The Liberal Lutheran Church Today
Like us
  • Home
  • Responses
    • From Pastors and Churches
    • Study Guide
    • From ELCA members and others
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Witness Stone Blog

'The ELCA is a Political and Social Activist Group With a Specific Cultural Agenda'

3/10/2015

2 Comments

 
Every once in awhile, in the comment section under an article or blog you come across a comment by someone that is so good you want to share it. That happened to me this week while I was reading a Michael Rinehart, Bishop of the Texas Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod, blog. Bishop Rinehart is extremely liberal politically and theologically. Under a recent death penalty focused blog by Bishop Rinehart I found this gem:

Linda writes "...The fundamental issue is that the ELCA is a political and social activist group with a specific cultural agenda. The ELCA pastors are required to pledge loyalty to the organization itself as well as to the rightly preaching Gospel and rightly administering the sacraments. When they find those two at odds, there is tremendous pressure placed upon the pastor with a threat of taking him off the roster and never issuing another call. If a faithful Lutheran pastor disagrees with the Synod bishop, he runs the risk of being labelled schismatic and pulled from the clergy roster if he won’t toe the mark. The hierarchy manages that change and advocates for it, and waits for the orthodox to leave (without their buildings, and preferably quietly) or just to age out. The ELCA seminaries teach symbolic and allegorical reading of Scriptures, although they don’t call it that, and they have an agenda of radical feminism and full participation for homosexual practitioners to be pastors and administer and take part in the sacramental life of the church.

Surveys are undertaken of the congregations not to determine what the faithful need to be reminded of or grounded in, but to change church teaching based on what people are already doing and already believe in practice. We actually had a young 30-something woman who was a member of our former small ELCA church state that she believed we could get more members if we didn’t require our members to be baptized as our constitution provided. Indeed. Let’s be so inclusive that we are no longer the Lutheran or even a Christian church at all. Radical hospitality. My brother calls it the Burger King of churches: have it your way at ELCA.

At present the ELCA is having congregations read and participate about what they believe and practice regarding Holy Communion. I believe this will eventually result in a policy statement which captures what most people believe and are already doing, rather than the ELCA actually bothering to catechize the faithful with confessional Lutheran teachings and correct any errors in understanding and/or practice regarding the sacrament. They will not want to reinforcing Lutheran teaching that Holy Communion is a sacrament for the baptized who believe, and that even believers must be rightly disposed to participate or should refrain (or be denied the sacrament if the pastor has knowledge).

Now the saying goes that the ELCA practices radical hospitality – ALL means ALL regardless of their understanding of Holy Communion. No matter that Scripture teaches that when you eat and drink of the Body and Blood of Christ without being properly disposed that you are bringing judgment onto yourself. That’s just one example, albeit a pretty big one, I know.

ELCA.
Asking people what they already practice and believe to ok it is hardly Evangelical.
Not calling them to learn or abide by the confessions is hardly Lutheran.
Advocating worldly social and political agendas is not being Church.

About the only word of truth left in the ELCA, then, is the last one. America.

It is true that it’s located in the United States of America.

I am waiting for the call for the Gospel rightly preached to be deemed hate speech by the culture at large. It’s coming. ELCA will soon follow and the rightly preached Gospel, the fullness of the Word, will be silenced within the ELCA churches by discipline of individual members by the Synod (this used to be done at the congregational level. In 2013 the ELCA changed the constitution to provide that the Synod now undertakes that discipline. Apparently the congregations can no longer be trusted to administer such member discipline any longer. After all, they may not toe the party line at the congregational level. But the Synod surely will.

All the beautiful Lutheran language in the well-drafted and crafted ELCA constitution has been relegated to symbolic and/ or ceremonial status in the church. Many ELCA...are persons of good faith, but it’s just not the Lutheran or the Christian faith except in name and symbol and outward ceremony. The substance has been stripped. Nobody preaches about original sin or even sinning unless its about “sinful structures” that promote some -ism, take your pick. Like patriarchy in our culture. That is a sinful, oppressive thing that only radical feminism can make right. It’s all about inclusivity, moral relativism and the historical-critical method which sounds like a good contextual way to read the Bible and allow its truths to come through. Instead, it is the leadership’s way of teaching seminarians to dismantle Biblical truths one by one in study, all in favor of the wisdom of the age.

By the resounding failure of pastoral and theological leadership in the Human Sexuality study, I fully expect gender fluidity and gender bias studies to be commissioned within the ELCA. After much time and money expended by a future task force the ELCA will teach...that God did NOT make them male and female, and that the term eunuch in the Bible is a pejorative term that refers to and perpetuates fear of the stranger or 'other' from biblical times and perpetuates transphobia. If you disagree you will be called transphobic, even though the only thing you fear is that the Gospel is no longer rightly preached in your church.

