The Winter of our Discontent

The synod Council of the NE Iowa Synod voted to rescind the resolutions it passed in November.  You may remember those resolutions, one repudiated the Churchwide votes and called upon the ELCA to do the same.  The other expressed the bound conscience of the NE Iowa Synod, seeking to adhere to the 1990 Vision and Expectations.  From the firestorm it caused through out the synod and the larger church, it is not too surprizing that the synod council reversed itself.  People can stand just so much pressure, then they will turn from the pressure to seek a quieter life.  It is hard work being at the center of the maelström, with the winds of discontent swirling about you.  Most folk simply cannot stay there for long before the desire to flee takes hold and that which was done is undone.

I do not fault the good folk who serve on the NE Iowa Synod Council.  In the weeks following the November council meeting letters, calls, emails and face to face conversations took place that pulled back the covering which hides the deep divide we now suffer in the ELCA.  For all the talk about ’structured flexibility’ and ‘bound consciences’ that greased the skids of passage in August, we cannot pretend that we are not a deeply divided church.  We cannot live as a divided church for long.  No organization can survive if its purpose is so compromised in the way we are in the ELCA.  We will see more of what we have seen in the NE Iowa Synod Council’s reversal as the ELCA seeks its new equilibrium.  Unless approached with the greatest humility and Christlike compassion, the purging of the defeated will continue.

There will be no organized pogroms coming from Higgins Road, no synodical schemes of removal, just the slow, grinding pressure to conform to the new reality of the ELCA.  It will come in the Lutheran form of shunning, orthodox clergy and laity ignored as if they do not exist or treated as if they belong to some unenlightened earlier time.  It will come in the pop theology of no judgment of any behavior.  It will come in the apathy of the majority and the desire to let this storm pass us by and go some other place.  It will come when what was once understood to be orthodox Christian faith is set aside in order to maintain ‘peace’ in the church.

It is easy in this time to yield to the desire to depart from so troubled a church.  It is easy to see no hope for the ELCA and walk away from the unhappy place that our church as become.  It is easy to be discontented,  to be so disconsolate, that we become eager to depart for the imagined bliss of some new ecclesiastical shore.  Many are already at this point and can do no other but leave.  With sadness we watch them go, but we understand why they cannot stay.

Yet we stay in this divided, troubled church.  Like Jeremiah, God has set us in this church to give witness to what the Word God has spoken and continues to speak.  Yes, like Jeremiah, there will be set backs, there will be ears that refuse to hear, there will be God’s people thinking they are wise as they run after the new god of inclusivity, justice and social righteousness.  Yes, there will reversals such as the NE Iowa Synod Council’s rescinding their earlier stand.  Like Jeremiah, those who remain in the ELCA will not cease speaking God’s Word in the hope that one day repentance will come and this church be restored.

All these will come, and are in many ways, already here.  Let us lift our voices against it all, not because those who advocate the new path are our enemies, rather because they are our brothers and sisters in Christ who have erred and lost their way.  Let us speak God’s Word of mercy and grace until all repent of their sin and return to the Lord.

Congregations Affiliate with Call to Faithfulness

St. Paul Lutheran in Monona, IA and Nazareth Lutheran in Cedar Falls, IA have voted to affiliate with Call to Faithfulness.  They join other congregations who have formally aligned with the ongoing work of reform and renewal in the NE Iowa Synod.  Other congregations are considering affiliation with Call to Faithfulness at their annual meetings as well as congregations and individuals who support CTF with their prayers and resources.

Christianity Lite

The February 2010 issue of First Things has a very good article by Mary Eberstadt titled Christianity Lite.  You can find it at  http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/christianity-lite

Going with the Flow

GOING WITH THE FLOW  by Pr. Marshall Hahn as printed in January 2010 edition of “Connections Magazine” published by Bible Alive Ministries.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a

living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  – Romans 12:1-2

“What shall be our witness this week?”  With this question, Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson of the ELCA began both his opening sermon for the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly and his Report of the Presiding Bishop to the assembly.  His answer:  “Let this be our witness:  We are a church going with the flow.”  This challenge to the church was the heart of his report.  “No, I am not suggesting we go with the flow of whatever seems to be the current wave; rather, let our witness be that we are going with the flow of God’s Spirit being poured out,” Bishop Hanson explained.  It was a bold rhetorical gambit.  “We are a church going with the flow.”

This had been the criticism of those who opposed the proposals which were to come before the assembly to allow for the rostering of people in homosexual relationships in the church.  The critics said the ELCA was abandoning the commitment to Scripture and the orthodox Christian tradition to go with the flow of the prevailing culture.  Bishop Hanson sought to blunt that criticism by transforming the phrase from a criticism to be avoided into a goal to be embraced.

