Category Archives: Religious News

Lutheran Gay Clergy Retreat

In 1990, a pair of Lutheran congregations in the “Castro”, the San Francisco neighborhood called the “gay capitol of the world”, ordained an openly gay man and a lesbian couple. That was the start of Lutheran Gay and Lesbian Ministries. Later renamed Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM), this agency would ordain and roster over thirty gay and lesbian Lutheran ministry candidates because the ELCA refused to do so. Of course, ELCA policy changed with the momentous churchwide assembly of 2009.

So, what should ELM do now? A new course was charted for ELM at their January board meeting.

Far from feeling it was time to close our doors; we concluded that by creating a network for publicly-identified LGBTQ rostered leaders in a major Protestant denomination, we can participate in changing the church and transforming society. Furthermore, we concluded that we are strongly positioned to provide much needed support to LGBTQ people seeking to become rostered leaders in the Lutheran church. LGBTQ people know what it is like to be on the margins of the church. Through their ministry, LGBTQ rostered leaders are poised to offer an evangelical outreach to many and to work alongside others longing to be connected to a church that truly welcomes all.

ELM will soon be hosting a workshop/retreat at Stony Brook Conference Center in New York. Here are the details, cut and pasted from the ELM website:

The Proclaim retreat is a gathering of publicly identified LGBTQ rostered leaders and seminarians for a time of renewal, community building, and professional development. The 2012 retreat will be held at Stony Point Center, New York, April 18-21. Our keynote speaker is Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, who will join us for most of the retreat.

This retreat is open to members of Proclaim, significant others, and children 3 and under. For information on joining Proclaim go here.

The retreat begins with dinner on Wednesday evening and concludes with lunch on Saturday.

More about the Event:

This retreat will be the second gathering of Proclaim. We will gather together and embrace what it means to be publicly identified leaders as we care for ourselves, as we live in and amongst our communities, and as we serve as public witness to the Gospel.

The keynote speaker this year is Bishop Gene Robinson, the current bishop of the New England diocese of the Episcopalian church. Bp. Robinson is the first publicly identified gay person to be elected bishop in a major Christian denomination. His story is featured in the 2007 feature-length documentary, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” and his book In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God (Seabury Books, New York) was released in 2008.

Program:

Here is a sample of sessions and discussion items for our time together:

What is the banquet that we are invited to? What motivates/propels us forward? What feeds our souls?

Discuss how LGBTQ leaders can shape and reshape church and community in the present and into the future.

Examine how LGBTQ leaders are a gift to the church.

Offer opportunities for LGBTQ leaders to hone and sharpen skills for ministry.

Create a vision of what this community and church might look like in 10 years–when we are all moving/going together.

Registration is OPEN. Go here to register.

Registration Deadline is March 16, 2012.

If you have questions, please contact Rachael Johnson, operations@elm.org

Tampa, Washington & Chicago: hope to see you there

Here are three upcoming events that I’m marking on my schedule. Perhaps a reader or two will decide to attend, but all of you should follow from afar.

April 24 – May 4: United Methodist General Conference, Tampa, Florida

The national (international) convention of United Methodists only convenes every four years. Thus, when they do gather, there is a lot of business to take care of. The first week consists of committee meetings and hearings, and the plenary sessions take place the second week.

The Methodists are the largest of the “mainline” Protestant denominations with over 8 million members. For comparison, the ELCA has around 4 million, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches slightly over 2 million each, and the UCC slightly over 1 million. Of these five denominations, the Methodists are the remaining holdout for ordaining gay clergy, and that will certainly be the issue at the forefront of the upcoming General Convention.

The Methodists are also the most international of the American denominations. While the ELCA belongs to the worldwide Lutheran Federation, that is not a governing body that decides ELCA policy. The same is true with the Episcopalians who are part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. But, within the polity of the UMC, their international sister congregations and conferences are not mere affiliates but actually belong inside the denomination; thus there will be large numbers of international delegates to the upcoming General Convention.

