Minneapolis Church Votes to Leave ELCA

UPDATED: This afternoon I had the occasion to talk with an ELCA pastor about the parishes voting to leave the ELCA because of it recent vote to accept partnered gay clergy. This pastor was saddened by such moves and agreed with me that the intellectual dishonesty of those who seek to literally apply arguably anti-gay Bible passages while ignoring many more Bible dictates was appalling. Indeed hypocritical. The other things that this pastor pointed out were (1) that 90% of ELCA parishes will feel zero impact from this move since no parish can be forced to accept a partnered gay pastor and (2) by leaving the ELCA or withholding money from the national church body, the main punishment falls on mission work and other worthy charitable work. Thus those "punished" are not even those with whom the homophobes are upset.

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Roanoke, Virginia, apparently does not have a monopoly on modern day Pharisees within the Evangelical Lutheran Church - now an ELCA parish in Minneapolis, Minnesota has voted to split from the national church over the recent vote to allow partnered gay clergy and to give recognition and ministry to committed same sex relationships. As I have asked in prior posts, are the good members of St. Paul Lutheran Church applying the same literal biblical application to all other passages in the Bible as they say should apply to anti-gay passages? I suspect we know that answer - of course not, only the gays get special mandatory literal application of a few Bible passages. I suspect St. Paul's has any number of divorced and remarried members and that countless other Bible passages are ignored when found to be inconvenient for the heterosexual members of the parish. In short, the homophobes at St. Paul's are hypocrites and bigots like the ones at St. John's in Roanoke. Here are some highlights:

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A Minneapolis church is just the third in the nation to vote to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In a bold move over the weekend, St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church of Minneapolis voted overwhelmingly to leave the ELCA in protest over last month's vote to allow the ordination of gay clergy members who are not celibate. It was the first of two votes required to make the move.

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We're profoundly saddened by this. We really didn't want to leave a denomination we've been a part of and various predecessor bodies for 130 years," said Pastor Roland Wells. Pastor Wells said 96 percent of his congregation voted to split from the ELCA.

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So far that church in Minneapolis is one of only three in the country to begin the process of leaving the ELCA. The other two are in Arizona and Virginia.

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It is always easier to hang on to one's bigotry than to open one's mind and consider that past ways of thinking were in error. Some people just seem to have the need to have someone to look down on and condemn to stroke their own egos and sense of self-righteous. History will not be kind to St. Paul's when the day comes when their action makes them akin to segregationists of the 1960's.