ELCA Churchwide Assembly, a Postscript

by Phil Soucy

I woke up this morning with the thought that we start our journeys home from Churchwide today.

Then it struck me that we came home Friday night...
We came home Friday night...

There is a hotel chain that says they'll leave a light in the window for us...

We too have been following a light left in the window for us - by Christ Jesus.
We came home Friday night...

Welcome home, everybody...
Welcome home...

Day Six

by Phil Soucy

I would like to report at the outset that the Presiding Bishop, in accordance with the agenda for the assembly laid out weeks ago, took the entire assembly to Central Lutheran today for worship at 11:30 a.m. Throwing caution to winds (yes, Virginia, that reference is deliberate), the assembly had to cross the very same ground that the tornado touched down on. They were in the previously "so-called targeted" area including Central Lutheran for nearly an hour, and then retraced their steps to the Convention Center. The sky remained blue, tornado-less and cloudless, the sun shining brightly. So much for that...

That "weather" pattern was not prevalent throughout the morning in the assembly hall as "greetings" were brought to the assembly by Reverend Dr. Gerald Kieschnick, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. More accurately, he was greeted warmly and humorously in the name of the Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America by Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson. The Reverend Dr. did not smile, but began his message by quoting Paul in 2 Corinthians 15: "...we implore you, on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. What a blessing it is to know that our sin is forgiven, removed from us as far as the east is from the west because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ on Calvary's cross..."

At that point I realized that the exchange of commemorative plaques was probably off...

Getting into stride, he later quoted from the Kolb-Wengert translation of the Formula of Concord on doctrinal controversy and discord, to wit: "...for these controversies are not merely misunderstandings or semantic arguments where someone might think that one group had not sufficiently grasped what the other group was trying to say or that the tensions were based upon only a few specific words of relatively little consequence. Rather, these controversies deal with important and significant matters, and they are of such a nature that the positions of the erring party neither could nor should be tolerated in the church of God, much less be excused or defended. Therefore necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God's word and reliable writings so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God's word and the Christian Augsburg confession and which is not. And so t
he Christians of good will, who are concerned about the truth, might protect and guard themselves from the errors and corruptions that have appeared among us..."

His was a serious message of rebuke, delivered somberly and, as he said, "...in deep humility with a heavy heart and no desire whatsoever to offend. The decisions by this assembly to grant non-celibate homosexual ministers the privilege of serving as rostered leaders in the ELCA and the affirmation of same-gender unions as pleasing to God will undoubtedly cause additional stress and disharmony within the ELCA. It will also negatively affect the relationships between our two church bodies. The current division between our churches threatens to become a chasm..."

Bishop Hanson replied graciously "...in the same spirit of high humility and clarity in which you addressed us, I want you to hear, in my humble voice my deep commitment that the shared confessions that hold us together as Lutherans I hope and pray will be strong enough for us to continue to be in conversation and that the cries of the world that we have heeded together, in spite of these difficult times of acknowledging our differences, the cries of the world that have called us to join together as Lutheran Services in America, Lutheran Immigration Refugee Service, Lutheran World Relief, Lutheran Disaster Response and military chaplains, that even as we take and hear your honest voices about our actions, you hear our honest commitment to be in conversation and together responding as your board of directors did this week in response to LMI, so that with Lutheran voice and humility and capacity we might proclaim Christ through our deeds of service. Bring my commitment to your church."


I am aware that a casual reading of these reports would lead to the conclusion that we are one-subject Lutherans. I have per force of the issues before us, the church, and the assembly concentrated on that subject, seemingly to the exclusion of all others. But I know you and those who surround me in this work are Lutherans, loving our church and vitally interested in the gamut of the work done for others by the ELCA.

This assembly dealt with amazing issues of vital important to the life of the church and its present and future mission to its members and those it is in service to in the world, using our hands to do God's work. All done as Mother Theresa once said, "Not because we want anything, but because they need it."

The assembly voted that youth (under 18 at the time of their election or appointment) and young adults (18-35) should comprise 10% of boards, committees and assemblies at the congregation, synod, and churchwide level.

