Mr. [Bill] Sullivan, a former ELCA pastor, is national coordinator for the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), a collection of 226 congregations founded in March 2001 with 25 charter member churches dissatisfied with the denomination’s liberal drift.
Now the trickle has turned into a flood.
“It’s been going nonstop,” he said of his phone.
On Friday alone, he scheduled three visits to ELCA churches in Buffalo, N.Y. Sioux City, Iowa and Jacksonville, Fla., for later this fall. They are thinking of leaving, as were the 15 people who had stopped by the hotel suite that day. Twenty-five inquiries had come in that week alone, and that was before all the vote tallies were in down the street at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
He glanced at his e-mail.
“The train wreck is just about over,” he said, reading from a post sent by a delegate on the convention floor. “The first responders need to be ready.”
It would be wonderful if all the churches for traditional doctrine that are in the Protestant tradition could form one denomination, but I suppose there would be too many stumbling blocks such as women’s ordination and beliefs about the Lord’s Supper. However, some people on the left wing of the churches (at least in the Episcopal church) seem to beliebe that after Gene Robinson was consecrated all the concern about ordaining gays would dissipate. It hasn’t in the EC and it won’t in the Lutheran church, or any other mainline church that will take this step.
This is ‘the issue’ that will split the Christian church in the 21st century. Anyone who can read scripture, and read it with common sense and the willingness to understand and accept its clear message on this subject, cannot help but move away from the “churches” who are openly and willfully violating the clear tenets of scripture. I understand the rationalizing that is going on – – but the fact is, God has spoken, and dthe church, the real church, will leave those who insist that God listen to their reappraisal of His clear desires.
So be it.
Even if all traditionalist Christians cannot form one denomination, they can respect each other, cooperate, and recognize that some differences are not a bar to fellowship.
Anyone know the differences between the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the Missouri Synod? (Bad Answer: one letter…LCMS vs LCMC.)
The LCMC ordains women (and is insistent upon it) while the LC-MS does not (and insists that to do so is a grave error).
I agree, imk and i think that’s what she should do because the militant atheists don’t care what denominations we are. To them we’re all the enemy.
I hope they learn from the ECUSA debacle and realize decisions need to be made quickly and decisively or the cancer will just keep on spreading. None of this “having a conversation” and “living into the tension” stuff.