This is also a significant part of the reason why the UMC has not yet voted to ordain gay clergy—the international delegates tend to be much more conservative than the US delegates. The principal gay advocacy group within the UMC is the Reconciling Ministries Network, and I recently visited with Troy Plummer, their executive director, and Pastor Bonnie Beckonchrist, their board chair. Both are cautiously optimistic about prospects for favorable legislation in Tampa, but suggest it will take nearly 65% favorable vote from the US delegates to bring the total margin to 50% or better.

I’m hoping to be there for the plenary sessions to do some live blogging.

June 25 – 28: UCC Coalition National Gathering, Elmhurst College, Illinois

The United Church of Christ has the most progressive history regarding gay inclusion of any of the five principal mainline denominations. The UCC Coalition is their advocacy arm, and this year’s national gathering will be historic. In June, 1972 openly gay seminarian William Johnson was ordained in a UCC conference in northern California, and this year’s gathering will celebrate the 40th anniversary of his ordination. Elmhurst College of Elmhurst, Illinois (a west Chicago suburb) will host the gathering and will also be the home of The William B. Johnson “Guestship”.

Elmhurst College has named its annual LGBT Guestship in honor of an esteemed alumnus, the Reverend Dr. William R. Johnson. A member of the Class of 1968, Johnson is a United Church of Christ minister and vice president for member relations of the UCC’s Council for Health and Human Service Ministries. In 1972, he became the first openly gay person in modern history to gain ordination to the mainstream Christian ministry.

“For four decades, he has worked tirelessly and effectively on behalf of the rights and dignity of all people and, in particular, of LGBT people of faith and their loved ones,” said President S. Alan Ray in announcing the William R. Johnson Guestship. “He has provided counsel and support to hundreds of LGBT seminarians and clergy in the UCC and beyond.” Ray noted that a scholarship in Johnson’s name supports openly gay UCC seminarians studying for parish ministry.

July 6 – 10: Biennial Assembly of Lutherans Concerned, Washington, D.C.

I attended the 2010 Biennial in Minneapolis, and I hope to attend this year also. In 2010, LCNA celebrated the momentous changes at the ECLA Churchwide Assembly of 2009. The preacher during the primary worship service was former NY Synod Bishop Stephen Bouman, who currently works within the ELCA home office as Executive Director of Congregational and Synodical Mission. His participation symbolized that gays and their advocates were now insiders, and Bouman’s sermon encouraged LCNA to use their gifts of advocacy for those who remain on the margins, especially the immigrant.

This year, the symbolism will be heightened as the keynote address will be given by none other than Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA.

Reconciling Works 2012 is more than a conference. It is an opportunity to explore and live out the work of reconciliation that we are called to do. Justice requires reconciliation, and reconciliation takes effort. Throughout our time together, we will work on justice issues from the intersection of oppressions (racism, sexism, ablism, etc.) and through the lens of full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the life of the Lutheran Church.

We’ll worship together, using a rich variety of traditions of the worshipping community. We’ll provide a blend of the familiar and the unique drawing on our Lutheran heritage and the wealth of liturgical practice in the area. We’ll network with one another, hear stories of joy and frustration, and make decisions together about the future direction of Lutherans Concerned / North America and our Reconciling in Christ communities.

Bringing down the “fat man”

Humphrey Bogart, reprising the role of detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, battled evil in the Sidney Greenstreet character of Kaspar Gutman, aka “the fat man”. Though bested by Bogart’s character, “the fat man” slipped away to Istanbul, no doubt to prepare for a sequel.

What about real life? Can college coed Sandra Fluke bring down the fat man of conservative radio: the bombastic, foul-mouthed, mean-spirited Rush Limbaugh? Have his comments degenerated beyond chronic bad taste into the legal realm of slander?

Sandra Fluke is the law student from Georgetown University who was prepared to offer testimony before the Issa Committee on contraception, but she was excluded and only five conservative men were allowed to speak. Later, she was invited back and offered testimony to a House Democratic committee. She testified in favor of health insurance coverage that included contraceptives without a co-pay.

It was her testimony before that committee that caused Limbaugh to become ballistic.

