From California:
The tragedy is twofold for not only do the resisters of approving NNIV need to oppose the NNIV, but also to understand and OPPOSE the system with which the synod uses to defeat them by:
1. wearing the NNIV opponents down with never ending facilitated meetings and discussions,
2. Isolating dedicated opposition when it becomes obvious they won't be "brought around"
3. Including softer opposition as a minority position but including it in a final predetermined "consensus" document.
Everyone thinks he has had a "say" in the final consensus, but has had no influence on the final outcome. The process is right out of the plethora of the "how to" manuals for change agents.
So fighting the NNIV with everything they have, will be within the constricts of all of the above. Having gone through the process, and having been either neutralized or isolated, then what? Reluctantly live with the NNIV or leave WELS.
Or going "completely passive" avoiding the dialectical system, and "letting WELS finish its self -destruction", then what? If or when the NNIV is consensually approved WELS has already been self destructing by passively accepting the "old NIV" and using it for more than a quarter of a century with an entire generation knowing nothing else. The tragedy is that the "old NIV" would probably be defended with everything the opponents of NNIV have if the issue were one of NIV or NNIV.
Either way, this controversy could be a godsend to give some courage and spine to reject all of the progeny the revisions and revisions of revisions since the committee commissioned in 1880's to update the English of KJV without replacing any of the manuscript evidence it translated was hijacked by the change agents of the day with different manuscript evidence. EVERY revised and contrived translation since then has used the different family of manuscript evidence to one degree or another since....even NKJV.
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Part II from Califonia
I can't say that any advice I can contribute is based entirely on "experience with WELS". It also includes many years of researching the subject of the "Process" which I discovered during battles with the government schools systems in late 1960's at the beginning of the planned deliberate dumbing down or "unfreezing of the system" in the secular arena. It was that experience and acquired knowledge of how the process works, which allowed me to recognize it when WELS adopted it (PPBS) at convention of 1967. I could see the process being used to dispatch the KJV to the wastebin of history, resulting in the eventual unofffical-official acceptance of NIV.
The process itself was one of the objections which fell on ears which could not accommodate the idea that men of WELS could possibly be party to such a system as I described. To suggest such a thing was to disrespect the pastors and leaders. The process was but one of several subjects about which I could not go along to get along...which at the time were, The Bible translation issue, the government grants to WELS schools, Humanist methodology being assimilated at MLC, and PPBS (the process of decision making, more than simply a different financial accounting system which is what it how it was described to inquirers).
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GJ - California has a lot of good advice, based on her experience with WELS. The tradition of double-talk is so embedded in the clergy that I doubt they will escape it. Someone pretends to be a conservative, leads followers along, then pushes them off the cliff. SP Schroeder just did that, as Gurgle did before him.
The truth is, WELS "conservatives" could not lead six drunks to men's restroom at Hooters. They would be too busy worrying about how that might break one of the 10,000 unwritten rules of the sect.
