How I Became Less Lutheran
Some notes on the formation of a "Commission For A Renewed Lutheran Church"
When the news of the formation of a “Commission For A Renewed Lutheran Church” came through my social media feed, I will admit it made me… despondent.
I’ve been in this denomination long enough to know we assign ourselves this renewal task periodically, often with a long name that turns into an acronym (CFARLC?). Then very little of substance happens and we forget what we did previously and do it again.
At my darkest moment I texted a friend and wrote, “There is nothing that makes me feel more nihilistic than the announcement of the commission for a renewed Lutheran church.”
I’ve seen the list of the nominated. There are some cool people on that commission. It depresses me to know cool people will give so much time to a process that is probably systematically structured to result in very little of substance (a commission of 35 people is simply too large). I do hope they have some good meals and take selfies in Chicago.
However, as I sat on the topic longer, although I wanted to admit briefly to my consternation, I honestly don’t want to be a crank. So, I’m going to take the more nihilistic responses I have and shelve them, and instead attempt to ask a question that may be of some service to the members of the commission (and our denomination more generally):
How did I become less Lutheran?
The short answer to this question: I moved to Arkansas, survived a church split over same-gender marriage, stayed in the congregation, have been a committed localist1 for twelve years, and during that time have led our congregation toward a vision for how church can be in 2023.
Here’s one way our denomination as it is currently structured has helped: because we are mostly congregational in our polity, we have had the freedom to strike out in radically new directions with very little (or almost no) intervention by the wider church. My church administrator, who has experience with the Episcopalian church, points out that this kind of local congregational freedom is mostly unheard of in more “episcopal” structures.
In other words, perhaps we’ve become less Lutheran precisely because our denomination is Lutheran in a very congregational way.
Over time, we have sloughed off many of the traditional Lutheran accoutrements. Much of the cultural baggage of midwest Lutheranism makes little or no sense to a congregation made up of members who have been raised in Arkansas. We certainly are far enough away from cultural midwest Lutheranism for very many of our members to assume that “cultural” Lutheranism IS Lutheranism, or even know what cultural Lutheranism might entail.
This applies not just to foods at meals (injera vs. lefse) or rules of decorum (Minnesota nice or neurodivergent directness), but also the age at which one can commune (we commune everyone), the presence of confirmation (for us that is a rite you participate in when you join the church, not a special class you do as a teen), etc.
More generally though, it means we have leaned in hard to the progressive side of our identity. In fact our tag line is quite simply: “a progressive church in the south.”2
One aspect of this progressive shift has been some level of alienation of our long-term Lutheran members. Not all of them, mind you. Some of our lifelong Lutherans are tenacious and in for the ride (like me). But one of the rather common reasons some have given for departing and joining other congregations is “we became less Lutheran,” which when translated meant “less cultural accoutrements of Lutheranism and far more mutual aid and social service. Who are all these new people?!”
I can’t go without mentioning that in 2022 our church received the Arkansas Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers’ “Agency of the Year Award.”
We received this award for a variety of reasons. We are the founding congregation for Arkansas’ main refugee resettlement organization, Canopy NWA. We are the founding location for the global Little Free Pantry Movement. We founded Queer Camp in 2022, as well as The Transition Closet (a closet that provides gender-affirming resources for all) and at the beginning of the pandemic we began Ozark Atolls, a significant support organization for the Marshallese community.
All of this happened after our church split over same-gender marriage. That moment was so freeing!
You might say the portion of the iceberg visible above the water line for us is quite simply, “We’re radically LGBTQIA inclusive.” But there’s a lot under the water that makes that visible portion float, and it’s the wild and messy ways our congregation is engaged in community service.
Our staff has shifted to simply thinking about our facility as a community center— and it is.
We’ve also become less Lutheran by growing younger. While the rest of our denomination ages, we have become continually younger. And youth programs take a considerably different form among us than many Lutheran church. I already mentioned Queer Camp, which is a camp for queer youth attended by young people across the state and as far away as places like Puerto Rico. But also our Marshallese organization Ozark Atolls is launching a youth participatory culture project this year empowering young Marshallese to advocate for social justice.
I’m also less Lutheran purely by geographical distance. My synod office is in an entirely other state (Oklahoma). There are only 20 ELCA churches in Arkansas. Our congregation partners with dozens of organizations, but none of them are other ELCA churches. Instead, we are the host site for two mutual aid feeding organizations, May Day and Food Not Bombs. We frequently do projects like Interfaith Camp with the local synagogue and Islamic Center. Our partners are organizations like the University of Arkansas and 7 Hills Homeless Center, and our grant supporters include entities like Walmart and Arkansas Community Foundation.
As I have mentioned we have ourselves started half a dozen local non-profits. And it is the community itself (mostly regardless of their religious affiliation) who partner with us, financially support us3, and more.
Honestly, I grew up in a kind of American Lutheran heartland. Our denomination is predominately rural, which I’m guessing means that, in spite of our denominational leadership moving significantly to the left on social issues these past few years, nevertheless the average Lutheran in a rural congregation in the midwest may be of a very different perspective.
