For Elca, Lutheran church members like myself this is good news: http://www.washblade.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=26843 Essentially it allows individual congregations to bless same sex unions and the 4.6 million member church will ordain ministers in committed gay relationships.
Yay... life long member of the ELCA here, and I couldnt be prouder. Of course, ELCA is far from fundementalist, where a sizeable (not all, but much of) chunk of the homophobic mentality is coming from, so I was confident that it was a matter of time. ELCA congregations tend to be very welcoming, or atleast in my experince they have been.
ya my minister's own daughter is a lesbian and I have often talking to my pastor about the issue. Apparently she does have many fundamentalist family members in places like Kansas and Nebraska which still make it difficult. It will probably cause a minor split in the church, but it goes to show people you can't stop progress and there is no longer room for hate.
have my doubt that the missouri senete will like this... but i forget if they are elca. Still, even if it causes a divide, it still is a step forward. if more people get a chance to actually interact with more people of the lgbt community, then hopefully, as we have seen so far, more people will be more understanding and accepting. the greatest threat to the homophobes is that people are allowed to get to know gay people.
I play organ for a Lutheran church (I'm not Lutheran myself) and the pastor was NOT happy about this at all. He didn't right out say it... but he definitely showed it, saying they had "different" ways of thinking... he talked about it during the sermon. I wish I could've done something, but this is my only link to getting money right now.
dont blame you for keeping mum to keep your job in this econamy. if I had to have a choice between paying the bills, and being completely out, I would pay the bills. mans gotta eat and needs a place to sleep.
In case you guys didn't know the Lutheran church isn't unified. There is the ECLA, Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod. They operate as separate entities and broke after an earlier confrontation. The ELCA is larger by all means. The Wisconsin Synod is very conservative and is shrinking at an abysmal pace with less the 500k membership around the US.
All I remeber was that one of my brother's girlfriend while he was at pacific lutheren university was missouri synod, and hated it, because she was basically a taught in her church that until she was married and a posession of her husband, she is a posession of her father. They often have a very 'promise keeper' view of gender.
