Please indulge me with some more Casablanca analogies.  Last week, I sarcastically used iconic Casablanca movie lines to criticize the Lutheran Core announcement that they are taking their football and leaving.  Well, that’s not exactly what they said.  In a rhetorical slight of hand, they claimed that the rest of us ELCA types remaining on the field of play are the ones who have left them.  Whatever.

So how are we to respond?

One approach is to wring our hands and cry in our beer.  This is the anxiety laden, sky is falling, response.  A fellow named Jim Smith offered a comment on Pretty Good Lutherans blog that exemplifies this attitude:

This is a very difficult time in the ELCA, and it is far worse across this nation in terms of congregations in conflict and pain than many imagine. I have many friends across the ELCA and served on some national efforts and what I am hearing is frightening in terms of congregations laying off staff, closing, having to merge, or just imploding. Not a few, not just one or two in a Synod, but hundreds, and yes, probably thousands.

I don’t know Mr. Smith, and his comment is all I know about his views.  His concern for the ELCA appears legitimate. and he doesn’t appear to be a CORE rabble rouser.  But, I take issue with his blame game and priorities.

I was a CWA voting member. At the assembly, I met over 10 voting members who were for the changes, but voted no because they knew it would destroy the church.

I applaud them. We need to move beyond what we want to what is best for the whole church.

The implication is that the majority of voting members who supported the various resolutions were selfish (how demeaning is it to dismiss the LGBT fairness claims as merely “what we want”).  Should church unity be the paramount concern rather than righting a wrong and seeking justice?  Is the most important thing to stick together even at the expense of perpetuating bias, prejudice, and inequality?  Don’t blame the CORE and WordAlone types for leaving, blame the rest of us for forcing their hand.  CORE had threatened to leave, we should have listened to them and knuckled under to their threats.

Emily Eastwood, the Executive Director of Lutherans Concerned North America (an LGBT advocacy group), offers a cogent rebuttal to this view in a Nov 19 press release.

It seems with yesterday’s [CORE] announcement that some ELCA Lutherans cannot even tolerate being in the same church family with congregations who accept us.  Anger and fear have overtaken the great commandments from Jesus himself: to love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

For 35 years LC/NA has never isolated itself from those who disagree with us. Nor have we threatened to lead an exodus from the denomination by those congregations who found the wait too long or the social statement well short of the advocacy needed for LGBT people in church and society.  We have never called for congregations to withhold giving to the ELCA; in fact, we encourage additional stewardship, especially in times like these.

Mr. Smith is correct: there is lots of worry in the ELCA these days over defecting members, defecting congregations, and especially withheld funds that have impacted the mission and ministry work of the ELCA. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: CORE knows how to inflict pain, but do they know how to heal?

So, how do we move forward?  Where do we go from here?  Minneapolis is history.

ELCA presiding Bishop Mark Hanson issued a statement and a video last week:

The presiding bishop quoted Romans 5: 1-2a in his open letter: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”

Hanson wrote: “We stand together in God’s grace, but we are not standing still. We proclaim Jesus Christ and are fully engaged in this mission by actively caring for the world that God loves.”  He added that in serving God’s mission, members bring their diversity, tradition and disagreements.

“We go forward in this mission trusting that ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Romans 5:5b),'” he wrote.

Blogger Doug Kings criticized the statement as mere public relations, lacking in substance but heavy in fluff:

Obviously the release of the letter and video is an attempt to balance the “negative energy” surrounding last week’s mass layoffs at the ELCA churchwide office, stories of withheld mission support and departing congregations, and the CORE announcement that it would be forming a new Lutheran denomination. All of that, however, is barely acknowledged in the letter itself.

As so often happens with institutions in trouble, the assumption is made that the real problem is public perception. All we have to do is manage the news cycle. We’ll drown out the bad news by shouting good news even louder.

Bishop Hanson’s letter then listed some positives to suggest business as usual. “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.”  But it’s not business as usual.  The characters of Bogart and Bergman aren’t in Paris anymore, they’re in Casablanca.

Bogie’s first response was to cry in his beer, but by movie’s end he had embraced the new reality, and his character rose to new heights of social consciousness.  We must do the same.  Instead of ignoring the momentous changes of Minneapolis, we should embrace them.  Instead of apologizing for our new policies, we should shout from the rooftops.  Let’s stop being embarrassed about what was accomplished, and let’s be proud of what was done.  There is a whole generation of youngsters out there that has been turned off by the hypocrisy of the church.  Tell them what we have done. 

