Please check out the new page on our website, “ELCA Focus,” which brings together in one place a large number of resources and articles regarding the ELCA.  It is intended to help pastors, lay leaders, and congregations become aware of and prepared for the dramatic changes that are anticipated from decisions that will be made and actions that will be taken by the 2025 ELCA Churchwide Assembly.  A link to that page can be found here. 

There are three sections to the page – “What Is the Issue?”, “Stories from Churches”, and “Relevant Articles.”

“What Is the Issue?” (LINK) contains links to the websites for the Lutheran Congregational Support Network, the ELCA’s Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church, and the DEIA audit which the ELCA had done of its governing documents.  The page also includes a link to my evaluation of a communication from an ELCA synodical bishop where he totally dismisses the legitimate concerns that people have about anticipated coming changes.  You will also find a link to power point slides that were used by the Reformers group of one ELCA congregation to inform their fellow members regarding issues within the ELCA.

If you have not yet checked out the Lutheran Congregational Support Network, we urge you to go to their website – https://lutherancongregationalsupportnetwork.org/  Their goal is to provide a means to inform ELCA congregations of coming constitutional changes in the ELCA and to help congregations be prepared and know how they can respond. 

“Stories from Churches” (LINK) contains links to actual accounts of pastors, churches, and lay leaders that have experienced the heavy-handed tactics of synods.

“Relevant Articles” (LINK) contains links to articles previously published by Lutheran CORE.  I do not see how anyone could read several of these articles and not say, “Something is very, very wrong.”

We hope this resource is helpful for you and that you will share it with others.

 

Structural and governance changes will most certainly come about from the work of the ELCA’s Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church.  An all-encompassing redefinition of mission and ministry will most certainly result from the recommendations, expectations, requirements or whatever that will be laid upon congregations because of the DEIA audit which the ELCA had done of its governing documents.  The provision for bound conscience will very possibly be eliminated as part of the review and re-evaluation of the 2009 human sexuality social statement.  As I keep up on the latest of what may be coming for unsuspecting ELCA congregations, I realize that conflict within congregations might only become more severe leading up to and after the next ELCA Churchwide Assembly in August 2025. 

In June of 2013 – just a little over a year before I retired – the synod in which I was rostered, Southwest California, elected the ELCA’s first openly gay synodical bishop.  That election threw the congregation where I had already been serving for thirty-nine years into total turmoil and conflict, and that was a conflict that continued throughout and beyond my final twelve months there.  And I found that since I had already announced my retirement because I would be leaving after forty years there, I was totally unable to provide leadership, guidance, and stability in the situation.  That was a situation that the congregation would have to work through without me.  I was not in a position to help them in any way during my final year there.

Friends of Lutheran CORE who are a part of ELCA congregations will find themselves in many different kinds of situations in regard to the upcoming changes in the ELCA.  Do any of the following describe your situation?

• In some ELCA congregations there will be strong agreement among the pastor, leaders, and members that the time to leave the ELCA is now and action needs to be taken as soon as possible in case the coming changes in structure and governance make it even more difficult if not impossible even for former ALC congregations to leave with their property.

• In some congregations there is no way that a motion to disaffiliate from the ELCA will prevail.  Even if a majority are in favor of leaving, they will not be able to achieve two separate votes with at least two-thirds of those voting approving a motion to disaffiliate. 

• In some congregations the pastor has kept information regarding what is actually happening in the ELCA from the people.

• Some friends of Lutheran CORE are the only one in their congregation (or one of very few in their congregation) that is aware and concerned.  They have faithfully sought to inform others, but their efforts fall on deaf ears. 

• Some former LCA congregations and mission congregations started by the ELCA believe that they would never receive permission from their synod council to leave with their property and/or would not be able to pay back to the synod the mission start funds expended by the synod that the synod would demand be repaid.

• Some congregations are too diminished and/or the membership does not have the energy left to deal with the issue.  If they are aware of S13.24, they are just hoping that the synod will not use that provision in the model constitution for synods against them to justify the synod’s moving in, taking over, and possibly closing the congregation.

• I know of a vibrant, Biblically faithful, Spanish language ministry where the synod owns the building and most of the salary of the pastor is paid by the synod and churchwide.

