I wanted to take a break from the normal polemics and note the kindly, warm side of WELS. No, the Church Growth people do not share those attributes, although they talk about love all the time. I mean the traditional WELS pastors and laity who trust in God's Word and treasure the Gospel.
A significant number of people want to return the Wisconsin Synod to its doctrinal foundations or improve on them, since major errors have been made and promoted. Mostly I hear from the laity or from ex-members, but I hear from many types.
For a long time, WELS leaders bet they could take their most faithful members and pastors for granted. They thought they could expel every pastor or layman who disagreed with their false doctrine and have a smooth-running machine of growth. These CG boobies came very close to destroying the synod, which is a human organization after all, a reflection of the True Church, which is invisible and eternal, but just a reflection (very dimly seen at times).
For several years, Paul Tiefel Jr. and his buddy Dave Koenig (both CLC [sic] pastors) played the game of protecting WELS from me. They would carry on about how I was slandering WELS when I simply wrote about the Wisconsin Synod having a pan-denominational worship conference at and ELCA college. Those two drama queens acted as if WELS was coming undone with wrath over my reporting. Meanwhile, Martin Luther College made a point of phoning me to ask for my newest books and to tell me when I could get free books from their library pruning process. MLC people went overboard in their friendliness when I moved to New Ulm, although I heard nasty stuff from the CG people talking through my members.
The efficacious Word bears fruit, no matter how bad the organization might be at times.
The Word, Applied over Time
These dates might be instructive for some:
1530 - Augsburg Confession signed.
1546 - Luther died. Emperor Charles V came back from the Muslim campaigns to finish off the Lutheran rebels. He stood victorious over Luther's grave.
1580 - The Formula of Concord and the Book of Concord were published, finally dealing with the issues uniting the Lutherans, repudiating the errors of the papists, Anabaptists, Zwinglians, and erring Lutherans.
Luther's death precipitated a crisis that took 34 years to address.
Lutherans are only starting to face their problems now. The issues are not economic, not demographic, but doctrinal.
PS - I still get the daily abusive comment (anonymous) from someone in WELS. That side of WELS will never go away.
