... an LCMS pastor is the religious leader coordinating and sending out emails for a local Christian Unity gathering. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quinfirefrorefiddle will know why I snicker each time I see one.
The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (aka LCMS or just "Missouri Synod") is much more conservative than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Although they aren't the most conservative Lutheran church in America, they're the largest conservative Lutheran denomination. And they have an institutional phobia about doing anything with people who don't hold and proclaim the "pure Gospel" like they do. They couldn't possibly do anything that might imply that they endorse anything that isn't the ABSOLUTELY PURE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE (which they are the only arbiters of), and nobody can possibly be a true Lutheran without agreeing with them on every tiny point of doctrine (and some of them aren't too sure that people who disagree with them can even be called true Christians at all). Most lay people in their church aren't bad about it, but some of their pastors can and do lead witch-hunts to root out impure doctrine and improper ecumenism.* So when I see an LCMS pastor working on anything to do with Christian Unity, it's funny. And I wonder what his superiors and fellow pastors think of him ...
*You may recall that after 9/11, an LCMS district president (their equivalent of a bishop) participated in a huge ecumenical prayer service in New York City. (It might have been held at Yankee Stadium? It was a really big deal, anyway, lots of religious leaders from lots of denominations.) He had permission from the overall president of the LCMS to do it, but the ultra-conservative faction managed to get him brought up on charges anyway, hoping to use him to oust the president (who was, gasp, shock, horror, only a moderate conservative, not an ultra-conservative). The District President resigned, instead.
For those of you interested in the history of it, in the late 60s there was a sea-change in American mainstream Protestant theology (and the LCMS was, at that point, part of mainstream Protestantism as much as any Lutheran group can be). The historical-critical method that had been developing in large European theology departments at universities since the mid-1800s was finally reaching saturation in American seminaries, not just the academically-focused ones, but the ones turning out ordinary parish pastors. (Basically, this perspective on the Bible says that the Bible was not meant to be a history textbook or a science textbook or a religion textbook, so don't try and treat it as one. It's a book of stories, that went through many stages of oral telling, writing, editing, and translation, before arriving at the state we have it today. As Christians, we believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, but that doesn't mean that human beings can't have messed it up in places or gotten the details wrong or just not cared about the kinds of details we think are important.) The more literal-minded folks were upset about it. The conservative faction was also leary about greater Lutheran unity: Lutheran groups in general spent the 20th century merging lots of small fragmentary denominations into a few large ones, and also building closer relationships with other Christians in general. In 1969, J.A.O. Preus II, a conservative from a very prominent Lutheran family, was elected President of the LCMS on a platform of not getting any closer to other church groups than they already were. The same convocation also ratified a pulpit fellowship agreement with the American Lutheran Church (ALC)--the very thing Preus had been elected to prevent! He needed something to give to his allies. So he went after the most liberal seminary the LCMS had at the time, Concordia St. Louis.
It was a witch hunt. There were anonymous accusations of professors teaching "impure doctrine," but no concrete statement of what the problematic doctrine actually was. There were accusations that a majority of professors at Concordia St. Louis were teaching it, but only one was named, and he got suspended without anyone ever actually saying what he was being suspended for. Finally, in 1973, the students and professors got fed up and demanded that the charges (and who was being accused) be made public. The seminary's board of directors refused, as did Preus and his people. So most of the students and professors walked out and created their own seminary, the Seminary in Exile, or Seminex. Cue an even larger witch hunt and a propaganda battle. I had to do a paper on it in seminary, on the ways the split was (and was not) reported in the LCMS magazine. Within a few years, Seminex was permanently separated from the LCMS (and had taken a decent number of congregations with it, forming the American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch, or AELC, not to be confused with an earlier and completely separate denomination called the American Evangelical Lutheran Church which was one of the Lutheran Church in America's predecessor bodies), and anyone not willing to toe the ultra-conservative party line had been either removed from any leadership position or hounded out of the LCMS altogether.
The new-born American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch didn't want to be a denomination on its own, so it approached the two largest Lutheran denominations at that time, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America (we are not very creative about our names, you may have noticed) to see if they wanted to merge. They did in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (see what I mean about the names?). Seminex disbanded, most of its faculty and students folding into the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Chicago, which was an LCA seminary before the formation of the ELCA. Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative faction that came to power has largely maintained a stranglehold on the denomination, mainly because they're quite willing to attack anyone who stands up to them and have the power to force people out. They have less power now than they used to, and I live in hope that things will change as the generation that came of age during the whole struggle (and were indoctrinated during it) die out.
