Nebraska Churches ponder ELCA split including one WCA church in Nebraska

[billiefan2000]

Churches ponder ELCA split
By Christopher Burbach
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
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Nebraska and Iowa are feeling the fallout from a decision by the nation's largest Lutheran denomination to allow noncelibate gay clergy and church leaders, as well as recognition of same-sex couples.

Thanksgiving Lutheran Church in Bellevue voted Jan. 31 to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or ELCA. It takes two votes with at least a two-thirds majority, taken at least 90 days apart, for a congregation to split from the national church.

The Jan. 31 vote was Thanksgiving's second vote, so it appears to make the church the first Nebraska congregation to break from the ELCA since a controversial churchwide assembly in August.

At that assembly, ELCA delegates voted to lift a prohibition against sexually active gay and lesbian pastors from serving as clergy. The new policy, which has not yet taken effect, would allow ELCA congregations to hire such individuals as pastors if they show they are in committed, lifelong relationships.




One congregation in the Western Iowa Synod of the ELCA also has voted twice to leave the ELCA. That is Skien Lutheran Church in Sloan, Iowa.



Other Midlands congregations are considering whether to leave, and some are withholding their support of the national church.

At least one Nebraska church, Hope Evangelical in rural Smithfield, is known to have voted once to leave and is pondering the required second vote.

And at least one Iowa congregation, Eagle Grove Evangelical in Eagle Grove, has taken a first vote but chose not to split from the ELCA.



By Thursday, 220 congregations had taken a first vote since August on resolutions to leave the ELCA, said Melissa Ramirez Cooper, an ELCA spokeswoman. Sixty-four rejected it, she said.

Twenty-eight congregations have taken a second vote. Ramirez Cooper said she didn't know how many of those had passed. But she said seven congregations have been removed from the denomination.

The ELCA has about 10,400 congregations in the United States and the Caribbean. It's the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, with more than 4.6 million members.

Bishop David deFreese, leader of the ELCA Nebraska Synod, noted that those voting to leave were a small percentage of the state's 260 congregations with 119,000 members.

Still, he said, it hurts.

“Our goal is always to enlarge the circle, to touch more people with God's love and hope,” deFreese said.



He said he was saddened not only by the congregations' departures, but also by the message they could send to society.

“This is maybe just another statement to society that the church is judgmental,” he said. “We want to have the church seen with arms out, longing to care.”



In Iowa, Bishop Michael A. Last said there is “significant unsettlement” in the Western Iowa Synod he leads.

“Probably half of our congregations are not so happy with our (August) decisions, but believe that the ELCA is a church they still feel good about, and for them it's not really an issue,” Last said.


He estimated another 25 percent of congregations supported the decisions. The remaining 25 percent, Last said, are in the process of discerning what to do, including whether to leave the ELCA.

Last said some in his synod are urging the national church to delay implementing the decisions until the ELCA's 2011 churchwide assembly.

In Bellevue, Thanksgiving Lutheran members who attended meetings in October and last week voted about 90 percent in favor of leaving the ELCA, Pastor Glenn Harless said. The second vote was 283 to 32. About 900 people attend services weekly at the church.



“The decisions of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis last August regarding issues of human sexuality were simply a catalyst for TLC to begin the discernment process to leave,” Harless said by e-mail.


“We believe that Jesus Christ calls us to love and to care for all people, including those with same-sex attraction; but we have a profound difference of opinion with the ELCA regarding how we are to carry out that ministry.”

He said the ELCA's new position “ignores a clear reading of the Scriptures, including God's created order and design for human sexuality.”

That stance appears to be a common theme among those leaving the ELCA.

“The (August) decisions cannot be squared with the biblical and historical teachings of the Christian faith,” said the Rev. Cathi Braasch, pastor of Hope Evangelical, a growing rural church near Smithfield, Neb.

“For our congregation, and for so many, we recognize we're all sinners and that we are called to love all sinners — without blessing or endorsing sin.”

Those are hotly debated points in Nebraska and Iowa, as across the nation.

The Rev. Lilette Johnston left as pastor of Skien Lutheran after the Sloan, Iowa, church voted to leave the ELCA.

“I'm very supportive of the actions that were taken at the (August) churchwide assembly,” Johnston said. “I believe in the mission and the ministry of what it means to be Lutheran, and the fact that we are called to mission and outreach in our country and throughout the world, and I believe the ELCA does that very well.”

Like many congregations that are leaving the ELCA, Thanksgiving will affiliate with Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, an association with deep Nebraska roots.


Omaha.com - The Omaha World-Herald: Metro/Region - Churches ponder ELCA split

[billiefan2000]

glad Thanksgiving is distancing itself from ELCA



I wish they would do the same with the Willow Creek Association


Willow Creek Association - Find A Church



in which Hybels church in Chicago

and Granger church in Indiana

and Joel Osteen 's among other dubious nationally know churches are members of the WCA



I wish for all the churches in the Omaha metro area and in Norfolk Nebraska and in Nebraska in general at

Willow Creek Association - Find A Church

would distance themselves from Hybels and the WCA movement


at least 4 in my area have in the last year have distanced themselves from the wca including Covenant Presbyterian Church and Westside Church

(both of which are no longer listed as WCA member churches)

:thumb up to Westside and Covenant Presbyterian church