The Synod Council of the ELCA has recommended that the Churchwide Assembly vote on a resolution which provides for exceptions to allow the ordination and the rostering of people in committed homosexual relationships.
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This is sad, watching my church implode.
---Katie
3 comments:
Unfortunately, our church has been hijacked by the most liberal elements of the church. This really is not happening in the LCMS, although they are fighting about other things. I don't know what an individual can do to make a difference, except to join one or more of the reform movements and keep speaking out. It does not seem to matter to our leadership that the majority of the membership does not support the direction in which they are leading the church.
When Mark Thompson, the ELCA's head of Global Missions, was confronted for his double-talk on this subject back in the 'Eighties at our Synod Assembly, he blurted out, "Why, it may take ten years to get you people to accept homosexual pastors!"
Don't kid yourself that the battle was just now lost. It was lost when this nonsense first reared its satanic head- and the majority who disagreed with it refused to stand up and say, "No more!"
As bad as things are getting in the LCMS, they are nowhere near as bad as they are in the ELCA, where the fight effectively ended ten years ago. Katie, the "reform movements" in the ELCA are mostly composed of the very Pietistic and generically "Evangelical" pseudo-Lutherans who have recently hijacked the LCMS. No help there- especially because they are essentially engaged, not in "fighting," but rather in enabling behavior, allowing well-intentioned lay people to deceive themselves into thinking that the ELCA can still be saved, and that impotent hand-wringing and grumbling can somehow help do that.
The ELCA's effective decision to ordain practicing homosexuals- and don't kid yourself; the next step is to eliminate the prohibition entirely- was part of the agenda of a powerful faction in both the LCA and The ALC at the time of the merger. This debate has been going on ever since. We might have voted the people who made supported it and the rest of the radical, unbiblical agenda that has defined the ELCA throughout its history out back then, if we had truly fought- instead of grumbling and then going along. We might have halted the ELCA's slide into apostasy- if we had cut off the flow of money to Chicago unless it stopped, or been faithful enough to say, with a united voice, "Accept gay pastors, and we will leave. Issue closed. Don't open it again."
Instead, a few of us stood up- and the rest of you left us hanging high and dry. You quietly told us later that you agreed with us when we stood up in the Synod Assemblies and objected to the way things were going, only to be hooted- and usually voted- down. But why didn't you stand up beside us then? Why didn't you do something when it was still possible to prevent what the ELCA is in the process of doing?
Why, even now, is it so hard to call apostasy what it is- and to the faces of the apostates?
Can it really be that allegience to a human church body- even one in which one has a long family history, or a strong ethnic identification- is so important that even now, years after it became obvious that Higgins Road wasn't listening and that the ELCA was irreformable, the majority continues to enable its escapades by sending it their money and putting its name on their letterheads and church buildings?
Don't you see that *you-* the folks in the ELCA who disagree with this stuff- are the ones who have made it possible by your continuing refusal to stand up and say, "No! You will not do this in our name-" and making it clear that you will wipe the dust of your feet off against them if they refuse to listen?
Don't you realize that when you continue to belong to a heterodox church body long after it becomes clear that it cannot be reformed, you deny the very confession your post means to make?
Kid yourself if you must that you are "staying and fighting." You folks will fight no more in the future than you have in the past. You will quietly grumble- and continue to let Higgins Road use your money to fund its abominations, and your good name to mask the evil in which- whether you want to admit it or not- you are accomplices.
Kid yourself if you must that the less radical pastors who remain are doing so "so as not to abandon the flock to the wolves." The role of a shepherd is to identify the wolves in no uncertain terms, and to keep them away from the sheep, if necessary by moving the flock-not to engage in enabling behavior by helping the flock kid itself that wolves and sheep can long live together in harmony in the same church body.
As a former ELCA pastor, my advice to any and all faithful Christians i the ELCA is to recognize that you are in denial. Your church isn't listening. It will not listen. Why should it? You wouldn't do anything to make it listen back when you might have. Now the undoing of all that has transpired since 1988 is unthinkable. It's simply too late.
On the other hand, your offerings- together with the use of your good name to create the illusion that decisions like the ordination of gay pastors was ever really in doubt- are what make it possible for the ELCA to get away with what they're doing.
I hope that you and the others in the ELCA who aspire to faithfulness recognize at long last that it cannot be reconciled with remaining in the ELCA. It has been years since that has been possible, however deep the denial in which many of you are.
I hope you and those like you repent
your sin in continuing to be associated with a church body which has abandoned the truth for years after it has been clear that it cannot be reclaimed. Until then, I'm afraid I have no sympathy for you.
The mess you find yourselves in is of your own making. The way out is the same as it has always been: to confess God's truth instead of being the trusty lapdogs of those who deny it.
Say "no" to them, Katie. At long last, stand up to them! I fthe ELCA laity had done so years ago, the ELCA itself might have been saved.
It's been too late for that for years. But it isn't too late to save the people who are deceived by Higgins Road by making the good confession, instead of being accomplices of the deceivers!
Wow, Bob, I am sorry. I can't imagine what you have been through.
However, it is rhetoric like yours that makes my palms sweat when I think about leaving my church to go back to the LCMS. I left as a teenager during the whole Seminex period and though I was not aware of the particulars, I remembered the LCMS as an angry place. Sort of like your post.
I don't disagree with you that the ELCA is a lost cause. I do disagree with the assault on the character of the faithful who are still in the ELCA. But, as you said, you have no sympathy for us. OK. I can live with that. Thanks anyway.
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