Who the SRK is
The SRK (Suomen Rauhanyhdistysten Keskusyhdistys ry) is the central organization of the Conservative Laestadian movement, based in Oulu, Finland, and the sister organization of the Laestadian Lutheran Church in North America. Its congregations live, worship, and hold membership within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, and its speakers include that church's ordained ministers. Like the LLC, the SRK is bound by its own governing documents to one measure: its registered rules commit it to work “in accordance with the Holy Bible and the Evangelical Lutheran faith, confession, and doctrine” (SRK säännöt § 2). That is the same Holy Word of God, the same three ecumenical creeds, the same Unaltered Augsburg Confession, and the same catechisms of Luther that the LLC's Constitution confesses. It is the standard the open letter asks the SRK to apply.
A public endorsement — in print, under names
The SRK's support of the expulsions has not been private. In September 2022, at the SRK's office in Oulu, its Board and the LLC's met and declared themselves “of one mind” that “years of division has led to a heresy in North America.” The SRK's own newspaper, Päivämies, reported the same, adding that “there has been no doubt that we believe exactly the same way.” Four years on, neither organization has named the heresy.
In January 2023, the SRK's chairman, Valde Palola, in opening remarks to the SRK Speakers' Meeting, endorsed the removals directly: the 2022 LLC delegates “ultimately removed two member congregations from the central organization.” In the same remarks he taught the doctrine at the center of this dispute: “the congregation cannot err on any point of doctrine either.” He also acknowledged receiving “many messages and emails expressing a different view” — the letters written asking for help — and did not answer them.
And at the LLC's 2026 Annual Meeting in Rockford — the meeting called to expel a third congregation, Coastal California — the SRK's representative, Tapani Kinnunen, a member of the SRK Board, told the delegates he was “completely unaware of what has happened in California,” and then rose and pronounced on it in the SRK's name. Scripture has a word for this: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” Prov. 18:13.
The chairman's own words, on both sides
The open letter is addressed to the SRK's Board with hope, because its chairman has himself, over many years, written the very answers the letter asks the SRK to give — and then, in 2023, taught the opposite.
In 2012, Valde Palola wrote that “the teaching of continuous revelation is problematic — it lowers, in a certain way, the authority of Scripture,” and that by the Reformers' sola scriptura principle “the holy Scriptures alone are the norm of doctrine.” That same year he wrote that the congregation “is indeed holy, but it is at the same time sinful,” and therefore prays, “Forgive us our sins” — nearly word for word from Luther. In 2017 he told Finland's national radio that when we speak of the congregation, “we speak of Christ's congregation, which is worldwide . . . all children, wherever in the world they are born . . . are born also as members of God's invisible congregation” — not of any organization's membership roll. Opening the 2023 Summer Services at Kauhava, he preached that “the core question in all this is whether we consent that the written word of God, the Bible, is life's highest rule.” And in 2025 he publicly rebuked the bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for changing the church's practice without following its constitutional order, calling the error “extremely serious.”
Set against all of that is what he taught in January 2023: that the visible congregation — the SRK and the LLC — “cannot err on any point of doctrine.” The two cannot be squared. The letter does not ask the chairman to adopt anyone else's words. It asks him to stand by his own.
The SRK has been here before
This is not the first time the SRK has faced a reckoning over a “different spirit.” In October 2011, the SRK's Board issued a public statement — which its then-chairman called an apology — over the “caretaking meetings” of the 1970s and 80s. It acknowledged that “foreign features appeared, such as doctrinal errors and the abuses that resulted from them,” that “facts must be faced openly and honestly even when they are not pleasant to us,” and — in the chairman's own word — that “spiritual violence” had occurred: people made to repent not of a concrete sin but of a “spirit” they “had, as it were, to dig out” of themselves. The statement published in Päivämies went further, rejecting the “so-called spirit doctrine” and “a wrong concept that the Board of the SRK or of a Rauhanyhdistys would form some kind of ‘government of the House of God.’” The open letter asks the plain question: has the SRK Board learned from this?
Four years of silence
The SRK has received these questions before. On August 3, 2022, and again on June 1, 2023 — the second addressed to the SRK Board directly, and translated into Finnish that October — the SRK was shown that the 2022 expulsions violated the LLC's own Constitution, its Bylaws, and Minnesota law, and was asked plainly: do you disagree with what is written; and if not, why have you endorsed the removal of congregations that confess the same doctrine you do? Neither letter was answered. The open letter of September 8, 2026 puts the questions a third time, openly, and is copied to the Archbishop of Turku and Finland and the Bishop of Oulu, within whose church and diocese the SRK works.
The chairman also received direct appeals from members. On June 29, 2023, Craig Kumpula — a member who had visited Valde Palola in his home in 2019 — wrote to him personally, engaging Palola’s own published statements point by point: his January 2023 quotation of Luther’s Bondage of the Will (that it is “impossible for the congregation to err in even the smallest point of faith”), which Mr. Kumpula showed was quoted against its context, and Palola’s claim that the authority to interpret God’s Word rests in “God’s congregation,” which he warned “sounds dangerously close to the Catholic Church’s claim to have authority to interpret scripture.” That letter, too, went unanswered. Read Craig Kumpula’s June 29, 2023 letter to Valde Palola (PDF) →
Read and verify
The full case to the SRK, with every quotation footnoted to its source, is the open letter. The publications and recordings referenced above — the Päivämies reports, Palola's remarks and writings, the 2011 statement, and the recording of the 2026 Annual Meeting at which the SRK's representative spoke — are listed on the Sources page, and the meeting recordings are on the Recordings page. The SRK's role also appears, in sequence, in the filterable timeline on the home page.