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April 18, 2010 in City
Vote on gays splitting Lutherans
Churches leaving over synod’s stance on ordination
A controversial decision last summer by the largest Lutheran church group in America to ordain gays and lesbians is causing churches to exit the organization nationwide, including some in Washington state.
On Aug. 21, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted at its national convention in Minneapolis to ordain gay ministers who are in a “committed relationship.”
Since then, traditional-minded Lutheran organizations say they’ve grown rapidly.
“I wouldn’t even begin to tell you how many thousands (of calls) I’ve gotten,” said Paull Spring, chairman of Lutheran CORE, a national coalition of Lutheran churches whose goal is to “preserve within the Lutheran churches in North America the authority of the Word of God according to the Lutheran confessions,” according to its website.
William Sullivan, service coordinator at Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, an association of congregations that, like Lutheran CORE, believes the ELCA has been moving away from accepting the Bible as its final source of authority in decision-making, said his group has doubled in size in the U.S. since the ELCA vote last summer.
To formally leave the ELCA, a church body must conduct two votes at least 90 days apart, with both votes attaining a two-thirds supermajority.
The ELCA disputes the effect of the gay-ordination vote, saying the number of departures is small. “Only 2 percent of the church’s 10,000 plus congregations have voted to leave,” said John Brooks, director of the ELCA News Service. “And one-third of those votes failed.”
But parishioners at Christ Lutheran Church in Odessa, Wash., took the step, exiting the ELCA last month.
“For people here it was a matter of biblical authority and interpretation of the Bible as God’s word,” said the Rev. Tim Hauge.
“This is a conservative town culturally as well as theologically,” Hauge said. The growing liberalism in the ELCA is ultimately “a deal breaker,” he said.
Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Walla Walla overwhelmingly voted to leave the ELCA in November.
“The decision to go against the teaching of the Bible regarding homosexual behavior was the final straw,” said the Rev. Mark Koonz.
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer’s congregation in Chimacum, Wash., south of Port Townsend, will take its second vote to leave the ELCA today, and it’s expected to pass, said the Rev. Don Pieper.
But critics of the departing Lutherans say they are not following Jesus’ example of being tolerant toward different kinds of Christians.
“I think there’s an underlying authority of Scripture, to me, that says God is gracious and is embracing and loving and accepting of people,” said the Rev. Alex Schmidt, of Faith Lutheran Church in Leavenworth, Wash.
He said Christians often use “Scripture as a big hammer to promote their point of view.”
The Rev. Erik Samuelson, of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Spokane, said he was a convention delegate last summer and voted in favor of the ELCA statement on human sexuality because it was intended to promote a range of issues.
“What it’s done for us is to validate a whole range of understandings of sexuality that exists in our congregation,” Samuelson said.
“This is not going to be a church-dividing issue for us,” he said. “Our unity comes more from our relationship with Christ than it does from all agreeing on any controversial issue.”
The Rev. Chris Berry, of Campus Ministry at Western Washington University in Bellingham, said in his experience, “gay and lesbian inclusion is not an issue for a majority of our college students. They wish we would just move on.”
Diversity is the key for proponents of the ELCA’s decision.
But one Seattle pastor who knows about the struggles of diversity believes it was the wrong move.
“The leadership is determined to establish the ELCA as a diverse church, where essentially almost anything goes,” said the Rev. Victor C. Langford III, of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Seattle.
Langford, a retired Army chaplain, was the first African-American to attain the rank of brigadier general in the Washington National Guard. He began his ministry in 1965, the year the National Voting Rights Act was signed.
He said his church is multiracial and culturally diverse but of one mind on matters of traditional Lutheran theology. And thus the congregation is preparing to leave the ELCA over its “disregarding the authority of the Word of God.”
Some pastors shepherding their churches out of the ELCA say they’ve experienced retaliation by ELCA officials, such as being blocked from working in the pulpit or fired from their posts for their open opposition.
“I was without call (work) for six months,” said one pastor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of ELCA reprisal.
“If you try to leave, and especially if you try to leave with a large congregation, they are going to make it very difficult for you,” he said.
One pastor claims her affiliation with a group advocating traditional church teachings was behind what she called an “unjust termination” after 8 1/2 years of service at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in north Spokane.
The Rev. Jaynan Clark, president of WordAlone Network, a national organization of more than 200 churches that helped spark Lutheran CORE’s formation, has been an ELCA minister since 1985.
She charges that the ELCA “used my family situation to come in and remove me from office,” referring to her divorce from the co-pastor at the church.
Bishop Martin Wells, of the ELCA’s Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod, denies this and any involvement with Clark’s firing or hindering her employment.
