Question for Pastor Paul Rydecki

 Pastor Paul Rydecki above
and Pastor Steve Spencer below - at the first and only
Intrepid Lutherans conference.

Holy Cross Lutheran Church - Kerrville Texas

October 18 at 7:36am · 

And here is Part II of this week's offering of ATP. Thanks for watching. Make sure and share with a friend whom you think this might help. As always, send your questions to atpholycross@gmail.com.

Should I Leave the WELS over UOJ?

What does one do when he realizes that his church (or church body) teaches false doctrine? Scripture says we are not to have fellowship (communion/participat...

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Jeff Samelson Paul - Hi. I have no agenda in asking this; I'm just curious. I was thinking about this after you posted the letter the other week, and this link seems to provide an opportunity to ask: If you had not been suspended from the WELS ministerium, do you think you would have left on your own? And assuming you would have, what do you think would have been the conditions in which you did, i.e. when and how? (If you don't want to answer this hypothetical, I won't be offended or anything.)

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 · October 18 at 11:13am

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Paul Rydecki It's a fair question, Jeff. What I was pleading for up to the day of my suspension was for the district (and/or synod at large) to restudy this issue, to review the exegesis that had been popularized by Sig Becker et al., to answer the questions I had posed about both the exegesis of the passages in question and the history of the new terminology and concepts that are so different from the terminology and concepts expressed in the Lutheran Confessions, Luther, Chemnitz, etc. My congregation was promised by the presidium that this would, in fact, take place, as recently as a few days before my suspension. But the decision was made at the seminary level that it was a settled issue and needn't be studied further. If there had been a willingness to do that study, it would have demonstrated a willingness to confront possible errors in previous exegesis and in the teachings of the Synodical Conference from early on. If that willingness had been there, who knows what might have happened? But finally, it wasn't there. If I hadn't been suspended, and if my calls to address the doctrinal inconsistencies had gone unheeded, then, yes, I would have eventually left the synod. It's hard to say when, not unlike the WELS struggled with when to part from the LCMS as it was trying to gauge the official response of the LCMS to its calls to orthopraxy. I suppose I would have "filed" a formal state of confession against the synod, and then that would have played out.

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 · October 18 at 11:23am

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Jeff Samelson Paul Rydecki Thanks for the answer!

 However, eight years after agreeing with Thy Strong Word,
Heiser was worshiping and conferencing with the UOJ Rolf Preus sect, which returned to the UOJ LCMS and UOJ ELS.