Consider this.  A week ago, at the semi-annual meeting of the ELCA Church Council:

the Church Council by voice vote overwhelmingly approved the waiver of the prohibition forbidding application for reinstatement until 5 years had passed since the removal or resignation.  The five-year waiting period is a general policy applying to anyone who had been removed for any disciplinary cause or who resigned voluntarily. The waiver granted by today’s action only applies to those removed and those who resigned solely for the reason of their being in a same-gender, committed relationship.   Applications to begin the reinstatement process can now be submitted immediately.  The process is individual and can vary in the length of time for completion.

This action by the Church Council is the first official enactment of the church council pursuant to actions at the August 2009 Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis that ordered the elimination of the policy that precluded service in the church by ministers in committed, same-gender relationships.   Also today, the church council soundly defeated a proposed amendment to policy that would have required an additional step of approval for candidates in same-gender relationships by 2/3 of the synod council’s executive committee in order to be reinstated.

And how do we hear this news?  Does the ELCA boldly proclaim its actions?  No, it comes in a press release and blog entry from Lutherans Concerned North America.  Why should the ELCA be embarrassed when it does a good thing?

Perhaps it’s too soon, and we’re still grieving the loss of members.  Bogie and Bergman can’t be together, but Bogie sees that it’s for the good, and he promises Bergman that she’ll come to that realization also, “maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

Tomorrow, Sunday the 8th of November, the Lutheran church of Sweden will ordain Eva Brunne as a bishop in ceremonies at the Cathedral in Uppsala.  Swedish Archbishop Anders Wejryd will conduct joint ordinations of Brunne, as Bishop of Stockholm, and Tuulikki Koivunen Bylund, as Bishop of Härnösand in northern Sweden.

That two women are being ordained as bishops is noteworthy, but the real news is that Brunne is a lesbian in a long-term, committed relationship with another female pastor.  This ordination of an openly lesbian woman as a bishop follows the news a few weeks ago that the Lutheran Church of Sweden will conduct marriage ceremonies of gay couples, which has been permitted by Swedish law since May.

The ordination ceremonies follow the election of Brunne a few months ago.  A secular, gay, European blog, Eurout.com, commented at that time, in a post entitled, God Bless Sweden:

With 413 to 365 she won the runoff-election of the Lutheran Church in Stockholm, after she was already the favorite candidate of the majority of pastors during the nomination. “She has this natural authority,” said her fellow church members after the election in several TV interviews. “Her enthusiasm and the ability to see the whole picture, to not get lost in details makes her so precious for this position.”

I want to add, her sense of humor doesn’t hurt either. When Brunne, who was a pastor in Stockholm for 16 years, was asked what she does to relax in her free time, she answered, “I read crime fiction. And I carve. The things you do to conform to Jesus, huh?”

Her partner Gunilla Lindén, who’s also a pastor, gave birth to their now 3 years old son after they entered a registered partnership. International journalists addressed whether this is a problem for the Swedish church, but Eva Brunne only joked, “Um, why? The backyard of the bishop’s house is really big enough.”

There are conflicting reports whether UK Anglican representatives will boycott the ordination.  An Anglican cleric who blogs as Madpriest writes, with “embarrassment”:

Five bishops from various levels within the Anglican Church, including Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, have decided not to attend the November 8th ordination of the openly gay Eva Brunne to be the next Bishop of Stockholm.

“The Anglican Church has a moratorium right now concerning the ordination of bishops who live together with someone of the same sex,” Alan Harper, a bishop from Armagh in Northern Ireland, stated.

Back in July, two UK bishops warned that allowing homosexuals to be married in Swedish churches would lead to “an impairment of the relationship” between the Church of England and the Church of Sweden.

In addition to bishops from the Churches of England and Ireland, the churches of Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have also elected to skip the ordination, although without providing any specific reason.

Representatives from the churches of South Africa, the Philippines, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Germany are among the international representatives who have accepted the Church of Sweden’s invitation to attend Sunday’s ceremony.

But Swedish Archbishop Wejryd denies a boycott, according to the English language Swedish newspaper and website entitled The Local.  Wejryd indicated that officials from other countries and other denominations are often invited but seldom attend Swedish ordinations:

“We send invitations to those with the highest rank. That’s why the Archbishop of Canterbury received an invitation, but no one expected him to say yes.”

He added that the Church of England would be represented by the Reverend Karen Schmidt, who serves as the Bishop’s Chaplain for the Portsmouth Diocese, with which the Stockholm Diocese has a twinning relationship whereby church leaders from both diocese conduct reciprocal visits with one another.

