Adele Ferguson - Bishop Marvin Wells responds to ELCA column ELCA `flight’

MY OCCASIONAL writings about the uproar in the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America over whether to ordain actively gay clergy and allow gay weddings in the church hasn’t stirred any bishops to respond until now.

Bishop Martin D. Wells of the Eastern Washington and Idaho Synod, ELCA. writes. “You’ve caused some trouble for me in Eastern Washington.”

He sent me a copy of his letter to the Ellensburg Daily Record where he accuses me of “several serious mistakes that must be corrected for readers to have an accurate picture of dynamics within the ELCA. Some of her allegations are in quotations from another Lutheran body, one that is poaching on distressed ELCA congregations.”

I am not sure to which Lutheran body Bishop Wells refers. I have quoted from The Lutheran Hedgehog, a publication of CrossAlone Lutheran Churches which are affiliated with Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, which, I wrote, many congregations fleeing ELCA have made their new home, and from The Lutheran magazine, which I consider the ELCA house organ although it denied that to me..

THIRTY SEVEN ELCA congregations joined LCMC last year alone, a dozen of them since August when the decision was made that generated their flight.

“By action of the Churchwide Assembly, our highest legislative body,” wrote Bishop Wells, “the ELCA has voted to permit congregations who choose to do so for purposes of their mission, to call pastors who are gay and living in a publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gendered relationship.”

This decision followed eight years of study on human sexuality, he wrote, which I remember very well, having attended meetings at the Lutheran church of which I am a member. I have, in fact, been writing about the effort within the ELCA to permit gay pastors and gay weddings since 1993.

That effort, I have written many times, is promoted by some of the bishops of the church, a statement with which Bishop Wells takes issue. “It’s not true to say that ‘It’s the bishops who have pushed for years for gay pastors and for gay weddings in the church’, “ he wrote. “Bishops play an advisory role in the ELCA.”

“This decision was made by an Assembly of congregation members and this churchwide Assembly must include 60 percent lay members. Nothing about these decisions permits gay weddings in our congregations. In our teaching statement on human sexuality, the term marriage is reserved for the lifelong promises of a man or woman. We have not. therefore, established ‘a new norm, the moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual marriage and family.’ “

I have reported from sources given above, the fact that although prior to August, active gay clergy and gay weddings were not authorized by ELCA, there have been over a hundred gay pastors ordained and gay weddings have been performed, some with the approval, tacit or open, of their bishops. No action was taken in August on gay weddings because there was no consensus reached on the matter.

BISHOP WELLS says bishops have a partnership role in calling pastors but it’s up to the congregations. I had quoted a longtime pastor who, in resigning, said, “When I retire, this congregation will be at the mercy of the bishop and he will make sure that my successor is a company man. We are going to get out now.”

I appreciate Bishop Wells’ letter and hope his Synod is free of the dissidence and divisions that led to an exodus from ELCA. He sent me his blessings. I send him mine.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)