“Pastor Clark and I have a difficult relationship,” Wells said.
Because of her “family commitments,” Wells said, “there have not been any open calls for which I thought about her.”
Clark said the official response obscures the true motive: retaliation for openly denouncing the ELCA’s growing liberal theology.
Langford, the Seattle pastor, who has been with the ELCA since 1988, predicted the organization’s decision would result in the decline of the largest Lutheran body in the world.
“I don’t see it recovering from the decisions that were made,” he said. “So much promise, it had so much going for it.”
Wayne M. Anderson, a freelance reporter, can be reached at wayneanderson @centurytel.net.
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snuggarunt on April 18 at 5:58 a.m.
Hermann Sasse… . . .
Among the lies which destroy the church there is one we have not yet mentioned. Alongside the pious and dogmatic lies, there stands an especially dangerous form of lie which can be called the institutional lie. By this we mean a lie which works itself out in the institutions of the church, in her government and her organization. It is so dangerous because it legalizes the other lies in the church and makes them impossible to remove. Such a lie exists, for instance, where the governance of the church grants to those who confess and those who deny the Trinity and the two natures in Christ the same rights in the church; where the preaching of the Gospel according to the understanding of the Reformation enjoys the same right as the proclamation of a dogmaless Enlightenment religion, so long as the latter appeals only to the Bible; where it is the rule that at a church with two pastoral positions one must be filled with a pastor of the “free” bent, so the “liberals” in the congregation do not have to go to an “orthodox” pastor… .
It is self-evident that this falling away of the church from the Gospel can also happen where its organization still appears to be in order. For no constitution, no statute, no legal fixation of the confessional position can guard the church from defection from the true faith. At least, it has instead been the teaching of the Lutheran Church, which in distinction from other confessions never has known of a form of organization which God gave to His church to insure pure doctrine. We are unaware of Lutheran theologians ever teaching anything else.
But the moment the falling away of the church from the Gospel finds its expression also in church law, and thus is legitimized, the entire awfulness of what we have called the institutional lie applies. For this lie makes the return to the truth as good as impossible. A church can fall into terrible dogmatic error, it can open gate and door to heresy, by tolerating it and doing nothing about it. With the help of the Holy Spirit, such a church can later repent, return to the pure Word of God, and take up the fight against false doctrine commanded by this Word. But if it has solemnly acknowledged the right of heresy in its midst, then heresy itself has become an organic component of the church concerned. It can then no longer fight against heresy, and a burning struggle against false doctrine in its midst would be an entirely illegal fight of one wing of this church against another.
How shall a church which suffers with this illness again become well? How can such a church body separate the true church from heresy? No one is so foolish to think that heresy will ever of its own will give up the right granted it in the church. It is part of its essence that it cannot do this; for it lives on the basis of the claim to be the genuine church. It can only live in the shadow of the church and not as an independent religion or philosophy. And even when a particular heresy is forced aside in consequence of an altered philosophical situation and a change of the [ruling] theological system, it does not leave the visible center of church history without leaving to other heresies its basic ideas, its power over minds, and its hard-earned right to exist. Thus the foolish and simplistic hope must be given up that the false doctrine, which has been acknowledged in modern church government as equally legitimate with the pure doctrine, will finally disappear of itself. But where a church has made its pact with false doctrine and laid down the weapons with which it can and must fight heresy humanly speaking, there remains only the one last possibility for separating the church from heresy: the separation of the orthodox church from an image, which only bears the name “church,” but in reality has nothing to do with the church of Christ.
ChefGus/ John Olsen on April 18 at 6:37 a.m.
As an adult baptism at age 40 ( now 65) who has been part of the ELCA in Seattle and now in Spokane I continue to find it interesting that there are people of “faith” that operate primarily using the Old Testament (Laws)… my reading of Gospel..good news… and the Letters of Paul, and my understanding of Luther is that the “Body of Christ” that i have been a part of is about Grace, and Acceptance, and Love… Judgement about how people live is better placed in my opinion in the court system, and has little place in the communities of churches that I’ve belonged to and actively participated in. We are called to serve, to help heal, to feed and to love.. Christ spent his time in ministry on this earth as an example of being a presence with the very people that society reviles and spews hate upon….
I have seen and experienced much in the way of Grace from Bishop Martin in several settings, and he is first a “follower” in the vein stated above… and as Grace Full as any pastoral person I’ve known in my 25 years as an ELCA Lutheran… I’d support his view fully when it comes to Pastoral Call/Placement.