What does it say about the college coed Susan [sic] Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

In my former law practice, I never handled a slander case, but I know they are generally very difficult to pursue, especially against public figures. But I hope she does it. I hope she sues the blathering idiot.

We could echo journalist Edward R. Murrow’s ringing challenge to a fat man bully of an earlier time, Joseph McCarthy–Have you no decency?— but in the case of Rush Limbaugh, the answer is only too clear.

Santorum says I’m not a Christian

Of course, he doesn’t know me. We’ve never talked, and I doubt he’s read any of my writing, though I ‘d be delighted to send him a copy of A Wretched Man with the hopes that he publicly disses it. I’d send him a copy of Prowl, too, but that might offend his piety because the book drops a few ffenheimers. But, he knows I’m not a Christian because I’m a self-avowed, unrepentant, practicing liberal. What is more, I’m all about sex, because I’m a Democrat. From the 2008 interview in which he suggested that liberals could not be Christian:

Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. The prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom.

I’m sorry I missed Woodstock, but I was preoccupied dodging bullets and feeling scared, homesick, and abandoned in the jungles of Vietnam. I was pretty much celibate in those days, too, so I’m not quite sure why Santorum thinks I’m oversexed. I’ll ask my wife what she thinks.

Isn’t the sanctimonious, “we’re Christians, but you’re not”, what we really dislike most about the religious right? Well, I take that back; there are too many delicious absurdities to rank them.

The Power of Woman

As a former attorney, I appreciate the line of Charles Dickens spoken by Mr. Bumble, the law is a ass. In the context of the novel, Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble recognized that his own wife was more powerful than he in their marriage relationship, and the patriarchal presumptions of the olde English common law were false.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the successful struggle for woman’s suffrage, and during the second half the women’s liberation movement achieved notable social and legal successes. To be sure, the victory is not yet won, and pay inequality in the workplace is an obvious example of residual sexism in our culture.

So too the church. Except for a bright, shining moment in the earliest days of the Jesus movement, the men have been in control until recently. Contemporaneous with the women’s movement in secular society, the role of women in the church has changed, and the wide advance of female clergy is eloquent testimony; yet, in my own ELCA, only a handful of women have yet been elected to the episcopate, which remains mostly but not exclusively male. This weekend, I will travel to South Bend, Indiana to attend an Episcopal Diocesan Convention, and the honored guest of the Northern Indiana Diocese will be the Most Reverend Katherine Jefforts Schori, the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA, who is the first and only female to head a major Christian denomination in the US.

Though female leadership in the church is not yet completely de jure, along with Mr. Bumble I recognize the de facto power of women. Theological critics of the 2009 pro-gay actions of the ELCA are right in one thing—it was the women’s movement in the church a generation ago that set the stage for the recent successes of the gay rights movement: a “slippery slope” some would claim, but I prefer the metaphor of opening the door.

History repeats itself and not always in a negative way. The civil war in Northern Ireland finally ended when Protestant and Catholic women said enough. More recently, the women of Liberia rose up and ousted the corrupt Charles Taylor regime and elected a female as the first head of state in an African nation.

One of the Liberian women leaders was Leymah Roberta Gbowee, a Lutheran and the keynote speaker at the Women of the ELCA Triennial Convention in Spokane this summer. Earlier, she had been a scholarship recipient through the International Leadership Development Program of the ELCA in 2006-2007 to support her study in peace building at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va. An announcement from Oslo, Norway this week named Gbowee as a co-winner, with two other women, of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The following is from an ELCA press release:

The starting point of the women’s movement was war fatigue, said Gbowee, a mother of six children. She grew tried of watching children die from hunger and “waking up every morning and not knowing whether a tomorrow was possible. You can’t plan for the future.” Along with thousands of other women from across Liberia, Gbowee wanted to dream of a better community.

She decided it was time to stop the war and called together women of all faiths — Christian, Muslim, indigenous and others — from across Liberia to “step out,” recognizing that Liberian women can play a critical role in peace building.