The assembly has ordered a Social Statement be created on Justice for Women and presented for adoption in 2015 to help the church and its members in moral deliberations, to govern the ELCA's institutional policies and to be a guide in the church's advocacy work concerning women. Social Statements take a minimum of 5 years in preparation; there are two other social statements in the queue for 2011 and 2013.

The assembly said in unequivocal terms that basic health care and mental health care should be available to all at an affordable cost.

The assembly approved a budget for 2010 that is $76.69 million, a 6.4 percent decrease over 2009. This is based on estimated giving levels in 2009.

All of these things are important to us as Lutherans. It really is all about our hands doing God's work.

Look for a communication from Emily Eastwood, Executive Director of Lutherans Concerned in the next few days reflecting on the events of the assembly and the future they bode. In the meantime, continue your prayers for the church, all its members, and its leaders as the decisions of the assembly are turned into actions for the mission of the church to the world.

This is the last of these blogs from the assembly. It has been an honor to try to help you see in a small way the assembly through a rear-view mirror.

One last observation: in the hotel we stayed in the sign on wall informing what was going on in the venue. As we arrived last weekend it said that "Flexible meeting space was available." Now at this end of the week it notes that "Transformance seminars" are beginning. Indeed, they are... Peace and Blessings...

Video from Goodsoil Service for Hope and Healing

Video courtesy of Megan Rohrer

A Whole New Poetry

by David Weiss

Today I am struggling for words.

What have I seen these past days except Communion?

I remember years ago, as a teenager, once seeing my pastor lift a pitcher high to pour the wine from three feet above the chalice to accentuate the drama of the words, “poured out for you.”

This week it was as though the twin mics were the hands an unseen Celebrant lifting up the Bread to say in faithful disagreement, “This is my Body, broken for you. Do this … to re-member me.”

Who of us came to Minneapolis to see the Body broken? We go to church weekly, anticipating with innocent calm the breaking of the bread, so easily forgetting the original terror of the words when first instituted. We take for granted that this breaking brings wholeness, because it is typically loaves, not limbs or Lutherans that are broken.

So is our joy to be muted? No. We have witnessed the Magnificat play out in our Assembly. How can our souls not magnify the Lord?

How then do we tend to the Body?

By doing as we have done all week, all decade, all of our lives: by being persistently and (as we are able) graciously present to our brothers and sisters in Christ. By reminding them, gently to be sure, but with wisdom hard-won ourselves, that as Simone Weil wrote, “Life does not need to mutilate itself to be holy.”

What we have learned in our own journeys toward affirmation, wholeness and integrity is now our best witness to those who see no option except to mutilate the Body of Christ in the desire to keep it holy.

Me? As I have moved through this week I have felt the power of Adrienne Rich’s intuition, that, as the truth of our love finds its voice, there is “a whole new poetry beginning here.”

In the company of those of you here at the Convention Center and alongside those of you reading my words from afar, I have been watching, listening, weeping, aching, hoping, and trying to echo bits of my experience for others to read. Seeking Communion.

Again, Adrienne Rich, elegizing a team of women mountain climbers who perished together on a Russian mountain peak in 1974, describes their death-defying solidarity in words that were ours this week:

Now we are ready
and each of us knows it I have never loved
like this I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love

We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together but till now
we had not touched our strength

What does love mean
what does it mean “to survive”
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives

And while it is true that we are yet some ways off from the full Kin-dom of God, both in the details of the documents and in the strained fellowship of the Assembly, at the reception in Goodsoil Central on Friday night the food—“heavy hors d'oeuvres” in catering jargon—tasted like a foretaste of the feast to come. And at the worship service for Hope and Healing, between the eloquent readings, the poignant prayers, the powerful drumming, and the heavenly singing of Cantus, it seemed as though God, too, has been dreaming of this day for all of our lives and more.

Day Four

by Phil Soucy

Ok, I am not a great lover of windstorms, even when they are described as weak tornados by the weather service. "Weak tornado" is a bit like "jumbo shrimp," burdened by its own contradiction. And the lady who reported that she was holding on to a Stop sign to keep from being lifted off the ground by this "weak" tornado would probably have something to say to the weather service about the words it uses. Much like the lady when I was a kid who wrote to the weather service protesting that she had just shoveled three inches of "Fair and Partially Cloudy" off her front porch.

