Lutheran schism feared after votes on gays

MINNEAPOLIS | Last Friday, as members of the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination were casting four historic votes recasting the role of homosexuals in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a mop-up operation had begun a few blocks away.

In a hospitality suite on the 12th floor of the Doubletree Hotel, Bill Sullivan’s cell phone was ringing and ringing.

Mr. Sullivan, a former ELCA pastor, is national coordinator for the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), a collection of 226 congregations founded in March 2001 with 25 charter member churches dissatisfied with the denomination’s liberal drift.

Now the trickle has turned into a flood.

“It’s been going nonstop,” he said of his phone.

On Friday alone, he scheduled three visits to ELCA churches in Buffalo, N.Y. Sioux City, Iowa and Jacksonville, Fla., for later this fall. They are thinking of leaving, as were the 15 people who had stopped by the hotel suite that day. Twenty-five inquiries had come in that week alone, and that was before all the vote tallies were in down the street at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

He glanced at his e-mail.

“The train wreck is just about over,” he said, reading from a post sent by a delegate on the convention floor. “The first responders need to be ready.”

He looked up.

“People have been calling all morning,” he said. “They want this to be over. It’s been going on for days. A small minority of people are changing 2,000 years of church teaching.”

However, the “small minority” includes personages such as former ELCA Presiding Bishop Herbert W. Chilstrom, who posted an open letter July 27 in response to traditionalists’ concerns about the upcoming convention. In it, he explained that church teachings have changed over the millennia.

“I knew that our decisions to ordain women and retain some divorced pastors on our rosters were not decided exclusively on the basis of a few biblical texts or our long-standing tradition in either area,” he wrote. “We believed there were deeper streams in the Holy Scriptures that we needed to listen to. When I came to sexuality issues, I knew I could not employ a method that differed from what I had used to deal with those two issues.”

The majority of delegates at the churchwide assembly were apparently using similar logic: It was the final day for the most important votes and the traditionalists were losing every one.

For the one-third of ELCA delegates who decisively voted against ordaining homosexual clergy and other gay-friendly ballot measures, Mr. Sullivan’s group is a possible lifeboat in a sea of heresy.

The group calls itself “post-denominational,” meaning churches can associate with it while retaining membership in other bodies. The only requirement is an agreement with the LCMC’s statement of faith and constitution. The loose confederation of churches does not have bishops, but it does have an annual conference, set this year for early October in Fargo, N.D.

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