Brett Meyer has left a new comment on your post "WELS Member Comments":
"There are conservative (true to the Word) pastors that could take the call."
Pastors who are true to God's Word and the Lutheran Confessions do not exist in the WELS.
They all confess a new gospel, a new declaration of righteousness and have destroyed the central doctrine of Scripture in thier current confession. Opposing Christ and the Confessions they profess that the whole unbelieving world is righteous, forgiven of all sin and, by divine verdict, been declared by God to be guilt free all before faith worked by the Holy Spirit. Christ declares that no one is forgiven prior to faith in Him. Christ declares that the Holy Spirit's faith grasps hold of the fact that Christ paid for all sins and that by believing that your sins are then forgiven, you are justified through Christ and righteous in God's sight just as Christ is. WELS teaches that faith grasps hold of the fact that the whole unbelieving world was already declared forgiven when Christ paid for the worlds sin. That faith doesn't make of an unjust man a just man as Scripture and the Confessions declare but is just a open and empty hand accepting that you've already been declared forgiven. You are no different after faith than you were before faith.
The WELS and all Lutheran Synods confess this false gospel of Universal Objective Justification. Anyone who does is condemned by God and stand outside the body of Christ as Paul clearly states in the first chapter of Galations. There are those in the Lutheran churches who out of ignorance or hypocrisy do not confess the false gospel of Universal Objective Justification but believe they are forgiven and justified by faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone and not before faith. These are part of the invisible Church and are part of the body of Christ.
In Christ,
Brett Meyer
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GJ - Actually, I disagree that there are no faithful pastors in WELS. I know there are pastors in WELS who realize how ridiculous UOJ is. In fact, there has been a shift toward emphasizing justification by faith (which is rumored to be in the Bible, throughout, unlike UOJ - which came from Halle U. and the Pietists).
The Synodical Conference leaders made a Pietistic mistake when they canonized rules of fellowship and practiced Mennonite shunning. They mistook outward actions for an inward love of the truth. Pretty soon they were doing wacky things, like excommunicating someone for having his son in an English speaking catechism class.
Luther's solution was to trust the Word and let God work through the Word. So he did not leave the Catholic Church. They excommunicated him - and he is still excommunicated.
I am deeply troubled by the many Boomer pastors and members who let their congregations and synod rot away. Issues in WELS did not have the courage to stay together when DP Free died, and very few showed their faces before that, when Gurgle showed up to glare at them.
I have friends and contacts in all the synods, except ELCA. I knew some pastors who realized the error of ELCA, but too late. Now they are like the people who thought Obama was the Messiah.
At any given time a Lutheran body is facing doctrinal error. However, they have not done a good job of dealing with those errors in the last 50 plus years. WELS may be different, but that remains to be seen.
