The ELCA Elects its First Openly Gay Bishop

Last week at its annual assembly the Southwest California Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) elected its first openly gay Bishop—Guy Erwin, who is a theology professor at California Lutheran University in California Oaks as well as the interim pastor of a nearby ELCA parish. Erwin has been ordained a mere two years because the ELCA has ordained openly gay pastors only since the momentous decisions of its 2009 Churchwide Assembly, which allowed the ordination of partnered gays. He respectfully waited to be properly ordained rather than join the ranks of those who had been irregularly ordained before the ELCA officially permitted it. He is in a partnered relationship and identifies with a Native American nation. He took his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his graduate degrees from Yale.

His election was not unexpected since it was rumored that he would be nominated. He was already well-known because of a feature article in the ELCA magazine The Lutheran about his ordination as a partnered gay. He is a favored theologian of the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, Mark Hanson. Moreover, since the 2009 decisions that allowed the blessing and ordination of partnered gays it was inevitable that an openly gay or lesbian pastor would be elected as Bishop sooner or later.

There are a number of significant effects of this ordination. For one, it seals and reinforces the tacit commitment of the ELCA to normalize homosexual conduct. The election of a partnered gay to the high office of Bishop certainly affirms the sexuality involved in that partnership. This affirmation will in turn encourage more synods to ordain partnered gays and more parishes to bless—or, more likely, “marry”—partnered gays. I wrote “tacit commitment” because the ELCA does not yet have any public, normative biblical or theological rationale for its normalization of homosexual conduct. Its 2009 Social Statement on Sexuality admits that there was no consensus in the church on the bottom-line issue of the moral legitimation of gay sex. Yet it changed two of the central practices of the church—ordination and marriage—anyway. This, by the way, is from a church that prides itself in its commitment to theological guidance of its life and mission.

There will be few open protests to his election since the “commanding heights” of the church are heartily in favor of it. Open resistance would mean a diminished future for pastors in the church. The phony provision to respect the “bound conscience” of traditionalists will be narrowed further to pastors and individuals in parishes who don’t make any fuss. There is already little public fuss because most pastors and their parishes are terrified even to bring up this subject, fearing rightly that it will cost them members either way they go.

But there will be those pastors and laypeople throughout the ELCA who will find this more than they can stomach and will depart for the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) or for the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). The Southwest California Synod has already lost many of its largest churches to the LCMC. How many more will leave is unclear. Maybe the wave of leavings of the ELCA is over, though a continuing stream of churches has been departing even before this decision. The larger effects on the ELCA will consist of individual Lutherans drifting off to other churches or simply withholding their money from the synodical and national expressions of the church.

The major repercussion of the election of Erwin will be international. The growing African Lutheran churches will distance themselves further from the ELCA, much like the African Anglican Churches separated from their Episcopalian counterparts. Already the Ethopian Evangelical Church Mekane Jesus, the second largest Lutheran body in the world, has terminated its relationship with the ELCA and the Church of Sweden. That termination also ended the “companion” relationship between the South Central Synod of the Ethopian Evangelical Church Mekane Jesus and the Southwest California Synod of the ELCA, the Synod that ordained Erwin. The Ethiopian church has instead established formal relations with the North American Lutheran Church.

The next in line will most likely be the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania—six million and growing—which had already planned to send a Bishop to the annual NALC Convocation to be held in Pittsburgh in August. After the election of Erwin the Tanzanians will likely break with the ELCA and move to establish relations with the NALC. Other African churches will probably follow that pattern.

These international effects will be embarrassing to the ELCA, which prides itself so much in its “inclusivity.” But it seems there are limits to that theme, both at home and abroad. The realignment of Christianity moves apace before our very eyes.

another socalled church to get the Hell out of, asap!

go find a church that at least tries to uphold basic Biblical teachings and moral standards

allowing that we are all human, there ARE still some more genuinely=Christian churches than this one, that for sure!

-————today’s reading (at least, this comes to mind...)
take it or leave it, of course...

The Rise of False Prophets (2 Peter 2: —)

2 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a [a]preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; 6 and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter; 7 and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men 8 (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds), 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from [b]temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who [c]indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority.

Daring, self-willed, they do not tremble when they revile angelic [d]majesties, 11 whereas angels who are greater in might and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord. 12 But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, reviling where they have no knowledge, will in [e]the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed, 13 suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their [f]deceptions, as they carouse with you, 14 having eyes full of adultery that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed, accursed children; 15 forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; 16 but he received a rebuke for his own transgression, for a mute donkey, speaking with a voice of a man, restrained the madness of the prophet.

17 These are springs without water and mists driven by a storm, for whom the [g]black darkness has been reserved. 18 For speaking out arrogant words of vanity they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error, 19 promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved. 20 For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. 21 For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them. 22 [h]It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.”

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