It was a bold rhetorical gambit.  And it failed.  I was astounded when I heard him use it during his speech, and my 24 years of experience in reading the reactions of congregations to “bold rhetorical gambits” told me it fell flat as a pancake.  I believe Bishop Hanson must have felt it, too.  I listened for this phrase throughout the rest of the assembly – “We are a church going with the flow” – and I never heard it again.  What had been stated as a central image for the church was never once mentioned again.  Yet it is, in fact, a good barometer of how one understands what occurred at the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.  Is the ELCA a church going with the flow of the current culture – or a church going with the flow of God’s Spirit?  How one answers that question will largely determine how one views the events of this August at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

From the first night of the assembly, when the attempt to require a 2/3 majority for the passage of the Recommendation on Ministry Policies was defeated, it became evident that the assembly could very well pass all of the proposals concerning human sexuality.  As a voting member who was working actively with CORE to defeat these proposals, I could sense the disappointment from the CORE supporters and the optimism from those in favor of the changes.  And, of course, this was to become the assembly that adopted the changes which had long been sought by the advocates for changing the church’s teaching and practice concerning homosexual behavior.

But even for many of those who advocated these changes, the results were more troubling than triumphant.  The critical vote came on Wednesday, August 19, a day which will, no doubt, be remembered as the most significant date in the ELCA’s history.  For me, it will always be remembered as a surreal experience.  My seat was only three tables from the front, so I had a good view of the podium.  I first sensed something out of kilter when I noticed that Bishop Hanson had gone behind the curtain during the Bible Study.  He soon returned to inform us that a tornado had touched down just south of the convention center and that everyone was to remain in the assembly hall with the doors closed for safety as we began the debate on the Social Statement.  During the debate we could hear the sirens outside and the winds above the convention roof.  We were soon informed that a tornado had damaged the convention center roof, and the steeple of Central Lutheran Church next door.

During the debate, it also became evident that there was a fair amount of concern among those in favor of the proposal that they might not get the 2/3 required.  In fact, there was an attempt at one point to change the agenda to consider the Recommendation on Ministry Policies first, but it was ruled out of order.  The concern was that if the Social Statement did not pass, it would be more difficult to pass the changes on ministry policies.   When the vote was finally taken, the tension in the room was palpable.  Which way would the ELCA “flow?”   When Bishop Hanson viewed the results on his podium, his hesitation only added to the tension of the moment.  When the numbers were posted on the assembly screens, there was a silent, stunned reaction as 1,014 voting members mentally calculated the results – 676 yes, 338 no – exactly 2/3… exactly 66.667%.  Upon Bishop Hanson’s ruling that the Social Statement had been adopted, there was a spontaneous burst of applause, immediately belying any respect for the “bound conscience” of the 338 voting members sitting next to them.

Yet the sense of triumph was short-lived for many.  When Ryan Schwarz took the election of the Vice-President to the 4^th ballot, giving both himself and Robert Benne an opportunity to address the assembly, it was evidence that the opposition to the assembly’s decisions was deep, principled, and unswerving.  By the time the Recommendation on Ministry Policies were debated, several of the speeches in favor were almost apologetic  Others said that, while personally in favor of the proposal, they did not believe the church would be well-served by them at this time.  But the advocates for change would not be denied.

Yet, just as I have not sensed any movement to embrace “ELCA – a church going with the flow” as a rallying cry for the ELCA, so, too, I have not heard from any of the reports of the reception of the assembly’s actions any note of an accomplishment to be celebrated.  Indeed, as I left the convention center on Sunday, I spoke with a number of the most ardent supporters of the assembly’s decisions.  They told me they were surprised, themselves, at the mixed feelings they had about the outcome.  Their joy was far more muted and subdued than they anticipated it would be.

What I am left with from the assembly is the image of the dangling cross on Central Lutheran’s steeple.  For some, it may be a sign of the resiliency of the ELCA in the face of the storms that confront it.  But for me, it is a sign of a church falling to the winds of an alien creed – “going with the flow” until “the flow” threatens to overwhelm it.

Faithful Voices – Iowa Lutherans Witness for Renewal

Thirty-eight congregations were represented at St. Peter Lutheran in Greene, IA on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at the Faithful Voices Conference.  The more 125 laity and pastors from four synods surrounding the NE Iowa Synod gathered to be encouraged by their mutual faith in Christ and organize to renew and reform the Church.  Pr. Cori Johnson, one of the three dissenting voices on the Sexuality Task Force brought the keynote for the day.  Pr. Marshall Hahn, Pr. Jason Cooper, Pr. Ken Kimball and Pr. Gary Hatcher spoke on behalf of Call to Faithfulness on concrete ways congregations can begin to make a difference.  Click on the links below to listen and download the presentations.  ‘Save Target As’ in Windows Internet Explorer or ‘Save link as’ in Mozilla Firefox;  the podcast will then begin to download to your computer.

