Roanoke Church Considers Leaving ELCA - Follow Up

Yesterday I wrote a post about an church in Roanoke, Virginia, that is contemplating leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church because of last month's vote by the Churchwide Assembly to recognize committed same sex relationships - but not call them marriages - and to permit partnered gay clergy in ELCA parishes that wanted to have such clergy. Obviously, it is a subject that I feel passionately about and in my post I faulted the hypocrisy of the church's pastors for their hypocrisy in wanting to literally apply anti-gay passages of the Bible, but failure - as is the want in most anti-gay churches and denominations - to apply that same literal application to passages that hit home against their rank and file parish members such as the Gospel prohibition on divorce. In response to the post I received the following anonymous comment:

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I am the president of an ELCA congregation where a lot of the members are upset with the vote on gays in the church. I am torn in my own heart about how I feel about the whole thing. I definitely believe that we all need to answer and ask for forgiveness for our own sins and not for the sins of others what ever they might be. Your comments are very convincing to me and I just wish you didn't have the sense of anger in your message that I belive would turn off a lot of my fellow parishoners if I read it to them. God's peace to you

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I am sorry if my sense of anger is apparent. But I do not apologize for it. On the one hand this writer's parish members are "upset" because their sensibilities are offended and old prejudices are challenged. On the other hand we have gays, young and old, who are losing their faith or ending their lives by suicide because of hypocritical, selective applications of the Bible passages against gays. For newer readers, I AM VERY passionate because a former long distance boyfriend of mine lost his identical twin brother to suicide because of this very situation withing the ELCA in which they had been raised. Hurt sensibilities versus the loss of the life of a talent young man. I lost another friend - not a Lutheran - for similar reasons given his family's religious background. His solution was to shut himself in a running car with the windows down in a closed garage and let the carbon monoxide kill him. All because of a few ancient passages written by those ignorant of modern mental health and medical knowledge.

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I understand this ELCA congregation leader's concerns, but these people afraid of change who selectively apply Bible passages to harm others really and truly need to move on, accept modern knowledge about sexual orientation, and inherent limitations in the Bible and get over it. True Christians would not be hanging on to a handful of ancient passages that are ruining and destroying lives literally every day. I hope more people will wake up to the violence they are doing to countless LGBT individuals. One suggestion I'd make to this congregation leader is that he rent "Prayers for Bobby" and make it MANDATORY viewing for all congregation members. Another movie the congregation should watch is "For the Bible Tells Me So." These people need to understand the evil that they do - all in God's name.