“The bishop, David Bingley of Portsmouth, couldn’t make it but will attend Eva Brunne’s reception the following Sunday,” Wejryd told the newspaper.

A blog entitled Thinking Anglicans also reports on the controversy, imagined or real, with many interesting comments such as: “So what’s stopping us (the North Americans) from joining with the Church of Sweden and the ELCA and telling the C of E to go get stuffed?”

Pretty Good Lutherans blog offers several links to blog posts or articles critical of Lutheran Core (one of these was to my own post yesterday).  With a hat tip to blogger Susan Hogan for her list, this post will dig into each link a bit.

In a letter to the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune entitled “A continuing reformation”, David Weiss suggests the ELCA’s new policy on gays is “a huge change for the better.”  Without naming Lutheran Core, Weiss concludes his op-ed piece with these words:

So, to those who say that the ELCA betrayed its own Lutheran heritage last August, I beg to differ. The heart of the Reformation is about grace and welcome offered as a free gift to people otherwise made anxious by social and religious forces. And this year, at long last, from the heart of the Reformation I’m saying to my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, “Welcome home.”

A second op-ed piece is offered by former bishop of the St Paul area synod, Rev. Lowell Erdahl.  Writing on MPR news, Erdahl suggests “Unlearning the things that used to be obvious”.  He uses the analogy of the rejection of Copernicus five centuries ago: 

Convinced by what was obvious in nature and clearly proclaimed in the Bible, Luther called Copernicus a fool. Calvin asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”

Erdahl then suggests that he “was wrong in my understanding of both homosexual humanity and the Bible.”  Erdahl argues that the Biblical texts cited by the opposition “relate to lustful, exploitive same-sex activity, such as temple prostitution, abuse of prisoners and pederasty, but say nothing about homosexuality as we understand it today,” and such texts should not dictate the church’s policy toward the “significant segment of humanity who, through no choice of their own, are attracted to, fall in love with and desire to live in lifelong partnership with persons of the same sex.”

Erdahl concludes: “It will be a great day when homosexual humanity is as clearly understood and as fully affirmed as Copernican astronomy is today.”

The third link is to blogger Joelle Colville-Hanson, an ELCA pastor in Iowa, who confronts Lutheran Core directly, based on comments on Core’s website.

CORE Encouraging Congregations to Oust Pastors who Don’t Agree with them

 

Lutheran CORE is playing dirty. Got a pastor who agrees with the churchwide assembly decision or simply refuses to make a big old issue out of it? Get rid of them. Yup that’s their suggestion…

This was originally on their resources of “What to do now” You won’t find it on their webpage anymore because they have altered it –but for now it is still here: CORE Suggestions -don’t be surprised if they cover their ass and change that.

In an earlier post on her blog, Pastor Joelle took Core to task for their call for a funding boycott of the ELCA, mocking their stance as “”Well we will stay, call ourselves members of the ELCA, keep our jobs as pastors and other positions in the ELCA, vote in conference and synod assemblies, insist bishops and other leaders in the ELCA listen to us, scold and lecture the ELCA but will not sully our pure wallets by supporting the ELCA with our gold and silver.”

In the next link on Pretty Good Lutherans, Pastor S. Blake Duncan of Illinois also criticizes Core for withholding funds.

When we give as Christians, we are giving of ourselves – our time and our financial resources – out of a sense that everything we have and everything we are is given to us from God. So we give back to God what is already God’s so that the love of Christ can be proclaimed through the ministry of the church. The money I give to my congregation pays for the ministry of the whole church: for the hospital visits, the food pantry, the worship services, the bread and wine of communion, the Sunday school, confirmation. Besides funding our local ministry, a portion is sent to the synod as benevolence. This benevolence pays for Lutheran Social Services’ work of feeding and helping those in need; it pays for synod staff such as the new outreach coordinator who is now working directly with the Wartburg Parish; it provides resources to keep struggling congregations open and serving their communities in places where the need is great but resources are few – such as Trinity Lutheran Church in Kankakee; it pays for the First Call continuing education program for new pastors. A portion is also sent on to the ELCA, where it pays for churchwide youth events, disaster response, new congregational start-ups, campus ministry, Lutheran World Relief, and on and on. The money I give to my congregation each week does all of this! And this is possible only because my congregation is a partner with both the Central/Southern Illinois Synod and the ELCA. To stop giving is to imperil these ministries and risk hurting the most vulnerable programs and people. (Emphasis added)

The final link is to a brief letter to the editor of Star News in Elk River, Minnesota in which an ELCA parishioner notes, “when I heard an emotional plea from the pulpit last Sunday to urge the congregation to vote to leave the ELCA,” that parishioner and others began to work to ensure all views are heard in their congregation.

