This is from Pietist's blog. Click on the title for the entire article. (You'll have to scroll down a ways - he is much more prolific a writer than I!)
ELCA's Mountainous Sin (It's Nearly Broken-back!)
It should be slowly dawning on more and more members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) that "Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore. The ELCA is coming out with a new hymnal in which they are removing most of the masculine language from Scripture and hymns and the usage of the current Lutheran Book of Worship. The question is raised again, "By whose authority do you do this?" The obvious subservience of ELCA leaders to the activists of the GLBT movement (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans-gendered) and their relentless push to normalize homoeroticism, raises the question, "By whose authority do you do this?"
If you write them, they will send you a form letter (probably becasue they get so many objections, yet they keep on going, like the Energizer Bunny). To the first example, they will say, "We studied it carefully." To the second, "We will take a four year journey together and then vote." It becomes more and more obvious that the staff people of the ELCA believe they have so much authority that they can reconfigure the way we are ordered as a society, and will reach even as far as a religious person can and change the words that come out of God's mouth.
Less that two years ago I set forth to see if I could come to understand how the ELCA got to where it is, and it slowly dawned on me that we have become so ill-versed in Scripture, and Lutheran theology (the Confessions) that many no longer can even recognize heresy. Examples abound. Go to www.herchurch.org and you'll find an ELCA congregation that invites women to go to Crete and pour libations on the altars of pagan gods. You might say that this is but one congregation and they hardly speak for the theology of a denomination? Well, go to http://www.mnys.org/headlines/hansen_preaches_nyc.htmland you can hear our top official float one heresy balloon after another, celebrating that since some theologian has written convincingly that God is at work in all religions (!!!) that we can rejoice that all are saved, that since another theologian has written convincingly that the Office of the Keys based on Jewish authorities of the time of Jesus actually means "loosing the current understanding of the law." (Martin Luther placed this traditional teaching of the place of the forgiveness of sins in the life of the Church in the Small Catechism part of our Confessions)
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Go to www.commonconfession.net and learn about the two newly formed groups for reform and renewal in the ELCA. Take the Common Confession to your Church Council and listen to the discussion and speak to the situation. If they find a problem with any of the simple seven statements of classic Lutheranism, our understanding may being its slow (or not so slow) dawning.
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So, I've been there and done that - did not go so well, but I am hanging in there. If your pastor has already drunk the ELCA Kool-Aid, you can expect to get an ugly reaction....
---Katie
3 comments:
Katie wrote: "So, I've been there and done that - did not go so well, but I am hanging in there. If your pastor has already drunk the ELCA Kool-Aid, you can expect to get an ugly reaction...."
Interesting that a pastor would find objections to the common confession on the basis of its own merits.
If there is an "ugly" reaction to the common confession I would have to say that it must be the problem of the pastor, not the confession. There is absolutely nothing there that stands against the teachings found in the Book of Concord, in fact the Common Confession is simply an explication of what the Book of Concord means in this period of human history where Secular Humanism is being preached instead of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
As for the pastors who stand against the common confession on its merits, and insist on pushing the ELCA (im)moral agenda, I depart with the following:"Woe to you who call evil good, and good evil."
Peace in the Lord!
Rob Buechler
Katie, I am curious. When the subject of the new hymnal was presented at your recent church meeting, were the language changes part of the discussion? Was there any discussion? Or were you just told that the congregation will be purchasing them. No choice.
It really was not a discussion about the hymnal at all. It was a discussion of the realignment of responsibilities of the church staff and the introduction of the new hymnal was listed as one of the new responsibilities of our traditional worship director. We were also told that we would be hearing about how we could contribute to purchasing these new hymnals.... It is just assumed that we will be buying them, I guess. Beyond the problems with that particular hymnal, I see it as a waste of money because we are using hymnals less and less and printing much of the service in our worship folders anyway.
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