Lutheran (EL
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
Posted on 12/23/2010 5:08:27 AM PST by rhema
Hawley Lutheran Church will split from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America after members voted overwhelmingly Sunday to leave the denomination.
The vote was the culmination of a yearlong debate sparked in part by the ELCA’s 2009 decision to allow gay clergy members who are in same-sex relationships. Previously, the church had permitted gay clergy but required them to remain celibate. In the same year, the ELCA also adopted a controversial statement on human sexuality that opponents said moved the church out of line with biblical teachings.
The decision left the hiring of gay clergy at the discretion of member churches but drew strong reactions nonetheless. Hawley Lutheran began internal debate on the issue in October 2009.
In May 2010, the 1,100-member church held its first vote on leaving the ELCA, which drew support from 58 percent of participants but fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass. In September, the church held another vote to leave, which passed with 73 percent support. Sunday’s vote – which passed 239-60 – completed the departure.
Hawley Lutheran pastor Jeff Teeples said he’s glad to be done with the process, which he said was a difficult one.
“Now, we can move forward,” he said.
Hawley Lutheran is one of several area churches that have left the ELCA – the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States with 4.5 million baptized members – after the gay clergy decision. That backlash has produced its own backlash. After Hawley Lutheran’s September vote to leave, one Forum letter-writer sarcastically derided the move as out of step with Jesus’ teachings.
But Teeples said his church’s decision to leave had as much to do with advancing ministry and following Scripture as it did with the sexuality issues.
In a statement issued Sunday, he said it “grieves us that people have associated our decision to leave the ELCA with intolerance, contempt and bigotry, because these attitudes are not the attitude of Jesus, who we follow and love, and not the attitudes we teach or would want to exhibit.”
Instead, he said in the statement, the decision to leave “unites us to stand upon the Bible as the final authority in all matters of our faith and life and to proclaim Jesus as the Savior of the world.”
The church will join Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, a denomination with a focus on Scripture that formed earlier this decade in response to concerns about the direction of the ELCA. Since the ELCA decision on gay clergy, it has become something of a harbor for former ELCA churches, picking up hundreds of new congregations.
Opponents of Hawley Lutheran’s departure said they’re disappointed but saw the move coming. Floyd Synstelien, a former pastor at the church who voted to stay with the ELCA, said he didn’t think the debate was a fair one because church leaders favored leaving.
He said proponents of the split were effective in convincing the congregation the ELCA was flawed beyond repair.
“It’s disappointing, but we’ll move on,” he said.
Next Sunday, he said he and his wife – Hawley Lutheran members for nearly two decades – will join another Lutheran church.
There are only two position to take: stay, or leave. Being on the fence isn't an option because there is no vote for this (non)position. The former pastor is an idiot. Would he think the debate would be "fair" if the church leaders had favored staying? Of course he would.
He should be excommunicated from this congregation for favoring heresy.
He’ll just move on to a congregation that cozies up to heresy, where he’ll be among friends. It’s important to be in a Laodicean Lutheran congregation that never, ever makes the world upset with the church, you know.
I told my former pastor, that the ELCA was wrong and I would no longer be a member of such an organization. Specifically I will not be ministered to by a practicing homosexual. Yes we are all sinners to one degree or another, but active homosexuality was not within the letter or spirit of G_d’s word. I expect better from a pastor and as such the ELCA needed to disappear as a church.
Choices are Missouri Synod (LCMS) and Wisconsin Synod (WELS).
. . .My real disaffection with the ELCA didn’t start with sex. It began in earnest over the ELCA abortion statement and the subsequent decision by the national council to treat elective abortion for pastors and dependents as a reimbursable medical expense under the church health plan. From the abortion statement, the church said to value my baptism as an infant regards my conception by step-siblings as a morally justifiable reason for terminating the pregnancy that became me at the baptismal font. From the schedule of benefits by the health plan, had my birth-parents in any way been covered under the ELCA health plan, my church would have paid to do it.
I took what steps I could at the time to distance myself: I dropped out of the health plan. It does not help that my present ELCA bishop had, before becoming bishop, been pastor to the late George Tiller, the Wichita, Kansas, late term abortionist murdered in May 2009, and regarded it as less than problematic.
If it was abortion that created the distance between me and the ELCA, the decisions on gay sexuality from August 2009 have only convinced me to seek a somewhat further distance and, Brother, at last I’m taking it.
I’d offer another choice for those leaving the ELCA. The Church of the Lutheran Confession stands firmly on what the Word says, no more and no less. Writing as a pastor in this synod, we move forward to do His work with the Word alone as our guide source.
The new lutheran denomination that has come out of this is the North American Lutheran Church. This may be another choice in addition to the Missouri Synod and Wisconsin-Wells Synod.
A friend of my father who was a pastor of the ELCA has begun pastoring a church that is part of the NALC. I’m not sure where it is, but it’s somewhere in central MN.
Unfortunately, both of my parents are still members of an ELCA church and don’t seem to get the point that when your worshiping body leaders hold up people who are actively and defiantly living in sin to pastor a congregation, to do so is in direct contradiction to the Bible’s teachings. My parents are not “stupid” people. I don’t understand why this is no big deal to them.
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
Not true. My new Church is LCMC and NALC.
I don’t think Floyd Synstelien was being fair, since he favored staying.
In my area presently the choices are ELCA, LCMS or WELS.
Went with LCMS as they do a more traditional service, that I grew up with and use the KJV. The later service does a more modern service with NIV.
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