I was on a local radio show by phone this, the morning after the tornado, and the host of the talk show said that a minister had said that the tornado "was a gentle warning from God" to the ELCA. I said that the minister who would say that obviously had never been in a tornado: there was nothing "gentle" about a tornado. As for a message embedded in it, did he mention that the sun came out when the Social Statement passed? But, the reality was the two events were both just weather, dangerous in one case, welcome relief in the other, but just weather, though I understood the use of metaphor to make a point.

Today was decidedly and gratefully less exciting, though nonetheless important than yesterday. First off this morning the assembly discussed the proposed change to the ministry policies that would allow service by ministers in committed, same gender relationships. They first did that sharing their thoughts in small groups before rejoining into the full assembly for the second half to one-by-one at microphones give their reflections on the proposed changes. All as a Committee of the Whole - no parliamentary procedure.

We seemed no less divided on the ministry policies changes than we were by the Social Statement. But the vote on the Social Statement puts in sharp focus that alternating speakers, one for, one against, gives the impression that the house is evenly divided on the subject. Until the vote reveals where the house really is. The parliamentary consideration and vote on the changes to ministry policies will occur beginning tomorrow morning.

Later in the day, the Implementing Resolutions to the Social Statement were debated and ultimately passed, though not until after several motions were made and failed to substantially change the wording. You can find the Implementing Resolutions at the back of the Social Statement. According to the ELCA, the Implementing Resolutions "begin placing the policies and concerns of the statement, titled "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust," into all areas of the church's work."

These little reports might give the impression that it was sex, sex, sex, all day long. The truth is the church was conducting major business all day in all aspects of the life of the church. We should be grateful and uplift by that work.

We adopted the Full Communion Agreement with the United Methodist Church. We completed the Second Ballot in the election of the Vice President of the ELCA. By the end of the assembly a prodigious amount of work will have been accomplished. No one should imagine that being a voting member is a boondoggle, easy, or unrewarding.

Tomorrow comes out of the starting blocks all teeth and claws, as the Brits say. So I am going to get some refreshing rest so as to be ready for it.

Again, if you are able, you can view the proceedings of the assembly online at www.elca.org. Till tomorrow...

Altogether Different Oceans?

by David Weiss

Listening to the words spoken at the microphones about the Sexuality Statement and the Ministry Recommendations is a strange experience. The voices go back and forth from red mic to green mic, and it’s hard not to feel like we are already two churches, our deeply divided witness passing like two ships in the night.

But, no, even that analogy falls short. It seems more like we are boats in altogether different oceans.

Listening to our respective appeals to Scripture, tradition, and the Lutheran Confessions, it is hardly evident that those standing at the red and green mics are referring to the same documents. At one mic these foundational pieces of our heritage are deployed like a set of wagons circled against a hostile world. At the other they are lifted like a sextant, that trustworthy tool used by mariners to navigate with confidence in the absence of fixed points.

There seems to me to be two uncomfortable truths at the heart of this.

We in this church understand the place of our own experience in the life of faith in decidedly different ways. For some, experience is dismissed outright as utterly untrustworthy—especially in instances where it challenges the “reason” of the majority or the texts we hold sacred or confessional. From this perspective any appeal to experience is compelling evidence of a morally and rationally bankrupt position. To tender insight grounded in experience is to play right into the devil’s hands.

For others of us, experience—while by no means immune to critique—is regarded as potentially bearing profound and even sacred insight. It is acknowledged as one arena in which the Wind of the Spirit moves. It is an opening into which voices silenced by majorities can speak a word of truth, helping to interpret Scripture, to complete tradition, and to refine our reading of the Confessions.

The difficulty here is that these positions appear intrinsically polarizing. They are not different takes on the same picture. They are arguments about the nature of the eyes that see the picture.

The second truth is even less comfortable to name.

