ELCA approves gay clergy
by Ed Vitagliano

  The largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S. voted in August to allow nonrepentant homosexuals to serve openly as clergy, threatening a schism as conservatives recoiled from the vote.
  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) made the change when it met in Minneapolis August 17-23 for its biennial Churchwide Assembly.
  The assembly not only overwhelmingly voted to revise its rules for clergy, it also voted to allow congregations to “recognize, support and hold publicly accountable lifelong, monogamous, same gender relationships.”
  Conservatives both within and without were clearly disappointed. Rev. Gerald B. Kieschnick, president of the theologically conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), addressed the ELCA Churchwide Assembly after its decision and expressed his sorrow.
  “This grieves my heart and the hearts of all in the ELCA, the LCMS, and other Christian church bodies throughout the world who do not see these decisions as compatible with the Word of God, or in agreement with the consensus of 2,000 years of Christian theological affirmation regarding what Scripture teaches about human sexuality,” he said.
  Kieschnick told the assembly the division between his denomination and ELCA “threatens to become a chasm.”
With 4.7 million members, ELCA is the seventh largest Christian denomination in the country. Some conservatives expect that number to contract after the assembly voted to embrace homosexuality.
  “This will cause an ever greater loss in members and finances. I can’t believe the church I loved and served for 40 years can condone what God condemns,” Rev. Richard Mahan, an ELCA pastor in West Virginia, told The Associated Press. “Nowhere in Scripture does it say homosexuality and same-sex marriage are acceptable to God. Instead, Scripture says it is immoral and perverted.”
  Mainline denominations have been wrestling with the issue of homosexuality for years. Conservatives within denominations such as ELCA, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church USA blame creeping theological liberalism for allowing the embrace of homosexuality. They also blame it for something else: An erosion in membership over the last 40 years.
  The Washington Post cited recent research from the American Religious Identification Survey, which showed that between 2001 and 2008 the percentage of the U.S. population that considered itself part of mainline Protestantism dropped from about 17% to 12.9%.
  Some conservatives are talking about leaving ELCA. Bill Sullivan, a former ELCA pastor and national coordinator for the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), told the Washington Times that a handful of ELCA conservatives have already talked to him about joining his group. A loose coalition founded more than eight years ago with 25 charter congregations, it has grown to 226 congregations.
  But with more than 10,000 ELCA churches throughout the U.S., the LCMC numbers are a tiny sliver of the overall pie. It remains to be seen whether conservative churches will leave the denomination in large numbers.
  Other Lutheran denominations are also an option for the discontented. There is the 2.4-million-member LCMS and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, with 390,000 members.
  What is not open to debate among conservatives, however, is that what ELCA did in August was to cut the tether to more Biblically based denominations like LCMS.
  “Simply stated, this matter is fundamentally related to significant differences in how we understand the authority of Holy Scripture and the interpretation of God’s revealed and infallible Word,” Kieschnick said.