Using the experiences of the women before them, Gbowee used prayer, picketing and silence to further their mission. Despite insults and other behaviors that came their way, Gbowee said, “We kept quiet because we had a sense of purpose and sense of direction.” The women also put together statements of peace for African governments, engaged the media and initiated personal, one-to-one conversations with power brokers “to see how we could get the peace that Liberia was searching for,” she said.

“Leymah Gbowee’s life and leadership are a witness to the power of women to resist forces of violence and domination by creating a movement for reconciliation and peace,” said ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson. “In Liberia, I experienced her passionate commitment to rebuilding a nation torn by civil war not by seeking vengeance, but through her faith to encourage dialogue and inclusiveness at all levels of society.”

Bumble concluded his soliloquy: the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.

The ELCA and Ecumenical Partners

The 2011 ELCA Churchwide Assembly (CWA11) was hopeful, spirited, and frequently emotional. I was often moved to tears, and I was not alone. Assembly speakers routinely received standing ovations.

The ELCA believes in ecumenism, the expression of unity and cooperation with other religious bodies. Wet eyes and and a long, loud ovation filled the assembly hall when Bishop Hanson embraced Dr. Sayyid Sayeed, the National Director of The Islamic Society of North America. Similarly, the voting members rose to their feet to greet Bishop George Walker of The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion) when he addressed the Assembly.

Bishop Walker’s presence was both the culmination of five years of dialogue with the AME Zion Church, and also the prelude to scheduled meetings in Salisbury, North Carolina between leaders of the two denominations.

Last Friday, the 16th of September, leaders of the two denominations celebrated what promises to be an “unprecedented agreement between historically white and black churches” in a communion service at St. John’s Lutheran Church of Salisbury.

The mutuality expressed at the religious service and also at the discussions the following day are the result of a fortuitous geographical commonality. Salisbury is home to AME Zion’s Hood Seminary, Livingstone College, and the ELCA’s North Carolina Synod Headquarters. Rubbing elbows together in the same small city led to friendships which in turn led to the current discussions.

Georene Jones, a St. John’s member and student in the theological studies program at Hood Theological Seminary, called Friday’s service an “absolute affirmation of what I believe.”

“It gives me great hope for the future of the church,” she said. “This is a culmination of my hopes and dreams.”

See reporter Nathan Hardin’s excellent report in the Salisbury Post.

Earliest Christian Manuscript Discovered

Antiquities experts have released the contents of a Christian manuscript that may predate Paul’s letters and the gospels. Discovered in one of the many caves of the Arbel cliffs overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the fragment appears to be an early version of a passage that later appeared in Mark and the Synoptic gospels. Carbon dating places the document in the third or fourth decade of the first century near the time of the crucifixion. Some suggest the fragment contains the actual words of Jesus of Nazareth.

Here is the translation from the Aramaic text:

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman? He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has not made to lay together, let no one join in marriage.”

I apologize for my falsehood. Of course, no such text has been discovered or exists; yet, the actual passage on divorce, which has nothing to do with same-gender relationships, has been coopted by conservative defenders of “biblical marriage”, who latch onto the phrase “God made them male and female” and take it out of the context. As the nation and our churches wrestle with marriage equality issues, this divorce text has become the “clobber passage” du jour. My purely fictive version of Jesus’ teaching on divorce is no less perverse than the interpretation that twists this passage into authority against marriage equality. I have merely written down in plain language what some infer from the text.

When you see it in black and white, it seems rather far-fetched, doesn’t it? Is my fictive version equivalent to the actual version below? Of course not, yet some would have you believe so. Exegesis is the process of getting ‘out’ of the text what is truly there in the first place. The opposite of exegesis is eisogesis. This is the process of putting ‘into’ the text something that wasn’t intended by the author.

For reference sake, here is the actual text from Mark 10:2-9 (NRSV).

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Stimulus not austerity

Hey, I know, this is “a blog of progressive, religious themes.” My last post was pure economics, and now I’m going to say the same thing again, only different. There is religion here too, but it’s implicit–economic justice, care for the widow and the orphan, blessed are the poor, and more–but I’m not explicitly talking about that. Our national and world economies are about to pushed over a cliff, and we need to shout that as loud as we can.