We have markedly different experiences of the God who has marked us in baptism. Although both camps seem hesitant to raise the stakes this high—at least not at the microphone—behind the differing positions we stake out explicitly, lie arguments unspoken that reach to the very character of God. What we read in Scripture, what we hear in (and silenced beneath) tradition, and what we carry with us of the Confessions is shaped by our experience of the God with whom we keep faith.

Now I need to be very clear, I am not suggesting at all that we are keeping faith with different Gods. I am saying that we are a people with profoundly different experiences of the God with whom we keep faith. And we have yet to be honest or compassionate about what that means for us as a church.

As Lutherans we speak of faith as relational trust. If we intend to be one church at the end of this week, perhaps the biggest task to which we will be called is this: to acknowledge that in this moment the way to keep faith with God is to live in relational trust with one another. To confess that this Ocean is both deeper and more mysterious than any group of us can fathom, and that every every voice on the boat has a witness to bear.

May it be so.

God's Work, Our Hands

by David R. Weiss

While Churchwide Assembly will certainly address a wide range of issues beyond sexuality, it is simply honest to say that the Sexuality Statement and its accompanying recommendations are in the very air we breathe this week. It’s hard to hear anything said anywhere without immediately thinking about its relevance to the looming conversation about sexuality.

So, when Bishop Hanson further reflects this morning on our Assembly theme, “God’s Work. Our Hands,” and the question, “If I could follow your hands with a video feed for the last few weeks where would I see them doing God’s work?” well, you know where my mind went …

But before you scream, “TMI!,” remember, grace comes to us as bodied, not disembodied creatures. Jesus speaks of encountering him—or failing to encounter him—in “the least of these,” our brothers and sisters in need, because whatever Good News means beyond our bodies, it cannot be indifferent to our bodies.

And while doing God’s work surely involves putting my hands at the service of my neighbor’s need, it also involves placing my hands lovingly in pursuit of my beloved’s ecstasy. Soup kitchens and sexual joy are both instances of tactile grace, both moments when the “kingdom of God is … at hand.”

In this church, however, we tend to see sexuality—even while calling it “gift and trust”—as little more than “temptation to sin.” As though the best we can hope for is to hem in its potential for harm with a host of rules and boundaries so that we know at all moments what both our right hand and left hand are permitted to do.

The message is most explicit to our gay and lesbian members, but it remains powerfully implicit for those of us who are straight. We have learned too long and too well: making love, invoking intimate ecstasy in our loving relationships, is not God’s work.

But it is.

It is hardly the whole of God’s work. But I will say this. Sexuality is one corner of God’s creation where grace longs to be exquisitely present … and where its presence has an incredible capacity to heal and empower … and where its presence rests on our hands.

At times we seem determined as a church to hinder rather than welcome this Grace. But so long as the grace offered us by God through the goodness of bodily touch is shaped more by the long tradition of shame than by the deep (and holy!) intuition of joy, our response to the rest of God’s creation, from the pressing cries for economic justice and ecological care to the daring hopes for peace and flourishing, will be less than whole and less than gracious.

So, when I ask you, “when in the last few weeks or months have your hands done God’s work, offering someone a touch of grace?” I’m not trying to embarrass you. I’m trying to remind you that in our work to spread the gospel and to further God’s desire justice and peace we need all the grace we have available to us. And some of it—some wonderful portion of it—is right at our fingertips.


David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist committed to doing “public theology” around issues of sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. His first book is "To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical reflections on sexuality, spirituality and the wideness of God's welcome" (2008 / available online and in Goodsoil Central). A longtime Goodsoil supporter, he lives with his wife and children in St. Paul, MN.

A Theology of Hands: Rebuilding Zion in the Land of 10,000 Lakes

By. David R. Weiss

“God’s Work, Our Hands,” the theme chosen for the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly has a timeless—and yet ever timely—character to it. This is, after all, the very vocation of the people of God: to be doing God’s work … with our hands. And to be doing it with steady conviction and fresh insight in each particular historical moment.

As we gather every two years, Lutherans from coasts and borders, from edge to center, the task of each Churchwide Assembly is to imagine in the company of the Spirit and on behalf of the entire ELCA what particular commitments will shape our life together into the future opening before us. Our task this year will be to work out a theology of hands.