Pr Cori Johnson at Faithful Voices Conference

Pr Jason Cooper at Faithful Voices Conference

Pr Marshall Hahn

Pr. Ken Kimball

Pr. Gary Hatcher

‘Bound Conscience’ in the NE Iowa Synod

The Northeastern Iowa Synod Council has passed two resolutions in response to the Churchwide Assembly’s votes.  The first calls upon the ELCA Church Council to reject and work to overturn the Sexuality Statement and the Recommendations on Ministry.  The second affirms the votes of the NE Iowa Synod Assemblies of recent years, stating that the ‘bound conscience’ of the synod regards the 1990 Vision and Expectations for Rostered leaders to be the norm for the synod and rejects any new Vision and Expectations based on the votes taken at the 2009 Churchwide.

The NE Iowa Synod takes the rhetoric of the Churchwide Assembly at its word, that the ‘bound conscience’ of synods is to be respected.  It remains to seen if this will be the case or if the present rumbling from Chicago will not allow synods to have a ‘bound conscience’.  If it does not allow a synod to have a ‘bound conscience’ then the basis for the votes taken at Churchwide are suspect, built on a fiction the ELCA cannot or will not honor.

Pr. Marshall Hahn deserves our thanks for his work bringing these resolutions to the NE Iowa Synod Council.  The resolutions may be found at these links:

CONFESSION OF FAITH RESOLUTION

BOUND CONSCIENCE RESOLUTION

A Time to Speak

Greetings in Christ,

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

1For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

2a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

3a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

A parishioner stopped by yesterday with a letter.  She and her husband had considered what they should do as a response to the vote taken at the August Churchwide Assembly.  After much prayer and conversation, they chose to resign their membership at St. Peter, not because they were unhappy with the congregation, but as a protest against the ELCA’s actions.  They could no longer remain members of a church that had taken the actions that the ELCA had taken in regard to homosexual behavior.  It saddened them to resign, but they could no longer be silent.  Resigning was their way to speak out, their way to act, to do something that made a statement about the direction our church is taking.

There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.  Now is not a time to keep silence.  Silence, whether intended or not, gives approval to the actions taken at Churchwide.  GoodSoil and Lutherans Concerned/North America (LCNA), homosexual advocate groups, are not keeping silence.  They are celebrating the vote, but they are also working to foster wide spread acceptance of the vote in the ELCA.  LCNA has a plan for ‘reaching out’ to the rest of the ELCA to shape their thinking about the vote.  http://www.lcna.org/first_resolved.shtm This link will take you to the website LCNA has for their plan of action.  The advocates of change are not silent, but active and vocal in their continued, well stated goal of ‘full inclusion for gays, lesbians, transgendered, and bisexuals’ in the ELCA.

If you believe the votes taken in August were the correct thing for the ELCA to do, then silence is all you need do, GoodSoil and LCNA will work very hard to see that the implications of the Social Statement on Sexuality and the Resolutions will take place in the ELCA.

If you believe, as does Call to Faithfulness, that the votes are not the direction the ELCA should go, that they represent a turn away from the Scriptures, the Confessions, and the Tradition of the Church, then now is not a time for silence.  Now is a time to speak, a time to act.  If we join together we can have an impact on the NE Iowa Synod and on the ELCA.  If we are silent, we give permission to GoodSoil and LCNA to implement their stated goals in the ELCA.

Make plans to attend the Faithful Voices Event at St. Peter Lutheran in Greene, on Saturday, November 21, 2009.  The registration form can be found at the Faithful Voices page on this site.

http://calltofaithfulness.wordpress.com/call-to-faithfulness-voice-of-the-faithful/

You are the one who can make a difference in how our congregations respond.  Together, we can continue to make a difference in NE Iowa and the ELCA by making our voices heard.  It is a time to speak.

All Saints Day

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses (martyrs) who have in many cases defended the faith with their lives.  What do we owe to these witnesses to Christ?  These are the ones who faced torture and terrible death for the sake of confessing ‘Jesus is Lord’.  These are the ones who faced Empire and sword because they believed that the confession of the Church was Jesus risen from the dead.  These are the ones, like St. Athanasius, stood against the majority to maintain the orthodox faith when Arianism threatened to take over the Christianity.

These are the ones who make up the living Church.  We are who are in the flesh are not the Church by ourselves.  We are very much surrounded by all the witnesses, the saints, of Christ who have come before us.  They with us, make up the living Church and we owe them the respect and honor due to those who have endured much for Christ and His Holy Church.  Since it is as much their Church as it is ours, what we do must honor the great sacrifice they have made to preserve the Church.

This All Saints Day in the ELCA is marked by a church that chose to break with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.  The ELCA in national assembly voted Scripture to be in error and human reason, emotion and feelings to be the source and norm of our practice.  The ELCA has said that same-sex sexual behavior is not only no longer sinful, but God created and God pleasing, therefore may be blessed.  This the ELCA has done in direct opposition to the Scriptures and the living witness of the Saints.

