The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has elected its first openly gay bishop, the Rev. R. Guy Erwin, to oversee churches in Southern California, four years after the church allowed openly gay men and lesbians to serve as clergy.
Following a wider trend within other mainline Protestant denominations to appoint gays and lesbians to leadership positions, the ELCA’s five-county Southwest California Synod elected Erwin on Friday (May 31) to a six-year term.
“It’s historic and a turning point, as was the ordination of women,” said Martin Marty, the dean of American church historians at the University of Chicago and a member of the ELCA. “This is just one of many indications that the culture has shifted.”
Let’s see if they grow on the same trajectory as TEc has since VGR. After all, they chose to affiliate with TEc and shared the contagion willingly, consensually.
Wow – ordained just two years ago. How extraordinary.
Identity politics trumps even common sense. Two years part-time experience in a very small congregation. Then again, given the trends of that synod perhaps a life worth imitating.
Back in the middle and late 1990’s, when Episcopalians and Lutherans were nearing closure in their negotiations about a relationship of Full Communion with each other, I actually hoped that by entering into Full Communion with a “confessional” Church, ECUSA would somehow be healed of its anti-doctrine, anti-Scripture biases. Stupid me!
Chuck Bradshaw
Hulls Cove, Maine
“This is just one of many indications that the culture has shifted.â€
What other “shifts” in culture will the Episcolutherans decide as acceptable in God’s eyes in the next 10, 20 or 30 years? Your guess is as good as mine, but understand that any guess that might shock us today, can be blessed tomorrow. That’s what makes these “blessings” not worth the paper they’re printed on.
And the decline of Mainline Protestantism continues at an ever accelerating pace.
And my devout Lutheran mother-in-law told me, only about ~ 5 years ago, that this would never happen. Uh-huh.
Well, anyone who’s Protestant and liturgical could hotfoot it over to the LCMS or ACNA if they can deal with the somewhat different theologies–IMHO, better than what’s now being offered by the ELCA.
A Church that submits to Caesar’s “cultural shifts” may be eventually destroyed by its own cowardice–in for a dime, in for a dollar.
One more step on the slippery slope to total destruction. Good job!
No surprise that this tragic move took place in southern CA. How apt! But if the ELCA hopes to catch up with TEC in terms of being “gay-friendly” and “Trendier than thou,” the two shrinking denominations will suffer the same disastrous fate, as others have noted above. I mean, look at the UCC. They pioneered the pro-gay, “progressive,” “all-morality-is-relative-anyway” ideology long ago, and look at how it’s worked for them.
Brian in Maryland (#3),
It’s always good to see you appearing here, offering some Lutheran input. Keep up the good work, brother.
Chuck (#4),
You weren’t the only one who entertained such idealistic hopes. Having grown up in Lutheran territory in Sioux Falls (albeit among the low church, pietistic Norwegian ALC kind), I too once hoped that the converging paths of TEC and the ELCA might be mutually beneficial to both groups, with us Anglicans learning to take doctrine (and preaching) more seriously, and Lutherans learning to take church polity as more than a matter of adiaphora and becoming more eucharistically centered, etc. In SD we even had a nifty term for Lutheran-Episcopal cooperative efforts: “Lut-episk.” It seemed funny at the time, but now such collaboration in selling out the gospel and capitulating to the world’s antinomian ways stinks as badly as Lutefisk.
But being the optimist at heart that I am, I haven’t given up all hope that orthodox Lutheranism and orthodox Anglicanism may yet achieve some measure of those high hopes for our mutual benefit through cross-fertilization. Since there are no reliably conservative Lutheran seminaries left in the ELCA, it is my understanding (Brian, correct me if I’m wrong) that the new NALC is sending many of its seminarians to Trinity School of Ministry in Ambridge. Thus many of the future clergy on both sides will be trained at the same place, and that seems promising to me.
David Handy+
Eternal Optimist
There is an online seminary used by LCMC and I believe you’re correct about Trinity, Pittsburgh. The implosion of the ELCA is gaining speed and, as very few congregations have endowments to leverage their deaths a little further down the road, the final collapse will likely be swift. The seminaries are already feeling the pinch with declining enrollments and financial support. Luther, the flagship seminary of the denomination, recently laid off many employees, encouraged some profs to retire early and expects to leave some teaching positions vacant.
Meanwhile S. California elects someone with virtually no parish leadership experience and no history of growing a ministry. And I seriously doubt this decision will aid in reaching the Black, Asian and Hispanic communities of LA. So with the decision they signal liberal, white non believers are their target. Good luck with that. They weren’t doing a very good job of it before this outcome. Epic fail.
#4 I also had hoped that schemes for Episcopal-Lutheran union would be mutually beneficial to our two churches, both of them the churches of my ancestors. I think I hoped we’d get some of their confessional seriousness (and hymns!) and they’d get a better liturgy. Alas, it always seemed to devolve into plans for “interlocking ministries” and institutional mind-melding … At the time I publically complained to Abp Carey himself about it in an open forum.
I know it’s dangerous to say anything of a positive nature about the bishop-elect when so many are in high dudgeon about him, but I knew him somewhat about 20 years ago when we were students. He was working at Yale under the estimable George Lindbeck on a dissertation on Luther’s Theology of the Cross. On weekends, I think I remember that he preached old-fashioned pietistic sermons to a small local ELCA congregation. He both taught at YDS and he worked in the university administration. A distinguished Harvard grad, he had gone to the Luther centenary in 1983 on a Fulbright. Dazzlingly fluent in German and Lutherstudiespeak.
To give the devil his due — and I’m not saying he’s being demonized unfairly — he brings substantial scholarly gifts that perhaps compensate for his lack of parish experience. And what’s a Lutheran bishop today anyway? I always thought they considered their bishops mere functionaries, bureaucrats, time-serving admin folks (Swedish bishops excepted of course, with their maintenance of apostolic succession and High Church ecclesiology).