Sunday, October 31, 2010

UALC has final vote today

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which claims a membership of 10,400 congregations and 4.6 million baptized members, accepted a task force on sexuality recommendation to remove the celebacy restriction for its gay and lesbian pastors in August 2009. This was not a vote to have gay pastors marry each other or to marry congregants--this was a vote to remove the celebacy requirement for openly gay and lesbian pastors. The old "committeed, loving relationship" routine.

This caused splits in many congregations, and not a blip in other. Under the ELCA’s rules, congregations that wish to disaffiliate themselves must take two votes passing by a two-thirds majority, with a 90-day consultation period with the local bishop scheduled between the votes. The congregation officially cuts off ties with the denomination upon passage of the second vote.

According to an Illinois paper by the end of June, 462 congregations had cast their first votes to leave the ELCA, with 312 adopting the resolution. Of these, 196 congregations have taken their second vote, with only 11 congregations opting not to leave the ELCA. Our church voted almost 92% to leave on the first vote and 95% on the second. The crowds were the largest I've ever seen in our church, outside a special musical concert.

I know members of other Lutheran congregations who will never have the opportunity to discuss it, or to vote on leaving, because either the church board or pastor won't allow it to even come up. You can have all the constitutional documents you want, you can all use the same Bible, but if no one is reading either one, it doesn't make a lot of difference.

In the ELCA homosexuals are invited to be full members, to share in the sacraments, and to be treated in all ways as heterosexuals. But let's remember the gold standard in virtually all churches is chastity and celebacy outside of marriage.

I was going through Google to see when ELCA (created in 1988) began accepting openly gay pastors, and it appears the local congregations never had a say in that. Some pastors finishing seminary simply announced shortly before ordination that they were gay, so they were told in order to have the church's blessings they'd need to be celebate. That may have been the early 90s. Maybe they (I think they were all women) didn't exactly lie when entering seminary, but they surely had their fingers crossed when the discussion of sex outside of marriage came up.

If a heterosexual, married pastor declared love for a non-spousal other, saying they have a "loving committed relationship" about which they need to be open in order to be culturally relevant for our times, and that Jesus didn't address a ménage à trois as a sin, not many congregations would swallow that line of reasoning, no matter how "normal" the sex drive is of the pastor. But give ELCA a few years, and it will be up for a vote.

2 comments:

Darrell Michaels said...

Wow! That is truly sad. At what point does a Christian church become irrelevant? I'd say about the same time as they intentionally disregard biblical teachings on moral matters.

God bless your congregation for the decision it made!

Anonymous said...

I'm so pleased for your congregation...now you can move forward. I may have mentioned this in another comment, to a previous post of yours, that my former Lutheran congregation was one of the ones you described: "either the church board or pastor won't allow it to even come up." My family & I HAD to leave that congregation. We refused to place ourselves under the headship of a synod that wants to throw out anything that's inconvenient in the Bible...& then uses varying tactics to try & twist the arms of congregations into remaining under their direction!

Brenda