At the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly, voting members adopted revised ministry policies and a human sexuality statement.  Changed ministry policies will soon allow clergy in a lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationship, and the sexuality social statement recognizes the positive in both gay and straight relationships.  Both actions were supported by Goodsoil and opposed by Lutheran Core.  That is, Goodsoil was the pro-LGBT advocacy group present during the 2009 Convention while Lutheran Core was there as the opposition advocacy group.  Goodsoil was the coalition of several LGBT groups, especially Lutherans Concerned / North America (LCNA), and Core is closely affiliated with the WordAlone Network. 

Since the Convention, Lutheran Core has continued to agitate against the ELCA decisions, and their website / blog provides an outlet for their views.  Today’s Core blog post reports that a well-heeled private foundation, Arcus, provided significant financial support to LCNA in the past few years.

This is hardly surprising since the website of Arcus states: 

The Mission of the Arcus Foundation is to achieve social justice that is inclusive of sexual orientation, gender identity and race …

The following is my response to Core’s post:

And your point is?

Shocking, I say, shocking, that a rich person(s) with a pro-LGBT attitude helped pay the salaries of LCNA staff, Goodsoil Headquarters suite rental at the Mpls Convention Center, printing of literature, etc., etc.

Was the Lutheran Core hospitality room at the convention free? Who paid for the drinks and hors d’oeuvres and handouts and video presentations?

Your post contains a lot of quotes but no premise. Is one implied? Are you whining that Core did not receive equivalent financial support? Are you envious of the Goodsoil efforts? Is this a fundraising post? If so, perhaps you should include your “Donate” button.

Do you imply something sinister? Perhaps now would be a good time to repeat Nestingen’s [Core spokesperson] false claim, quoted on your website, that “the hallways and the back of the assembly fill up with gay advocates bussed in to influence the voters using, commonly enough, intimidation up to and including physical threats.” You know what they say about repeating a lie often enough.

Again, I ask, what’s your point?

During the debates at the ELCA 2009 Churchwide Assembly in August, the opponents of  LGBT friendly measures argued that such actions would jeopardize ELCA relationships with ecumenical partners.  True enough regarding the more conservative Missouri Synod (LCMS)  and the Roman Catholic Church, but the ELCA does not have full communion agreements with either of these bodies.  On the other hand, ELCA full communion partners (United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed Church of America, and the United Methodist Church) are pretty much in the same boat as the ELCA regarding LGBT issues.  The UCC and the Episcopalians allow gay clergy while the PCUSA and UMC are wrestling  with the issue.  In fact, some within the opposition would prefer the ELCA to make a sharp right turn toward the LCMS and Roman Catholicism and away from our communion partners.

A parallel situation exists with worldwide Lutheran bodies.  While African Lutherans stand strongly against the ELCA actions, the European Lutheran allies appear to be of like mind; indeed, the Swedish Lutheran Church has moved faster than the ELCA.  Earlier this year, Eva Brunne, a lesbian pastor in an open same-gender relationship, was elected bishop of the Stockholm diocese.  About the same time, the Swedish government passed marriage equality legislation, and the Swedish Lutheran Church has quickly moved to allow gay marriage within the church, according to an Oct 22 press release from Lutherans Concerned / North America.

This morning the Board of the Lutheran Church of Sweden voted and announced that the church would conduct marriage ceremonies for same-gender couples, using gender-neutral liturgies for both LGBT and heterosexual weddings.

The vote of the board of the church was taken at its meeting this morning and is reported as 176-62, with 11 abstentions and 2 absences.

Thirty years ago, Sweden declared homosexuality was not a disease. The church has offered blessings for same-gender couples since 2007. In April, Sweden passed a law that granted marriage equality to all. That law went into effect in May.

Some in the Church of Sweden are of the opinion that marriage in the church ought to be reserved for man-woman unions, and argued for that position. Today’s vote ended that debate. The new ruling will go into effect on November 1, 2009.

UPDATE: The Lutheran Church of Germany has just elected its first female leader, thus adding further evidence that European Lutherans are pretty close to the ELCA in their thinking and internal politics.