I know all of this because I had to do a paper on how the main LCMS magazine covered the whole thing. And because one of my pastors growing up was a Seminex graduate. And because another prominent member of my home congregation had been a teacher at an LCMS teacher's college (Concordia Falls River, I think?) who was forced out during the witch hunts because he (a math teacher, not even in the science department) wouldn't swear to only teach and endorse a literal six-day creation of the universe as scientific fact. And because one of my classmates at seminary (now an ELCA pastor) had been an LCMS deaconness working in the New York district offices in 2011 and 2012, and her boss was the one who got canned for praying at an ecumenical prayer service. It's a crying shame and (I think) a great offense against the Body of Christ that the LCMS does what it does. But the ELCA has gotten some great people as both pastors and lay people out of the whole thing.
tl;dr: the LCMS has been kinda screwed up since the late 1960s.
quinfirefrorefiddle will know why I snicker each time I see one.The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (aka LCMS or just "Missouri Synod") is much more conservative than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Although they aren't the most conservative Lutheran church in America, they're the largest conservative Lutheran denomination. And they have an institutional phobia about doing anything with people who don't hold and proclaim the "pure Gospel" like they do. They couldn't possibly do anything that might imply that they endorse anything that isn't the ABSOLUTELY PURE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE (which they are the only arbiters of), and nobody can possibly be a true Lutheran without agreeing with them on every tiny point of doctrine (and some of them aren't too sure that people who disagree with them can even be called true Christians at all). Most lay people in their church aren't bad about it, but some of their pastors can and do lead witch-hunts to root out impure doctrine and improper ecumenism.* So when I see an LCMS pastor working on anything to do with Christian Unity, it's funny. And I wonder what his superiors and fellow pastors think of him ...
*You may recall that after 9/11, an LCMS district president (their equivalent of a bishop) participated in a huge ecumenical prayer service in New York City. (It might have been held at Yankee Stadium? It was a really big deal, anyway, lots of religious leaders from lots of denominations.) He had permission from the overall president of the LCMS to do it, but the ultra-conservative faction managed to get him brought up on charges anyway, hoping to use him to oust the president (who was, gasp, shock, horror, only a moderate conservative, not an ultra-conservative). The District President resigned, instead.
For those of you interested in the history of it, in the late 60s there was a sea-change in American mainstream Protestant theology (and the LCMS was, at that point, part of mainstream Protestantism as much as any Lutheran group can be). The historical-critical method that had been developing in large European theology departments at universities since the mid-1800s was finally reaching saturation in American seminaries, not just the academically-focused ones, but the ones turning out ordinary parish pastors. (Basically, this perspective on the Bible says that the Bible was not meant to be a history textbook or a science textbook or a religion textbook, so don't try and treat it as one. It's a book of stories, that went through many stages of oral telling, writing, editing, and translation, before arriving at the state we have it today. As Christians, we believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, but that doesn't mean that human beings can't have messed it up in places or gotten the details wrong or just not cared about the kinds of details we think are important.) The more literal-minded folks were upset about it. The conservative faction was also leary about greater Lutheran unity: Lutheran groups in general spent the 20th century merging lots of small fragmentary denominations into a few large ones, and also building closer relationships with other Christians in general. In 1969, J.A.O. Preus II, a conservative from a very prominent Lutheran family, was elected President of the LCMS on a platform of not getting any closer to other church groups than they already were. The same convocation also ratified a pulpit fellowship agreement with the American Lutheran Church (ALC)--the very thing Preus had been elected to prevent! He needed something to give to his allies. So he went after the most liberal seminary the LCMS had at the time, Concordia St. Louis.
