By Jim Brown and Sherrie Black
May 27, 2003

(AgapePress) - A growing number of congregations in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are refusing to obey the denomination’s requirement that unmarried clergy be celibate.

Just this month, an ELCA church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, installed a practicing lesbian as pastor -- and a church in St. Paul voted to allow its pastors to bless same-sex unions. Yet another congregation in that state voted overwhelmingly in support of issuing a "statement of welcome" to homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered people.

Dr. Robert Benne, a leading figure in Lutheran ethics and social thought, says in the ELCA and all the other mainline Protestant denominations there is a great deal of agitation by advocacy groups to revise historic teachings of the Bible and the Church.

"They're well organized and ... have quite a few sympathizers among church members and pastors," Benne says, adding that homosexual activists even find sympathetic bishops, allowing them to "capture" some parishes.

Benne, who directs the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College in Virginia, says such churches have become "acculturated by American culture."

"The cultures of those churches are very much influenced by what you could call the 'elite liberalism' of society," he says. "So all of the avant-garde notions that the secular liberal elite propose are very much picked up by these churches and become major causes for them."

Benne says as the membership of Lutheran churches becomes more middle-class and more educated, conservative members of the laity and clergy have to find very serious ways to fend off this accommodation with elite culture.

He believes if the 2005 ELCA church-wide assembly votes to ordain practicing homosexuals and bless same-sex unions, there will be a major break in the denomination, causing many parishes to leave.

And in the PC(USA)
Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has picked as its top officer a female pastor who believes in ordaining homosexuals and appointing them as church officers. A church spokesman tells Associated Press that Susan Andrews, who pastors a church in Bethesda, Maryland, was the most politically and theologically liberal of three candidates for moderator.

But Andrews says she will not push the issue at the mainline denomination’s general assembly this week in Denver.

Some Presbyterians want to repeal a provision in the church constitution that prohibits non-celibate homosexuals from being clergy, elders, or deacons. But local presbyteries have voted overwhelmingly to keep the ban, which traditionalists say reflects the clear teaching of the Bible.

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