There are Biblically faithful, confessional pastors in the ELCA who do not believe that the right approach for their congregation would be to seek to disaffiliate from the ELCA.  There are many reasons for this.  Some feel that a motion to disaffiliate would not prevail.  Some fear that it would only be disruptive in the life of the congregation.  Some believe that they can keep the changes coming in the ELCA from impacting their congregations.  We need to be praying for these ELCA pastors and their congregations.  

We are very grateful for the friends of Lutheran CORE who are members of other Lutheran church bodies who are concerned about and regularly pray for their fellow Christians still in the ELCA. 

With the changes that are certainly coming and the wide variety of situations that friends of Lutheran CORE find themselves in, Brian Hughes is planning a series of webinars for upcoming months.  The themes for the webinars will follow the life of Moses and his leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt through the wilderness into the Promised Land.  Here are the planned topics.

November – Conflict Management

Groaning under Egyptian captivity; understanding what is coming in the ELCA and the stages and types of church conflict that might engender and how to navigate them without burning out

February – Vision Casting

The hope of the Promised Land; effective ways of pointing to a preferred future

March – Grief and Change

Loss and renewal in the wilderness; understanding the process of transition and how to maintain momentum and forward direction

April – Organizational Structure and Succession Planning

New rules for a new reality; constitution and bylaws for the mission field

Stay tuned.

 

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How DEIA, Anti-Racism and CRT Are Becoming the New Gospel in the ELCA

Any meaningful discussion of these modern-day heresies absolutely must begin and end with scripture.  DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and now Accessibility – other letters are soon to come, I’m sure, as other intersectional groups demand recognition and victimhood status), Anti-Racism (which seems to actually be sort of reverse racism), and CRT (Critical Race Theory), which defines everything and everyone through the lens of racism. They ultimately divide the world into victims and victimizers, and if you’re deemed a victimizer, you must be destroyed at any cost. 

Although these ideologies are often dressed up in biblical/religious terms to sound Christian enough to mislead people, they actually are in direct opposition to scriptural admonitions, and in fact seek by their very nature to undermine the authority of Scripture and replace the Good News of the Gospel of God’s love poured out for us through Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross, with something truly vile and destructive. In order for these progressive idolatries (more on that term later) to be accomplished, people have to be convinced that the Bible is wrong and not to be trusted in matters of faith and life, that faith only matters if it is filtered through the DEIA, CRT and anti-racist ideologies – nothing else will be tolerated!

As background and foundation for this article, I ask that the following biblical references be kept in mind and heart. The biblical language is clear and must not be allowed to be subverted by the typical “theological word salad,” manipulative gaslighting tactics and fear mongering (“If you don’t agree with us, you’re a racist, homophobic, transphobic, or whatever ad hominem attack they can think of to cower people into silence) so often used by activists and race-baiters to stifle debate and confuse those who are not well-grounded in scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.

Scripture for Consideration

Galatians 3:23-29, especially verse 28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (NRSV)

Colossians 3:5-11, especially vs. 11: “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” (NRSV)

1 Corinthians 12:12-13: “¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (NRSV)

Rom 8:1-8, especially 8:1 – There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (NRSV)

The DEIA, Anti-Racism and CRT Replacement Gospel

One of the great gifts that Christianity has given to the world has been the cure for the destructive problem of “tribalism.” For the purposes of this article, I would define tribalism as the pitting of one tribe, nation, group or even gender and intersectional identity against another. When Christianity began to spread, something amazing happened: tribalism no longer defined the lives of people of faith, and that change affected their communities.  A new possibility for communal living began to emerge because people believed in, as THE defining characteristic of their lives, salvation and forgiveness through faith in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for them.  As people came to faith, the tribalism that had separated them and pitted them against one another began to fade away. The rebirth that comes through baptism and faith was incompatible with the old waring cycles of death and destruction, and light began to shine in the darkness as the Kingdom of God began to emerge. Although we begin to see changes coming in cultures and even governments because of the presence of those changed by faith, darkness, however, will always be a part of this broken and sinful world.