My last post featured Economist Robert Reich who called for President Obama to “go big”, and I also mentioned Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Today, it is Krugman’s turn to debunk austerity in favor of stimulus in a New York Times article entitled “Misguided Deficit Worries make Unemployment Worse”. Krugman writes,

And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been making the real problem — mass unemployment, which is eating away at the foundations of our nation — much worse.

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs.

The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity.

State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs, and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.

And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

OK, I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy.

Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.

Are Reich and Krugman merely lonely voices crying in the wilderness? Consider this from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD):

The pursuit of austerity measures and deficit cuts is pushing the world economy toward disaster in a misguided attempt to please global financial markets, the annual report of the United Nations economic think tank UNCTAD said on Tuesday.

The report, entitled “Post-crisis policy challenges in the world economy,” savaged U.S. and European economic policies and called for wage increases, stricter regulation of financial markets, including a return to a system of managed exchange rates, and a conscious break with market-led thinking.

“The message here is very pragmatic: we need to reverse our course quickly,” said UNCTAD Secretary General Supachai Panitchpakdi. [former head of the World Trade Organization]

And this from The Atlantic, in an article subtitled How a stubborn misreading of classical economists — combined with a hyper-partisan Republican Party — haunts the U.S. economy [emphasis added]:

The intellectual actions of these extreme free marketeers do not take place in a vacuum. They interact with a political structure comprised of lobbies and pseudo think-tanks to promote policies that, while wrapped in the cloak of promoting free markets, ultimately serve to redistribute growth to the top of the wealth scale. “Efficient market hypotheses” and “rational expectations”–the idea that absent government interference, market participants will make optimally efficient decisions–leads directly to supply-side tax cuts, deregulation of financial markets, the formation of financial bubbles, the acceptance of income stagnation, and disinvestment in public goods. And these measures, in turn, have delivered levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since the late 1920s, along with policy handcuffs that today have us arguing about how to reduce, rather than strengthen, regulations.

And here’s where I get around to religion.

Going big

In the fall of 1966, this small-town boy from central Minnesota arrived on the campus of Dartmouth College as a “pea-green freshman”. I was the twenty-third string quarterback on the freshman football team. Professor Jeffrey Hart spent each hour of freshman English lighting and re-relighting his pipe as he strolled in front of the class, eliciting discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Despite Hart’s political conservatism in an otherwise liberal environment(he was a close associate of Wm. F. Buckley), he was the perfect icon for my introduction to an Ivy League education. To be sure, I was more than a little overwhelmed.

It was then that I first heard the name of Robert Reich. Though small in stature, upperclassman Reich was the biggest man on campus. If my memory serves, Reich was a leading commentator on WDCR, the college radio station, and founder of an unofficial experimental college. Reich’s taped speech on the three slain civil rights workers in Mississippi was used by subsequent speech classes as the model, par excellence. It was clear then that big things were in store for Robert Reich.

Of course, I am speaking of the man who would later serve in the Clinton cabinet and who is currently a frequent commentator on television and in print media. Reich and Nobel-prize-winning Paul Krugman are the two leading economists who advocate for the positive and necessary role of the federal government to stimulate a stagnant economy.

Reich is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley. Today he posts an op-ed piece, which challenges President Obama to “Give ‘em hell” in his speech to Congress next week. He hopes the President “goes big” and advocates:

rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, creating a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, and lending money to cash-starved states and cities.

Republicans will oppose it, of course. They’ll say the stimulus didn’t work the first time (they’re wrong — it saved 3 million jobs but it was way too small given the drop in consumer spending as well as budget cuts by states and cities), and we can’t afford it (wrong again — the yield on 10-year Treasury bills is now 2 percent, meaning this is the best time to borrow. And if growth isn’t restored soon, the debt/GDP ratio will balloon beyond belief). But their real hope is to keep the economy anemic through Election Day 2012 so voters will send Obama home. [emphasis added]

The coming year that will culminate in the 2012 election will be fascinating and frightening. For eighty years, America has functioned on the basis of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—a controlled capitalist economy with social safety nets—that reversed the laissez-faire, “hands-off”, environment that preceded it.