I only wish that I were writing this tongue-in-cheek. It’s the reason we led our church out of the ELCA and joined the LCMC. Peace and blessings to you." (read here) 



2 Comments
Didaskalos link
3/10/2015 08:13:03 pm

Just about everything the ELCA does these days fits under Jesus' condemnation of the "church" in His days of earthly ministry: "Because of your traditions you have destroyed the authority of God's word. And you do many other things like that."

When the ELCA inevitably acquiesces (if it hasn't already acquiesced) to the world's commands to recognize and unstintingly endorse "gender fluidity," it will continue to prove it's not even remotely Lutheran.

[from "THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH: RECLAIMING MARRIAGE"] . . Martin Luther, too, saw marriage as a sign that points beyond itself to even greater truths, as he taught in his sermon “On the Estate of Marriage”:

" The Church’s great teachers say that marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament is a sacred sign of something spiritual, holy, heavenly, and eternal. . . . It is an outward and spiritual sign of the greatest, holiest, worthiest, and noblest thing that has ever existed or ever will exist: the union of the divine and the human natures in Christ. The holy apostle Paul says that as man and wife united in the estate of matrimony are two in one flesh, so God and man are united in the one person Christ, and so Christ and Christendom are one body. It is indeed a wonderful sacrament, as Paul says (Eph. 5:32), that the estate of marriage truly signifies such a great reality. Is it not a wonderful thing that God is man and that he gives himself to man and will be his, just as the husband gives himself to his wife and is hers? But if God is ours, then everything is ours. Consider this matter with the respect it deserves. Because the union of man and woman signifies such a great mystery, the estate of marriage has to have this special significance."

Luther also addressed the question of who can marry, stressing the complementarity of male and female:

" Therefore, each one of us must have the kind of body God has created for us. I cannot make myself a woman, nor can you make yourself a man; we do not have that power. But we are exactly as he ­created us: I a man and you a woman. . . . Each should honor the other’s image and body as a divine and good creation that is well-pleasing."

Reply
Bruce
3/14/2015 05:37:00 am

"For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you.... These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm--shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted--twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom the blackest darkness has been reserved forever." (Jude 4, 12-13)

"Christ is our Aaron and high priest, and we should let him alone rule. But the pope and bishops will not allow that. They have established themselves and wish to take the reins of government by force, having set themselves against Christ.... The people imagine that these idle fellows are the best part, the jewels of Christendom; while they are mere shame-spots, and an abomination.... They feed the sheep not, but are wolves that devour the sheep. They are the 'clouds' floating above in the air, they sit high in the church, as those who should preach, and yet they do not preach, but permit Satan to carry them hither and thither. So also he says they are 'autumn trees without fruit, twice dead.' They have neither fruit nor leaves; they stand there alone bare like other trees; they make the claim and show as if they were Christian bishops, while neither the word nor the work of Christian bishops is there, but all is dead at the root. Further they are like the 'wild waves of the sea,' that is, like the wind tosses and plays with the waves and billows upon the water, so they go just as the devil leads.... They are 'wandering stars,' planets as they are called, that go backward and not in a steady, straight course. So these bishops have no regular course; their lives and teachings are mere error, in which they are misled and they mislead all who follow them. Therefore 'the blackness of darkness has been reserved for them forever.' " (Martin Luther, COMMENTARY ON PETER & JUDE [Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1990], pp. 296-297)

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    ​Dan Skogen

    ​
    "Then he (Joshua) took a large stone and set it up there under the oak near the holy place of the LORD.

    'See!' he said to all the people. 'This stone will be a witness against us. It has heard all the words the LORD has said to us. It will be a witness against you if you are untrue to your God.'
    Joshua 24:26-27


    Your gift can help us continue
    this ministry



    Categories

    All
    Abortion
    Augsburg University
    Bishop Hanson
    California Lutheran Univ
    Cartoon
    Church
    Climate Change
    #DecolonizeLutheranism
    Dig Deeper
    Eaton
    Elca
    ELCA Advocacy
    Elca Seminaries
    ELCA Youth Gathering
    Gender Neutral Language
    George Soros
    Guns
    Heresy
    Heretics
    Homosexual Relations
    ICE
    Illegal Immigration
    Immigration
    Israel
    Jesus
    Lcmc
    Lcms
    Lgbt
    Luther College
    Membership
    Mother God
    Nadia Bloz Weber
    NRA
    Other Gods
    Pastors
    Politics
    Pornography
    Queen
    Racism
    Salvation
    Sanctuary
    Synod
    The Bible
    The Resurrection
    Umc
    United Nations
    Universalism
    Video
    Virgin Birth
    Wordalone Ministries

    Archives

    December 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    March 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    September 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010

    RSS Feed

     

Home

Responses

Articles

Blog

Contact

ELCAToday.com
Copyright © 2015