Angry white men

OR

The biggest problem facing the ELCA

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of which I am a member, was created out of a merger of 3 other Lutheran bodies in the late 80's. At that time, I would guess that over 95% of the leadership was white men. In our wisdom, or lack thereof, we decided to make the leadership of this new ELCA look like America.

The problem was that Lutherans are lily white and we had no women at that time in leadership positions. But we forged ahead and ended up placing all of the competent women and minorities in top slots but that wasn't enough to fill all of the positions, so we used all of the below average women and minorities and when that wasn't enough we placed incompetent people as leaders in the new church. Note: now that we are 20 years old, we have plenty of competent women pastors but we still have a ways to go with our minority population.

Guess what? We created an Army of angry white pastors. Most of them are now about my age (64), or older,  so they will go away, but not soon enough in my opinion.

Their reaction was hateful, vile and vulgar. Because they could not be open about their disdain for women and minorities, they had to pick another issue to rally around. They chose the new ELCA's attempt to use inclusive language as the focal point of their rage.

Unless  "father, son, and holy ghost" was used to invoke the Trinity, they would use words like apostasy, invalid, and heresy to attack the speaker. They appointed themselves protectors of "confessional Lutheranism." Lutherans are, by definition, confessional we because subscribe to certain confessions of the church.  These supercilious twits failed to see that they were being redundant.

These angry white guys even formed their own society, the STS or Societas Trinitatis Sanctae.  A pastor friend of mine went to one of their weekend seances (retreats) and told me that it was a bunch of angry guys (a few women) playing dress up (black robes) and wallowing in their hatred of the ELCA all the while "contemplating" and "praying." They say we live in a time of "doctrinal confusion and moral uncertainty." How arrogant to define a problem that only they can solve. Just who is confused by our doctrines? Are they suggesting that they can bring "certainty" to this morally ambiguous world that we Lutherans embrace?


You can imagine which team this angry mob plays on in the ordination of gays issue. To date the ELCA has lost about 200 congregations - out of 10,000 - to this faction. Enough said about this very noisy but inconsequential "pimple on the butt" of the church, to use a metaphor from Paul.