Systemic change comes to the Lutherans.

October 7, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

We’ve been laboring for fundamental change in the Lutheran church for decades. I personally got involved in the late 1970s, and started serious writing in the mid-1980s. But its still startling to see the results of the work of hundreds of faithful people to lead and guide (not push) their fellow believers to a genuine tipping point.

If you’ve been following the LGBT/clergy debate in the Lutheran or any other denomination, or if you’re just Googling in, you probably have heard that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was not quick to embrace sexual minorities. Officially, it made tentative gestures of welcome more than 15 years ago, but in 1990 it built a fence around the ranks of its ordained clergy.

No matter what we did to try to open up the gate in that fence, all that the ELCA would do is study the issues. I spoke to the first study task force on Human Sexuality in July 1990, for example. The only thing that came out of that months-long study was that, after the director had threats made on her life (we’re talking about a large Protestant church denomination here, folks, they simply withdrew the study documents from further consideration, and waited another decade until the national Assembly (convention)—the ELCA’s highest legislative authority—ordered the church to undertake another study.

In the midst of this, lay people and pastors and one Bishop Emeritus of the church were arrested for blocking the sidewalk with their protest signs at one of the national Assemblies.

The tipping point never came in 2007. Hundreds of us were in Chicago’s Navy Pier as visitors to watch the proceedings, pray for results, and lobby voting members (delegates). But then in Minneapolis this past August, the tipping point was reached. A respectable majority of members in the Assembly voted to lift the restriction against non-celibate lesbian and gay people from being or becoming Pastors of the church.

Two other denominational leaders were immediately enraged, although their warnings were grave and measured, one from President Gerald Kieschnick of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (it figures) and the other from Archbishop Wilton Gregory, President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (and that figures, too).

But this week, the real tip finally occurred. At its Bishop’s meeting October 1–6, national church staff people sat down with Bishops and (for the first time ever) with representatives of Lutherans Concerned/North America, Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, and Goodsoil to discuss the implementation of the changes which were called for in August.

LC/NA’s Executive Director Emily Eastwood: “We are pleased that at long last we are being talked with, instead of just being talked about.” That is fundamental to the discernment process in which the church has always recognized the power of the Holy Spirit to move the Christian community forward. So even with the threat of continued controversy over its liberalizing decision last August, the ELCA is finally trusting the process which is modeled from the beginning of the Christian church (see Acts 15, again),and talking with the believers who are most affected by decisions being made. This is genuine systemic change.

ELM’s President, Rev. Erik Christensen: “Challenging conversations are ahead of us, but these are the challenging conversations waited for twenty years.”

Yet to be discussed, of course, is how the ELCA’s new standards will apply to those of us who have been admitted to the extraordinary (extra ordinem) Lutheran clergy roster, Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. After being removed from the ELCA’s roster in 1991, I applied for and was admitted to the extraordinary roster in 2002 (known then as the Extraordinary Candidacy Project). None of us knows yet whether the ELCA’s executives, Bishops and Church Council will move to accept our roster into their roster as a whole, or whether they will expect each one of us to go through the protracted process of applying for certification alone.

I am adopting a wait-and-see attitude on that, because I am disinclined to reapply if I must prove myself again to some credentialing committee. I have been ordained for 35 years, and serving in my present position for more than five years. Yes, we have wait for conversations about the larger church’s ordination standards, but we have also moved forward in mission and ministry without the larger church’s permission or interference because the Gospel and the Spirit are driving the church, not the other way around.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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