Likewise, homosexuality was only the surface-level reason for the NALC's formation. Factions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), founded in 1988, had long lamented the loss of confessional commitment amidst the raft of ill-conceived ecumenical agreements the ELCA promptly established with other mainline Protestants in the 1990s. Some didn't like that the ELCA had downgraded its Lutheranism. Others felt the ecumenical direction wasn't serious enough about reunion with Rome.

Protestants do not find the primacy-of-Peter in the Bible, neither do we recognize a centralized authority with permission to mix biblical and unbiblical teachings (magisterium) to instruct Christians about what to believe.

There is no alternative for the helpless sinner than to cast himself wholly upon the supreme help of God. Nothing avails for the individual who discovers that they are lost beyond recovery apart from an uncaused intervention from above. Human desire, strength and righteousness are of no account whatsoever in the matter of divine deliverance and transformation, which is exclusively and solely a work of omnipotent grace.

He taught that Adam's sin affected Adam only and that men and women are free to sin or to not sin. Pelagius opposed the idea of original sin: that, after the Fall, we are not able to not sin - until such time as God brings us from death to life and gives us the Holy Spirit and a "right willing." Pelagians then and today have a high anthropology (an omni-confident view of "free will") which always results in a low christology (we don't need a Savior, we need a coach to cheer us on).