Thanks be to God that He is merciful and we may yet be forgiven our folly, if we in the ELCA repent and return to the faith handed to us by the Saints.  Let this All Saints Day be a day of repentance and fasting in the ELCA for the arrogance to set ourselves over God’s Word.  Let us repent of the insult to the holy martyrs who shed their blood to preserve the faith throughout the centuries.  Let us repent of the desire to please humans rather than God by our actions.  Let us repent of setting our will against the will of the Father.  Then we may trade our pride for humility, our self-righteousness for God’s, and our exaltation of ourselves for discipleship.

We are not enemies…

I received a DVD from the local PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) recently along with a short note.  The note wished that I would get to know homosexuals so that I could see that they were just like me, ordinary folk. The hope contained in the note was that once I became better acquainted with homosexuals, I would cease my efforts to be unloving toward them.  I would see them as children of God.

Call to Faithfulness has never thought of homosexuals as anything other than persons for whom Christ suffered and died.  We have never made our concerns for the reform and the renewal of the ELCA about homosexuals.  We regard those who confess Jesus as Lord and Savior as brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of their sexual orientation. We cannot seem to get folk to understand that it is not about whether or not God loves homosexuals.  He does, for God loves all for whom Christ has died and been raised.  There are homosexuals who know of the work we are doing in Call to Faithfulness and support us in our efforts.  They understand that we are working to keep the ELCA faithful to the Scriptures, the Confessions and the Tradition of the Church.  We are not enemies, but brothers and sisters in Christ.

The crisis in the ELCA precipitated by the Churchwide Assembly centers on the misuse, indeed the abuse of  Scripture, to bless what God has not blessed.  There is no sound biblical, confessional, or traditional case for the blessing of same-sex sexual activity, regardless of the level of commitment on the part of those engaged in such behavior.  For the ELCA to allow such blessings and roster those in same-sex unions where same-sex behavior occurs is contrary to God’s Word, the Confessions of the Lutheran Church and the Tradition of catholic Church.  For a church to allow this, however well intended it may be,  is putting human behavior above God’s Word.  This we cannot do and remain the Church.  Our struggle with the ELCA is based on this departure from the universal Church on matters of Scripture, Confession, and Tradition.  The fact that it happens to focused on homosexuality is not the central concern.  It is not, nor has it been, about sex.  It is about the Word of God rightly interpreted and proclaimed among us.

We believe that the ELCA erred in its votes on the Sexuality Statement and the Resolutions on Ministry.  We believe that these errors are contrary to the clear witness of Scripture, the Lutheran Confessions and the Tradition of the Church.  Because these errors are about things so fundamental in the proclamation of the Gospel, they are a danger to salvation.  Persisting in these errors may be acceptable in the popular culture, they are not in keeping with the mission of the Church.  It is because we love the Church, because we love all of humankind, homosexuals included, that we reject and resist these errors.  We regret that some choose to interpret this concern as a rejection, even hatred of homosexuals.  Such an interpretation is flawed and does not choose to hear what we have said and continue to say regarding this issue.

We are not enemies.  Those who support the actions of the ELCA are misguided and in error, but for the sake of Christ we call you back to faithfulness to our Lord.  The love of Christ compels us to witness against this error for the blessing of the whole Church, so that we all might serve our Lord together.

Any who use the Christian faith as a justification for the abuse and ill-treatment of homosexuals, of any group of people, have no place in Call to Faithfulness.  We reject utterly the distorted message that Fred Phelps and others have espoused about God’s hatred of homosexuals.  Those who, by a distortion of Christian faith, cloak their violence toward homosexuals, toward any group, are not Christian, our anathema falls on them.

Let us continue to work toward that day when the ELCA will be faithful to Scripture, the Confessions and the Tradition of the Church and all will know that they are loved by God our Father.

Call to Faithfulness Fall Gathering Materials & Downloads

The printed materials from the 2009 Fall Gathering are available at this link: Call to Faithfulness Fall Gathering 2009

CTF podcasts can be downloaded by right clicking on the links below, then select either  ‘Save Target As’ in Windows Internet Explorer or ‘Save link as’ in Mozilla Firefox;  the podcast will then begin to download to your computer.

Pr. Gary Hatcher’s Homily at CTF 2009 Fall Gathering

Pr. Marshall Hahn’s first presentation at CTF Fall Gathering

Pr. Ken Kimball’s presentation at CTF 2009 Fall Gathering

Pr. Marshall Hahn’s second presentation at CTF Fall Gathering

Copies of Gathering Handouts and CD’s of Presentations given at the October 11, 2009 Fall Gathering are available by mail.  Send address to Pr. Hatcher at ggh@omnitelcom.com or call 641-816-5531