Last week the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination took a progressive and much needed step. Leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted 559 to 441 to lift a ban that prohibited sexually active gay and lesbian people from serving as ministers.
The new policy allows individual ELCA congregations to hire homosexuals as clergy as long as they are in a committed relationship. Until this vote, gays and lesbians had to remain celibate to serve as clergy. The proposed change would cover those in “lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships.”
Although still in need of more progression, this should be celebrated as a step in the right direction. Considering Church should be a place where one is the most accepted, particularly of those who “answer the call” of ministry, this is a victory.
68% of almost 1,000 delegates at the ELCA’s national assembly supported the vote. It makes the group, consisting of close to 4.7 million members in the U.S., one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations to take a more gay-friendly, human rights stance.
Of course with a vote split almost 70%/30% there was opposition as well.
“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,” said the Rev. Richard Mahan, pastor at St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Charleston, W.Va. “Nowhere in Scripture does it say homosexuality and same-sex marriage is acceptable to God. Instead, it says it is immoral and perverted.” Mahan said he believed a majority of his congregation would want to now break away from the ELCA.
I’ll leave the ever, ongoing Scripture debate to another piece but I do wonder if Rev. Mahan knows what fabric his pastoral robe might be made from. Almost certainly they are spun from blended cloth and of course the Book of Leviticus also states clearly that wearing blended material to be immoral.
Other leaders, such as Rev. Tim Housholder, indicated they may leave as well. He described himself during the debate as a roster ELCA pastor “at least for a few more hours.” The Rev. Marshall Hahn, pastor of a Parish in Dubuque, Iowa, said he’d need to talk to his bishop “to discuss what this means for my future with this church.”
With progression comes separation. After almost a decade of civil war, mainly over the authority of Scripture and church leaders, there was a break from The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the ELCA was formed in 1988. Deemed a milestone in both the Lutheran and Christian unity, the ELCA has throughout the years welcomed other changes such as the sharing of Holy Communion and pastors’ pulpits among all the major liberal Protestant church bodies in the United States. These were also met with resistance at the time, but have come to be a sign of unification and acceptance; both of which one should associate with religious practice.
This vote doesn’t require conservative congregations to hire gay clergy but opponents warned that it could lead some congregations and individual churchgoers to split off from the ELCA. However, ELCA supporters argued that failure to ratify and make changes ran just as great a risk of alienating large portions of the membership, particularly those from younger generations.
In 2003 the Episcopal Church of the United States experienced similar unrest. In a hugely progressive move its first openly gay bishop was consecrated. It alienated American Episcopalians from its worldwide parent church and led to the formation of the more conservative Anglican Church in North America. However of the 2 million plus members of the Episcopal Church in 2003 the conservative Anglican Church only took with it around 100,000 members.
The Rev. Katrina Foster, pastor at Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, pointed out that Lutherans heard similar warnings about flouting Scripture when they made past changes that are now seen as successful – chiefly, the ordination of women.
She summed it up saying:
“We can learn not to define ourselves by negation,” said Foster. “By not only saying what we are against, which always seems to be the same – against gay people. We should be against things (such as) poverty. I wish we were as zealous about that.”
Amen Rev. Foster. Here’s to a human rights victory.