It was a witch hunt. There were anonymous accusations of professors teaching "impure doctrine," but no concrete statement of what the problematic doctrine actually was. There were accusations that a majority of professors at Concordia St. Louis were teaching it, but only one was named, and he got suspended without anyone ever actually saying what he was being suspended for. Finally, in 1973, the students and professors got fed up and demanded that the charges (and who was being accused) be made public. The seminary's board of directors refused, as did Preus and his people. So most of the students and professors walked out and created their own seminary, the Seminary in Exile, or Seminex. Cue an even larger witch hunt and a propaganda battle. I had to do a paper on it in seminary, on the ways the split was (and was not) reported in the LCMS magazine. Within a few years, Seminex was permanently separated from the LCMS (and had taken a decent number of congregations with it, forming the American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch, or AELC, not to be confused with an earlier and completely separate denomination called the American Evangelical Lutheran Church which was one of the Lutheran Church in America's predecessor bodies), and anyone not willing to toe the ultra-conservative party line had been either removed from any leadership position or hounded out of the LCMS altogether.
The new-born American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch didn't want to be a denomination on its own, so it approached the two largest Lutheran denominations at that time, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America (we are not very creative about our names, you may have noticed) to see if they wanted to merge. They did in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (see what I mean about the names?). Seminex disbanded, most of its faculty and students folding into the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Chicago, which was an LCA seminary before the formation of the ELCA. Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative faction that came to power has largely maintained a stranglehold on the denomination, mainly because they're quite willing to attack anyone who stands up to them and have the power to force people out. They have less power now than they used to, and I live in hope that things will change as the generation that came of age during the whole struggle (and were indoctrinated during it) die out.
I know all of this because I had to do a paper on how the main LCMS magazine covered the whole thing. And because one of my pastors growing up was a Seminex graduate. And because another prominent member of my home congregation had been a teacher at an LCMS teacher's college (Concordia Falls River, I think?) who was forced out during the witch hunts because he (a math teacher, not even in the science department) wouldn't swear to only teach and endorse a literal six-day creation of the universe as scientific fact. And because one of my classmates at seminary (now an ELCA pastor) had been an LCMS deaconness working in the New York district offices in 2011 and 2012, and her boss was the one who got canned for praying at an ecumenical prayer service. It's a crying shame and (I think) a great offense against the Body of Christ that the LCMS does what it does. But the ELCA has gotten some great people as both pastors and lay people out of the whole thing.
tl;dr: the LCMS has been kinda screwed up since the late 1960s.
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Date: 2014-09-24 09:45 pm (UTC)From:The LCMS has given the ELCA a lot of great pastors. Strange how most of them are women....
And as it happens, when I was working my way through seminary in the seminary library (not Chicago) part of my job was checking to see that the issues of periodicals we thought we had were the ones we actually had. And thus I found the LCMS newspaper copies from the 60's to 80's. Anybody who thinks that Lutherans are polite, mild-mannered people should see the name calling on the front page of that thing, wow.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-25 06:02 am (UTC)From:Reading the main LCMS magazine for the year that Seminex split off was ... interesting. They're running articles on the fruits of the spirit (gentleness! community! peace and love!) while at the same time Preus was writing articles about how the historical critical method (and all other modern approaches to Biblical studies, basically) are WRONG using all kinds of straw-men arguments and an entertaining variety of logical fallacies, so OBVIOUSLY anyone who believes they have a shred of merit not only isn't Lutheran, but isn't Christian. And the next month there's a letter from the committee to reconcile the two sides (appointed by Preus himself), except it's not given an article like any other official committee report, it's buried in the middle of the letters, complaining that it was pretty hard to do any reconciling work when unnamed persons *cough*Preus*cough* would keep saying and writing such polarizing (and inaccurate!) things.
I got a kick out of the letters section, actually. You could tell the staff was chafing at the dictates of the Preus hardliners. They couldn't say anything officially, but in the letters they could publish things like people comparing Preus' stranglehold on LCMS doctrine to Pope Leo X's stranglehold on the Roman Catholic church. (For those of you who are not Lutherans, Leo X was the pope when Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation and started the Lutheran church. Lutherans have called Leo X many things throughout the centuries, starting with "Antichrist" and getting worse from there. To compare their own elected President to him, yowza.) It would have been really easy to just skip that one, and probably politically safer, too. But there it was. And there was another letter complaining about censorship in the LCMS publications--specifically in regards to a beloved and well-respected top LCMS person who got canned because he was too liberal. The LCMS magazine said he was just retiring and they wished him well. The secular paper gave all the gory details of how badly he'd been treated as they were forcing him out. The letter to the editor complained that he shouldn't have to read a secular newspaper to find out what was really going on in his own denomination.