My church for example at our last congregational meeting had a motion to bar the church leadership (our church council) from considering a man or woman in a committed same-sex relationship for a call (asking them to be our pastor), and it was decided to take a year to meditate on the proposal, so that no one would make a rash decision. I don’t think we’ll pass it, at least in conversations with other church members I don’t think people feel passionate enough about this to vote for it.

The ELCA leadership tends to check with the Lutheran church leadership in Sweden about their experience with cultural matters coming down the pike. That often makes for more realistic and pragmatic decisions than in other denominations.

The social reactionaries still leave ELCA churches for Missouri Synod ones. The great wave of those left the ELCA during the Seventies and Eighties, as far as I know, and that has limited the amount of Culture War in the ELCA since. The LCMS is currently in serious decline, though.

The ranks of socially conservative Episcopalians, especially the ones who are currently trying to appropriate the term “Anglican” to themselves alone, have been pumped up by members of other denominations who would love to see an Anglican schism over gay issues. The Institute for Religion and Democracy has been targeting the Episcopal Church for years in this way.

The Anglican Church in North America web site lists a number of member churches with decidedly un-Anglican sounding names, such as the Anglican Bible Church in Windsor, CA. According to that church’s web site, it’s the result of a merger between an Anglican church and a non-denominational one. From an Episcopalian point of view, that is just plain bizarre. The ACNA site also uses language that seems borrowed from fundamentalism and the neo-pentecostal movement — there’s a lot about “transformation” and “church planting.”

Episcopalians just don’t talk like that — at least, we didn’t use to. Particularly not the high church Episcopalians, who once upon a time were the ones most likely to prefer the term “Anglican,” out of fondness for, well, England, the Oxford Movement, smells and bells, boys’ choirs, watercress sandwiches, and the blue haired matrons with straw hats who keep trying to foist their daughters on the stubbornly single curate… All that could be very annoying at times, but I dislike what seems to have replaced it even more.

I’m an ELCA member (was raised in the Lutheran Church in America, which is one of the groups that later merged into the LCA), and while I can imagine that *individuals* are worked up about the changes, I just can’t see the ELCA fragmenting in the way that TEC has done. (Although I will admit to having been very opposed to the idea of the changes that were implemented this past year, back when they were in discussion 8+ years ago… when I was involved in evangelicalism. Being away from that atmosphere has brought a lot of changes for me personally, and I’m by no means a “liberal” person re. doctrine. Am hoping that most ELCA members are coming from a similar place.)

At any rate, this post (and the linked articles) are very heartening!

I am happy not as many churches have left but more than the 220 churches mentioned have stopped supporting the ELCA financially. So there are still plenty of churches that are pissed.

But yes, let the way the ELCA went about this (7 year process…) be a lesson to other denominations!