So the other way I’ve become less Lutheran is simply: I don’t have any desire to hold all the “sides” together. Back in 2009, the ELCA passed a resolution that allowed for individual congregations and synods to decide, based on their “bound conscience,” whether they would ordain or call clergy who were in same-gender committed relationships. I disagreed with that decision at the time4, and disagree with it even more now, not because I was against clergy being in same-gender marriages, but for exactly the opposite reason, that I feared it would create a two-tier system in our denomination for calls and also because it would institutionalize bigotry as simply a matter of “bound conscience.”
We still try to act like this today, as if you can hold together in one body mutually antithetical positions.
But honestly you can’t, and I believe Christianity is about taking a side, the side of the oppressed or marginalized. Inasmuch as Lutheranism has tended to try to maintain a false middle, I’ve become much less Lutheran.
I guess these days you’d consider me, in the terms offered in the TED-talk about localism, a “walk-out.” I’ve left any leadership roles within the denomination. I don’t attend synod assemblies, and use my continuing education time to attend secular programs with which we have resonance, from the World Science Fiction Convention to the Pacific Islander Health Forum conference to DEI training with the university.
I don’t write for the Lutheran magazine. I write for the American Baptists and Christian Century. And so on.
I’m just out here in this new space jamming with a community of people I truly love. I’m starting to realize the lament I feel when I see news articles about the ELCA is the last few episodes of a diminishing grief, a grief over an imagined future where I had thought (this was hubris) I might help lead our denomination in the direction we have headed.
But the grief really is diminishing. It helps to unsubscribe from the listservs, leave the groups, and realize we have an entire tribe, a whole network, all sorts of emerging rhizomatic connections, and the last portion of the grief is simply letting go and not caring so much about what used to be.
That’s all longer than any of the commissioners for this renewed Lutheran Church want to read, but I prayerfully decided it might be worth it for them to know one story of a walk-out now maintaining the bare minimum of connection.
—
A short note on Lutheran theology: I cut my teeth on the theology of “radical Lutheranism”5 while in seminary. Although I still find some of the emphases of that movement salutary, the fact all the men who led it turned out to be queerphobic in the extreme left me wondering about the value of such a theology for the proclamation of the gospel as I understand it as a progressive Christian.
And honestly, completely apart from the queer phobic nature of radical Lutheranism and some other contemporary Lutheran theologians (Robert Jensen, Wolfhart Pannenberg, etc.), so much of that theology is bereft of a touchpoint for action in the world.
For myself, I’ve gone the way of progressive or liberation theology, and consider myself much more a disciple of Dorothee Soelle6 than any other “Lutheran” theologians.
The reason this matters for a “renewed” Lutheran Church: well, it appears the majority of the time in our denomination that a leader asserts the nature of Lutheranism, they tend to do so either a) on the basis of cultural Lutheranism, b) in reference to the Small Catechism, or c) in reference to our social statements.
I don’t find our church (or my own way of doing theology) much in any of those approaches. So until such time as the denomination admits to a progressive shift that does not remain locked into a certain kind of strange confessional adherence, I find myself adrift.
Thanks to my colleague Amalia Vagts for a link to this TED talk.
VISION: We create sanctuary and envision a world where sanctuary exists for everyone. WELCOME: Good Shepherd Lutheran Church joyfully and unconditionally welcomes all people of any age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, education, culture, ability, or political affiliation to walk with us in full communion in our community of faith. We affirm the worth of all people as unique individuals made in the image of God. Come as you are! MISSION: We are a progressive church that walks in solidarity with the community providing mutual aid and creatively adapting to the needs of our neighbors as they arise.
The two largest end of year donations we received last year from individual donors were from non-members, and one of those was from a person who identifies more as Buddhist.
You can read my arguments against that decision here: https://www.elca.org/JLE/Articles/377
If you are curious, this is the one essay to read: https://crossalone.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Radical-Lutheranism.pdf
If you are curious, I recommend this essay: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/god-is-justice-social-spirituality-of-dorothee-soelle/
Love this. One thing: my impression of your calling, your own personal theological & pastoral journey, and the concomitant transformation of GSLC is not that you/our church are "adrift" so much as simply standing aside, wondering/waiting/hoping/praying...indeed _inviting_, challenging the Lutheran Church (or at least some portion of it) to acknowledge us, catch up to us. Adrift? It's a good bet that a long list of Lutheran "radicals" (starting with the namesake himself) very likely felt that way at one point or another...
"When the news of the formation of a “Commission For A Renewed Lutheran Church” came through my social media feed, I will admit it made me… despondent." Me, too. In fact, I mentioned this in Sunday's sermon, which text was Matthew 28--the Great Commission. I noted the irony of the use of the word "commission" in both statements. There are so many things wrong with how the problem is stated--'we are too white" and how it is addressed---with numbers and statistics. It reminds me of my years at an ALC college in the 60's. Some "deserving" African American kids were "imported" from Chicago to our college to make the college look diverse. It meant that a few of us midwestern small town kids got a closeup look at a real live black person, but the black students were assigned to one dorm, as I recall, and interaction on any meaningful level evaded me and most everyone else, I suspect. To whine about being too white is to ignore the socioeconomic foundation of slavery. It's not about skin color; it's about racism, about complicity, about maintaining the status quo. And maybe it's a little bit of nostalgia, too--if only we had 100 kids in Sunday School again---wait! let's import some of those kids!