On Friday, delegates juggled raw emotion, fatigue and opposing interpretations of Scripture.
Before the vote but sensing its outcome, the Rev. Timothy Housholder of Cottage Grove, Minn., introduced himself as a rostered pastor in the church, “at least for a few more hours,” implying that he would leave the denomination and eliciting a gasp from some audience members.
“Here I stand, broken and mournful, because of this assembly and her actions,” Mr. Housholder said.
The Rev. Mark Lepper of Belle Plaine, Minn., called for the inclusion of gay clergy members, saying, “Let’s stop leaving people behind and let’s be the family God is calling us to be.”
I read comments like Lepper’s – I heard them for years in the institution formerly known as ECUSA – and I wonder just what it means. They are spoken with utter seriousness and no attempt is made to delineate the kind of “family God is calling us to be”. And a moment’s reflection reveals that once again we are dealing with radically different understandings of the same word. Lepper’s sentence contains four words that can be interpreted by in radically different ways by people who claim to to the same church: people, behind, family and God. “Calling us to be” is a phrase that also has radically different interpretations in the context.
Pastor Householder leads one of our largest congregations. Well, maybe not this afternoon …
For the NY Times, this is a rather objective, restrained report, with little celebratory rejoicing over the outcome of Friday’s fateful vote.
I thought the most striking thing was the NYT attempt to connect the ELCA move with the infamous decision of the activist Iowa Supreme Court. It comes across as a rather condescending “coastal liberal” view that even the relatively more conservative Midwestern heartland is slowly becoming enlightened.
The article notes that CORE currently consists of around 400 conservative congregations. Now in a denomination with about 10,500 local churches, one way to look at that is that the ELCA could lose all 400 of those protesting parishes and still have over 10K congregations left. Maybe that’s a bit more than the mere handful of disgruntled conservatives the TEC’s PB is always claiming are the diehard opponents of TEC’s inclusive agenda, but I can see some ELCA leaders figuring that this was an acceptable, if lamentable loss, a regrettable but tolerable price to pay for advancing what they see as social justice.
But will it stop at a mere 400 congregations?? I think not. I suspect that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, the thin end of the wedge so far. As always, we’re likely to see a Bell Curve phenomenon play itself out, as at first just a few dare to bolt, then a parabola like arc of rapidly rising numbers of leaders and congregations jump on the bandwagon in choosing to depart, until the movement peaks, and then falls back down in mirror fashion. It’s the normal, natural, predictable institutional pattern.
But Lutherans are generally feistier than Episcopalians, so the numbers that choose to depart the ELCA could easily exceed those that have left TEC. However, on the other hand, there are no channels for international support for American theological conservatives from the Global South, as in Anglicanism. Each denomination has its own special dynamics and thus the conflict may play itself out in quite different ways. But I think it’s safe to say that the ELCA will indeed experience a major split, perhaps especially since the merger of the LCA and the ALC only took place a generation ago, and thus there are no deep, longstanding loyalties to the ELCA as a denomination.
David Handy+
One thing seems certain, and that is that the gay lobby has succeeded in redefining the terms of the debate. Virtually everyone, even some conservatives, and certainly all secular reporters, now use the term “full inclusion” as the question being debated. Whether you are a conservative and oppose full inclusion, or are a liberal and support it, FI is now what is supposed to be the thing dividing us.
(Read the NYT article and you’ll see what I mean — the reporter uses the I-word as the governing description of what is at issue.)
That is a stunning coup and I really have to hand it to the reappraisers. This was brilliant strategy and future historians will see this as THE critical move that caused the capitulation of all mainline churches in the first two decades of the 21st century.
Hindsight is always 20-20, I suppose, but I wonder what would have happened if traditionalists and clear-thinking moderates had formed an alliance to consistently refuse to enter any debate which was framed in terms of Inclusion. That EVERY time the deceptive rhetoric of FI was used reappraisers were immediately called on it and debate was not permitted to go forward until the misleading rhetoric was acknowledged. Maybe that would have been useless, I don’t know.
What is clear to me now is that the mainline churches are falling like dominos, falling according to the relentless logic of Inclusion, in a game set up by one side. If somehow the rules could have been challenged earlier, maybe we’d have a chance to be heard. But now that the rules of the debate have been set in the Arena of I, there are only two sides: people who are warm and generous and wish to Include people, and people who are cold and bigoted and elitist and wish to Exclude people. Gee, who’s gonna win?
What was left out of the NYT article and what caused the gasps in the auditorium in Minneapolis is that Pr. Timothy Householder stated before the assembly that he is a celebate homosexual who is living, by the grace of God, a life that is called to the path of holyness and sanctification commanded by scripture. He further derided the assembly for making a mockery of the church’s historic teaching and for mocking him and others like him who are living sacrificially for the Lord. He is one of three pastors at King of Kings Lutheran Church in suburban St. Paul. The church has a membership of more than 4,000 and is one of several churches in the Minneapolis St. Paul area with memberships between 2,000 and 15,000 that are most unhappy and are planning their departure from the ELCA. God bless him and the courageous people of King of Kings Lutheran Church, Woodbury, Minnesota.
What was left out of the NYT article and what caused the gasps in the auditorium in Minneapolis is that Pr. Timothy Householder stated before the assembly that he is a celebate homosexual who is living, by the grace of God, a life that is called to the path of holyness and sanctification commanded by scripture. He further derided the assembly for making a mockery of the church’s historic teaching and for mocking him and others like him who are living sacrificially for the Lord. He is one of three pastors at King of Kings Lutheran Church in suburban St. Paul. The church has a membership of more than 4,000 and is one of several churches in the Minneapolis St. Paul area with memberships between 2,000 and 15,000 that are most unhappy and are planning their departure from the ELCA. God bless him and the courageous people of King of Kings Lutheran Church, Woodbury, Minnesota.
How can any church –with a straight face–promote chastity as a virtue when it endorses active homosexual cohabitation?? It is amazing how the churches of the Reformation–which were founded to purify the church in many ways and areas–are now the main perpetrators within Christianity tearing down, rending, and destroying respect for the Bible, as well as the Christian moral and marriage Tradition. In many respects we are witnessing the final collapse of the Protestant endeavor as a “Reformation.” And it is those who clearly see this–whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox who are the True prophets–the True bearers of the Word of God. They are the ones who have not been gulled and tricked by those who have immense media power and those who have more ego-inflating fancy degrees than respect and love for the revealed , orthodox, Biblical (not man confected) Christian Faith.
Considering the pain that we have experienced, I grieve for our Lutheran brothers and sisters.