Pastor emeritus Nathan Bickel has left a new comment on your post "WELS, ELS, LCMS Beware - Rewarding Plagiarism Reve...":
Ichabod - I have no doubt that WELS will be forever discussing the issue of plagiarism; attempting to clarify it while splitting hairs and making degrees of it acceptable within its own inbred Synod. One of the things that utterly has turned me off to my own local WELS congregation, besides that of the pastor's Universalism teaching and preaching, is that he appears to be a synodical puppet.
Attending Bethel Lutheran is such, that it a local church which is compromised.
Its own identity is torn because its pastor and congregational officers are so wedded and dependent upon local circuit, regional district and national synodical allegiances. On one particular occasion I noticed that the pastor plagiarized a sermon that was posted on the WELS site. It was during the time period of the synodical Bible Study on the Romans 12 gifts. The sermon was about "encouragement" and highlighted Samuel's mother, Hannah.
Finally, it is my observation that the WELS schools don't teach and train its students to be independent thinkers and to be solely beholden to the Scriptures and to the Lutheran Confessions. Students, are instead pumped through the multi-webbed system only to be a rubber stamped version of the same stale synodical status quo. Nathan M. Bickel - Bay city, MI
www.thechristianmessage.org
www.moralmatters.org