By all accounts, President Herbert Hoover was a brilliant man with an exemplary record of government service prior to the collapse of an unregulated stock market in the fall of ‘29, his first year as President. As history tells us, Hoover’s laissez-faire ideology failed him and the country, and the economy continued to spiral downward into the Great Depression. The election of FDR in ‘32 and his huge, landslide reelection in ‘36 spelled the end of laissez-faire, replaced by the interventionist fiscal policies of economist John Maynard Keynes who provided the intellectual warrant for New Deal macroeconomics. The primary poster child of the New Deal was the Social Security Act, which the current poll-leading Republican presidential candidate refers to as a “Ponzi Scheme”.

For eighty years, this has been the American way, even when the federal government was in the hands of the GOP. Remember the “me-too” Republicans of the Eisenhower years, Nixon’s famous dictum, “I am now a Keynesian in economics”, and the willingness of the icon of conservative Republicanism, Ronald Reagan, to enact economic stimulus when needed.

Will all that change in 2012? For failing to pay attention to history, will we be doomed to repeat it? Will the Tea Party return America to the laissez-faire policies of Herbert Hoover? When leading Republicans flub minor details of American history, it is laughable, but when they forget the “going big” lessons of American macroeconomics, it is downright scary.

For generations, pundits joked that Democrats continued to run against Herbert Hoover though he was long retired at the will of the electorate. Perhaps it’s time to run against Hoover again.

Consequences for New Prague Pastor

Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) is around ten years old. Like the WordAlone movement with whom it shares many members, it was born as a dissident voice within the ELCA, but as the years have passed, it has become a separate church body, and its relationship with the ELCA has become increasingly adversarial. Since the ELCA adopted pro-LGBT policies at its national assembly in 2009, LCMC has openly encouraged ELCA congregations and members to split from the ELCA and join their organization. The mission field of the LCMC would not appear to be the unchurched but rather a poaching of ELCA congregations. LCMC regularly provides speakers to congregations in conflict to advocate for their organization and against the ELCA. While many of their speakers may be fair-minded, there are also plenty of reports of heavy-handed behavior and misinformation.

As the relationship between the ELCA and LCMC deteriorated, ELCA secretary David Swartling, the principal person responsible for interpretation and enforcement of the ECLA constitution, issued a memorandum to Synod Bishops and Vice-Presidents on Jan 19, 2010 that stated clearly and explicitly:

“Dual Rostering” of ordained ministers and congregations is impermissible under the Constitutions, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

Thus, when the senior pastor and council of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation of nearby New Prague, Minnesota, persisted in their attempt to dual affiliate with LCMC, they were naïve at best and belligerent at worst. The refusal of the council to allow the Synod Bishop to speak to interested persons at the church building prior to the scheduled vote regarding dual affiliation suggests more than innocent misunderstanding and is consistent with other reports of the heavy-handed tactics of LCMC supporters.

When the congregation voted down the resolution to dual affiliation offered by the senior pastor and council by a margin of 55% to 45%, it was effectively a vote of no confidence and a rebuke of the pastor and council, and now there appear to be consequences of failed leadership. The senior pastor has penned an open letter to the congregation, published in the congregational newsletter that appears online. The pastor writes (emphasis added):

A short time ago I visited with our Interim Bishop Glen Nycklemoe of the Minneapolis Area Synod. In the midst of our conversation, he presented me with several possible choices, including my resignation as your pastor.

However, rather than expressing contrition, the pastor attacks.

As I listened to his reasons, I was astounded at the level of misinformation that has made its way to his office … I am distraught over the lies that have been spoken.

I am more and more realizing that the church … has dramatically changed, and has more interest in protecting its hierarchical interests and structures than in seeking truth.

The pastor didn’t offer any details of the alleged lies and misinformation, nor any rebuttal to the fact that he and the council knowingly and willingly challenged their bishop and defied the constitution of the church body that nurtured him in his ministry and ordained him. By standing with the LCMC against the ELCA, he chose poorly.

If he doesn’t recognize the offense in his actions, then he is indeed naïve.