Despite all the happy rhetoric surrounding them, DEIA, CRT, anti-racism, and the victim-victimizer way of categorizing people actually turn people against one another, bringing back the tribalism that fell to the power of forgiveness, becoming ultimately profoundly racist and demonic.

Why? Because it skips the whole life-changing-relationship with Jesus part that CAUSED the changes and tries to go right to the end result. But since scripture and true faith are bypassed, the end result actually becomes the activists’ Utopian fantasy of a perfect world. This is where my use of the term idolatry comes in. They worship this vision and will destroy anything in the way of accomplishing it. Their goal, sadly, is a reflection of their own brokenness(as all idols are), and therefore HAS to accommodate virtually every kind of behavior forbidden by scripture (just keep adding more letters to the abbreviations!). God and scripture are, other than the occasional out-of-context reference to give some illusion of legitimacy, taken out of the equation completely. The resulting idolatry is then inside-out and backwards (I think the technical term is “bass-ackwards”) from what scripture invites us to experience. 

The Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church

Imagine the horror and embarrassment of ELCA leadership when it was discovered that after 35 years of mandated 10% quotas of people of color and people whose primary language is other than English, the ELCA actually became on average MORE Caucasian, with some figures being quoted as high as 97%!

Imagine the thought processes at work: “What can we do now? How can we FORCE the ELCA to become the church that we want it to be. The ‘racist’ ELCA must be destroyed and rebuilt in our image (but see Genesis 1:21 to see whose image is important!). We’ll call it ‘decolonization’ or ‘deconstruction,’ but we’ve got to completely destroy it. But how can we make the churches go along with all of this? I know! We’ll use guilt to do it! That worked before, right? We’ll throw enough Bible-sounding word salad at them to confuse them, but we’ve got to convince the 97% that THEY are the problem, condemned by God, that they are evil, racist, misogynistic, sexist, and that they are victimizers! THIS is the new gospel. ‘No condemnation in Christ Jesus’? Hah! We’ll HEAP condemnation on them! We’ll minimize Jesus’ death on the cross and salvation through faith in him. We’ll undermine people’s confidence in scripture, the confessions and the creeds, and we’ll guilt them into submission. Then they will actually help us destroy the church! Brilliant! And we’ll promise them a million new members who look just like us! All they have to do is shut up and get out of the way.”

In order to accomplish this on any level, ALL of the institutions of the church must be changed so that DEIA is the unquestioned operating procedure (done!), and they have to infuse DEIA into all of the constitutional documents of Churchwide, synods, and especially churches. Already on the ELCA website is the result of their DEIA audit and recommended changes to all of our constitutions. Being pushed by the Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church, this represents the reworking of the framework of the ELCA, from top to bottom. Once the DEIA is fully unleashed, nothing can stop it, and I don’t think most of the leadership in the ELCA fully understands what hell they’re about to experience themselves. DEIA demands complete obedience with no tolerance for conservative or dissenting voices. Even bishops will be forced to conform. 

The one thing still standing in the way of full domination for DEIA is Bound Conscience. These positions, put in place apparently to gaslight people who disagreed with changes made in 2009, are what gives legal cover to those who would disagree with DEIA, CRT and anti-racism. Oddly, from a conservative and biblical point of view, these clauses are deeply flawed. We would say with Luther, that our consciences are bound to the Word of God. Oddly, that part is never mentioned in the Bound Conscience clauses.

However, when Bound Conscience goes (and it is being actively “reconsidered” now), nothing is left to protect conservative pastors and churches who still dare to disagree, and we will be subject to legal action, discipline and punishment for being racist or any of the usual phobics, and whatever other attacks that would be launched. That, I believe, will happen as soon as DEIA is fully implemented in our constitutional documents. DEIA leaves no room for disagreement. The change will be breathtakingly swift. The United Methodists are now discovering, with the departure of huge numbers of conservative pastors and churches, what happens when the conservative brakes are released. Even progressives there are showing some concern at how quickly their founding documents and positions are being abandoned – with not much of substance being put in their place.

I expect these changes to begin to be implemented at the 2025 Churchwide Assembly. Once DEIA changes are implemented, Bound Conscience will fall. Conservative pastors and churches will no longer be welcome in the ELCA, nor will we be safe.