The ELCA may lose a percentage of people over this issue of Grace for all, but my view is that those that remain or choose not to leave are the sort of folks that are followers of the Gospel, and not the first five books of the old testament. John
pubpastor on April 18 at 8:23 a.m.
@snuggarunt You raise some theological issues really worth fighting about. Let’s get busy on those!
Not to single out Rev. Clark, but a generation ago she also would have been disqualified from ordained ministry in the ELCA herself, for being female first, and also for being divorced. The arguments of that era were similar to the arguments of today: Biblical authority, tradition, ecumenical consensus (aka, what all the other churches do). Some may say the slippery slope started then, but there are many who have found ways to be gracious (and theologically sound) amidst those changes. Gay pastors is the issue of our day, and I trust that the Spirit will show the church how to live together faithfully through this controversy as well (as has happened with so many “deal breaker” issues for 2000 years).
If you want to see a community in which Tea Party Lutherans have dinner with gay Lutherans—Bethlehem Lutheran gathers every Sunday at 9am, and we focus on Christ to bring us together despite (often deep) differences and love each other even when we profoundly disagree. Its often messy, but I for one love it that way.
+Rev. Erik Samuelson (pubpastor)
snuggarunt on April 18 at 9:46 a.m.
ChefGus well articulates the false dichotomy promoted by revisionists in the ELCA: One believes either the Old Testament (Law) or the New Testament (Grace)…not both! The concept that “Lutheranism” [as they understand it] is simply a one doctrine system, that of an enabling Grace, is nothing new. It goes by the name of Antinomianism. Curiously, the adherents of this counterfeit Lutheranism either cannot or will not articulate what separates their theology from that of the Antinomians… You’d think that for all of their proud talk about how long they’ve been faithful “Lutherans” they would have learned a thing or two about theology! But then again, the idolatrous belief that any God worth believing is that God who agrees with one’s self must be disregarded as just more of that “Old Testament” thinking!
snuggarunt on April 18 at 12:53 p.m.
I hate to be a cynic, Rev. Samuelson, but could your love for a “messy” Lutheranism have anything to do with money? Reminds me of a little jingle I once heard:
Monogamous, Same-Gender Luth’ran Church
(sung to the tune of Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, from the musical Mary Poppins)
If you donate your tuppence
Wisely to the church
Safe and sound
Soon that tuppence
Safe within the ELCA
Will compound
And you’ll achieve a sense of justice
As your piety expands
When Higgens Road and its directors
Give in – to special int’rest groups’ demands
You see, members, you’ll be part of
Dissing the church in Africa
(They’re homophobes, you know!)
Two millenia of Christendom’s
Theology must to go!
Millions given for bogus studies
Toward a pre-determined goal!
…Ordination for non-celibate gays!
All from tuppence, prudently
Fruitfully, frugally donated
to the, to be specific,
to the publicly accountable,
life-long, monogamous,
same-gender Luth’ran Church
Now, members,
When you give tuppence to the ELCA-church
Soon you’ll see
Leftist causes successfully promoted
At church-wide assemblies.
And you’ll achieve that sense of stature
As your arrogance expands
To the high ecclesial strata
That our ELCA-church commands
You can buy our health insurance
That’ll cover abortions!
Ageism! Feminism! Racism! Sexism!
It’s Victomhood that sells!
Opportunities!
All manner of social activism!
Anti-War! Pro-Choice!
Global Warming! End of Life!
Stewardship to
Secularize the Church!
You see, members,
Tuppence, patiently, cautiously trustingly donated
To the, to be specific,
To the publicly accountable
Life-long, monogamous,
Same-gender Luth’ran Church
smarg on April 19 at 5:38 a.m.
Homosexuality is a filthy, disease-ridden practice explicitly condemned by God.
ChefGus/ John Olsen on April 19 at 7:38 a.m.
So is heterosexual adultery, fornication, and sodomy… it is not just gay people that participate in those practices… Moses did not come down from the mountain with “Tablets” just for gay people… but for us all… john
SteveMD2 on April 19 at 9:12 p.m.
I also meant to mention the same thing happened in the Episcopal church. And they have only lost about 5% of their congregations, their second gay bishop has been approved, and a third is one of the finalist to become Bishop of Utah.
In the end, Justice and Love will triumph. I commend the ELCA for theri actions. And BTW, the Presbyterian USA almost voted just as the ELCA, did, and the vote was far different then their vote on gay pastors in relationships a few years ago. They are next.
25 or 50 years from now, most people will be asking why it took so long to do the right thing, and affirm gay people as part of Gods creation, entitled to full equality under our laws as well
The only shame will be how many suffered so much for so long.