
The applicant of a religious facility proposed for Price Township said Thursday he won't build after all.
Teddy Schreyer of Marshalls Creek said he plans to withdraw his application for a Jehovah's Witnesses convention center after residents and members of the religious denomination spoke out against it.
"I respect these feelings very much," Schreyer wrote in a letter to the editor. "I would like everyone to know that I was acting completely on my own, hoping to donate the property situated in Price Township for religious worship. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone that I have upset by my action."
The facility would have attracted 5,000 people every weekend from June to August, Schreyer said. It was to be located off Route 447, just west of Brodhead Creek and Circle H Road on 770 acres split between Price and Paradise townships.
An emergency access road for the center was planned to run through Paradise Township.Residents had concerns that runoff from the center would pollute Brodhead Creek, make for unsafe travel on Route 447 and bring noise pollution.
A spokesman for Jehovah's Witnesses World Headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., said the organization did not approve the convention center proposed for Price Township and that it knew nothing of any plans for one to be built.
Robert Johnson, the spokesman, also said the Jehovah's Witnesses organization wouldn't be interested in acquiring it if the center were donated.
"We're not building anything there," Johnson said. "We are only interested in things where we have a need, and we don't have a need there. Our people in that area are sparse."
Schreyer claimed the facility would be used for bible study and prayer for Jehovah's Witnesses from all over the country.
"He can do what he wants to do, but it's not true for him to say that the Jehovah's Witnesses are involved, because we're not," Johnson said.
There are Jehovah's Witnesses congregations in Marshalls Creek, Tannersville, Mount Pocono, Brodheadsville and Effort, with a combined membership of close to 1,000 in Monroe County.
Stephen Bortlik and David Prosser are elders and overseers of the 96-member East Stroudsburg congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. They said Thursday they knew nothing of Schreyer's plan until reading of it in the newspaper.
Schreyer used to attend the East Stroudsburg and Stroudsburg congregations of the Jehovah's Witnesses, but no longer does, the two said.
"He acted on his own," Bortlik said. "It's totally out of the blue."
Bortlik and Prosser said Schreyer's project as proposed does not really mesh with the Jehovah's Witnesses' meeting and convention structure. The denomination has assembly halls that accommodate 1,500 to 2,000 congregates. Monroe County's congregations attend such a hall twice a year in Grantville.
Larger, regional conventions take place in stadiums or convention centers in large cities. Next month, about 30,000 Jehovah's Witnesses will attend a convention in Veteran's Stadium in Philadelphia.
"What's mentioned here — it's foreign to us," Bortlik said.
"We have no knowledge of this building, or any plans to construct a building in this area," Prosser said. "He speaks for himself."
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I have to say these arrogant assholes never stops surprising me. I guess this little story from May 14, 1999,- is a monument of madness. LOL
Yakki Da
Kent
"The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide."
Daily News On The Watchtower and the Jehovah's Witnesses:
http://watchtower.observer.org