About 540 years before the birth of Jesus, our Hebrew forbears faced a similar prospect. Released from their exile when Persia conquered Babylon, they returned to the site of Jerusalem. Committing themselves to rebuild Zion, the city of God, their deeper project involved rebuilding their life together as the people of God. It was, without question, God’s work.

It was, however, less clear whose hands were welcome to share in that work. As these returning refugees began their planning, certain kinfolk of theirs who’d been left behind during the Exile came down from the hill country to the north, the region called Samaria. Eager to help rebuild the city, they were rebuffed. Deemed of a defective lineage. Rejected.

In doing God’s work, these Hebrews decided that “our hands” did not include “their hands.” Thus began centuries of animosity betweens Jews … and Samaritans.

Recognizing this animosity throws immense light on the scandal of the Gospel Jesus proclaimed. Of the ten lepers healed, only the Samaritan returns to give thanks. The Samaritan woman at the well might rightly be counted as the first apostle, the first to share the good news about Jesus with others. And the parable of the Good Samaritan, far from teaching the simple truism of kindness to those in need, declares the scandal of discovering that in God’s kingdom holy compassion might be modeled by those we least expect—and least desire—to receive it from.

When Jesus imagines “God's work, our hands,” there can be no doubt that despite generations of consistent animosity, despite an unbroken tradition of exclusion, the Good News is that “our hands” includes Samaritan hands. And far from a precursor to political correctness, this stance of full inclusion is a theological claim. It says that God is a God whose work can be done by hands long held unwelcome. (The same claim was made earlier by the authors of Ruth and Jonah, and by Third Isaiah—all of whom challenged the exclusionary impulses of Ezra and Nehemiah during the rebuilding of the city and Temple.)

This week, as we gather around the theme “God’s work, our hands,” the decisions we make about whose hands are welcome to do God’s work will often be portrayed as being about faithfulness to Scripture or tradition or confessional polity. But in truth the decisions we make about whose hands can be “our hands” in the ELCA —united in love and ordained for Word and Sacrament—are decisions about whether we can imagine and confess a God as surprisingly, scandalously, and graciously welcoming as Jesus’ God.

God’s work, our hands. Is your “our” as big as God’s?

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist committed to doing “public theology” around issues of sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. His first book is To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical reflections on sexuality, spirituality and the wideness of God's welcome (2008). David Weiss will be in Goodsoil Central from 12:30-1:30 for a book signing. A longtime Goodsoil supporter, he lives with his wife and children in St. Paul, MN.

About Goodsoil

Goodsoil is a collaboration of organizations working for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their families in the full ministerial and sacramental life of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). We work to reconcile our church’s policies and practices regarding same-gender marriage, blessings of covenanted unions, and the rostering of partnered LGBT ministers, harmonizing these with our shared values of faith, trust, commitment, monogamy, mutuality, and dignity.

GOODSOIL IS:

Lutherans Concerned/North America
Wingspan Ministry of St. Paul–Reformation Lutheran Church
The Network for Inclusive Vision

It's About Reconciliation:
Reconciling all through Jesus Christ, God gave us the ministry of reconciliation. Throughout all of Goodsoil's efforts before and during the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, our work is to engage the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in love and in grace, speaking the truth so that we may come to renewed understanding as the Body of Christ, overcoming estrangement and discord.

It’s About Transformation:
Our mission is evangelical, recognizing how all human relationships are transformed in and through the encounter with Jesus. Set free by Christ in his forgiveness, and bound to the neighbor in love, Goodsoil grounds its work in the freedom of Christians to establish mutually supportive communities of love, care, and trust among God’s people, no matter what their sexual orientations and gender identities may be.

It’s About Proclamation:
We give witness in all ELCA contexts—congregational, synodical, and churchwide—proclaiming the message of freedom in Christ with boldness and power, as did Paul among the Gentiles, as did Peter with Cornelius, and Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch. We acknowledge and celebrate the public promises of commitment for all couples. We call for one standard of ethical conduct for all ministers—regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. We encourage all members and leaders in the ELCA to similarly give voice to the transformed relationships they see before their own eyes.