Päivi Räsänen’s co-defendant, Bishop Juhana Pohjola, has told Australians how to avoid Finland’s anti-free speech folly.

In a surprise assertion, Bishop Pohjola said equating the Bible with “hate speech” was the direct consequence of the Finnish Church ordaining women priests.

This wasn’t just about a hard-line Marxian-Woke judiciary putting free speech on trial, he implied. 

Finland’s church put culture over Christ, and now activists want to ban the Bible.

Pohjola made the explosive assertions in an under-reported 2023 address to Adelaide’s Confessing Christ Conference (CCA).

Published by Creative WF on YouTube as three sessions, the Lutheran Bishop stated, “Once a church body endorses female pastors, she can no longer call herself a church of sola scriptura.”

Here’s why: “We were given false promises in the 1980s,” he protested.

Ordaining women was only going to be about opening up ministry to women, and nothing else.

We were even assured that accepting the ordination of women wouldn’t lead to the promotion of homosexuality, Bishop Pohjola added.

Additionally, all those opposed were told that accepting women’s ordination would still allow freedom of conscience. 

“After 35 years, we have a clearer picture.”

Now, biblical authority is being denied, which means all of the reassurances were clearly lies.

Advocates for female ordination never delivered the protections and limitations they promised.

Consequently, “Women’s ordination brought a theological revolution which changed the church body.”

This pushed theology into a more “progressive” direction, explained  Pohjola.

As a study carried out by the pro-female ordination, Church Research Institute revealed,

The ordination of women “changed the perception of faith and dogma. This impacted the policies of the church as well as daily practices,” he said. 

Additionally, the study revealed that “female clergy were notably more open towards homosexual couples’ rights in the church.”

They “also have been more active in favouring them.”

Put simply, female clergy were more likely to be infected with the Woke Mind Virus than their male counterparts.

The “change brought into the Church,” Pohjola continued, “can also be seen as an indicator of organisational secularisation.”

“Some indicators of this process are a weaker attachment to the traditional Church Dogma.”

This includes clergy watering down the Bible, replacing it with “tolerance, and common human values instead of biblical morality.”

What happened was a “collision of two different theological positions and visions, about what the church is and how the church is to carry out her mission.”

This has bitterly divided the church, and we are “weeping in Finland,” Pohjola testified.

Pohjola then said, he witnessed the ‘division tear apart the Baptismal Church where he was ordained, and served until he was defrocked.”

For context, in 2014, Pohjola was booted out of the State-run Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCE) for opposing women’s ordination and defending Biblical standards on morality, marriage, and sexuality.

Concluding session 2, he said,

“The real question in Finland today is not only women’s ordination.”

The real question is “about the mere survival of Lutheranism and even Christianity for the next Generations in these days of eschatological apostasy.”

A source in Adelaide familiar with the event told Caldron Pool that Bishop Pohjola was in Australia to field questions, share Finland’s experience and provide counsel. 

This is because “the Lutheran Council of Australia (LCA) was moving hard towards extreme liberalism.”

“Pohjola came out of the Finnish state church that had gone Woke on just about everything.”

He was in the country to help dissenting churches prepare for LCA’s Synod.

They were opposed to the “push to ordain women to the office of the Holy Ministry, the increasing theological liberalism and rejection of Biblical authority within the LCA.”

Professor John Stephenson of “St. Catherine’s Lutheran Seminary, Canada” also participated.

His contribution was “helping members of the LCA learn about the dangers of liberalism, including women’s ordination in the church and the biblical case against it.”

Lutheran teaching organisation, Creative Word Fellowship CWF, told CP that “The Confessing Christ conference tour was a joint venture between the organisers of what has become LM-A (Lutheran Mission – Australia) and CFW.”