Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Elect First Openly Gay Bishop

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") has joined the Episcopal Church in advancing LGBT equality by electing its first openly gay bishop.   I applaud the move and it is illustrative of why I became a member of the ELCA after I left the Roman Catholic Church in disgust over the Vatican orchestrated worldwide conspiracy to protect child rapists and avoid compensating victims of sexual abuse.  No doubt far right Christofascists will decry the action of the ELCA, but I hope that gays seeking a new church home - especially former Catholics - will consider the ELCA as an option.  Here are highlights from Gay Star News:

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has elected its first openly gay bishop just four years after it began ordaining openly gay clergy.

The church’s Southwest California Synod voted Friday to elect the Reverend R Guy Erwin, a North Hollywood professor of theology, to the role during a three day assembly in Woodland Hills.  Erwin has taught theology and the history of Christianity at Cal Lutheran University since 2000 and was ordained in 2011.

Emily Eastwood, executive director of Reconciling Works, the Evangelical Lutheran LGBT network, told the LA Times that Erwin’s election as bishop marked a turning point for LGBTs in the church.
‘One of our own has been chosen not in spite of being gay, but because he is truly gifted and skilled for the office,’ she told the LA Times, ‘Once again, today we are proud to be Lutherans.’

Erwin and his long term partner Rob Flynn are both members of St Matthew’s Lutheran Church in North Hollywood.

It is unlikely that Erwin’s election as bishop will result in any conflict within the church as most congregations that oppose LGBT clergy have already left the church.  In 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America decided that people who are in ‘publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships’ were acceptable for ordination – though Evangelical Lutheran congregations that do not wish to ordain LGBT clergy are not required to.

Gay Bishop Describes Battle to Become Straight

In a frank and moving interview last week, the Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire talked about his attempts to overcome his homosexuality (See: http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2007/07/cofe-would-shut.html). Obviously, from the name of my blog, I identify with much of Bishop Robinson's struggle. Here are some highlights:

'I think most gay people sense early on that they are different even if they are not exactly sure how they are different. That was certainly true for me by age 11 or 12. You have to remember that when I was that age, gay was not a word that was being used to describe homosexual people. There was very little discussion of it. There were certainly no role models like we have today of successful and productive people who were gay, so it was not something easily admitted to oneself, never mind the world. But very early on – I’ve probably told the story of friends of mine getting hold of a Playboy magazine and realising that they were very much more interested in these pictures than I was. And not only that – being aware of my attraction to other boys and finding that such a despicable possibility, given what the church had taught me and what scripture seemed to be saying about this – you just pray it’s a phase you’re going through, something you’ll outgrow. It was certainly something from the very moment I sensed I was ashamed of and fearful about – fearful for my own safety. I grew up in a world where that sort of thing was not remotely tolerated. It was in middle, southern America, which is still perhaps the most conservative place around these issues.'

Q. Did you feel it (the therapy) had worked, or did it just put you in denial? A. 'It didn’t work, and it almost never works for people who attempt it. I guess I did think it had worked. I suspect it didn’t make the same sex feelings go away, but it certain worked in that I felt ready emotionally and spiritually and physically for a relationship with a woman, so it certainly made that part of myself possible. And so when I entered into a relationship with the woman who became my wife, it was full of integrity – I wasn’t pretending to be something that I was not. And yet within a month of meeting her, I shared that all of my primary relationships had been with men, that I had been in therapy to make a heterosexual relationship possible, and that I felt I was in a good place to do that.'

Q. And yet you’ve managed to keep the family, haven’t you? A. 'I was just visiting my wife two weeks ago. She has become quite a national expert in the area of horseback riding for the emotionally and physically handicapped. She was beginning a new phase of this programme, she invited me down and I said a prayer and a blessing over this new effort with her board....we’re still very, very close. I just saw her on Saturday at our grand-daughter’s birthday party. We are very very close and we talk often. The thing that has hurt me most in the press – and there have been some awful things said – but the most painful is the charge that I ‘abandoned my wife and children to move in with another man’. First of all, there wasn’t another man – I didn’t meet my partner until two months after my wife was remarried. I never abandoned my wife or my responsibilities to her and I never abandoned my children. As a matter of fact they joke about that all the time. We talk nearly every day and they will often joke they’re the abandoned children. We tried to do the dissolution of our marriage in a holy way. We took a priest with us to the judge’s chambers for the divorce decree and went back to his church and in the context of the holy Eucharist released each other from the vows we had taken, asked each other’s forgiveness for ways in which we might have hurt one another, pledged ourselves to the joint raising of our children and gave our rings back as a symbol of the vows we no longer held each other to. It was one of the most healing moments of my whole life and I think that’s partly why our relationship has continued. To be so good and why our children were affected as little as possible in a family break-up.'

I envy his ability to have maintained a friendly relationship with his former wife. But, then, to do that, there has to be a two way desire that things not get nasty and that both parties are willing to face reality.