(I’ve made a running joke in this blog of referring to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) as The Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless (TVLLCBTSRN). In view of recent events, I’m going to name names in this post. In the future, who knows?)

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s decision, this past week, to bless same-sex sexual relationships, and to allow open homosexuals (if monogamous) to serve as clergy, will, I’m sure, lead to a perceptible (possibly dramatic) exodus of conservative churches and individuals from the denomination. I approve of this, and encourage it.

Still, I can already hear the accusations of the ELCA liberals and homosexual activists—“This isn’t about truth! It’s about hate! You people just can’t get past your homophobia!”

And in a sense, I understand the criticism. One might reasonably ask, “Why now? Has this problem come up all of a sudden (like the unpredicted tornado that knocked the cross off the steeple of Central Lutheran Church, a convention venue, during deliberations)? Why strain out this particular camel, when you’ve swallowed so many camels already?”

The church I grew up in was part of the old Evangelical Lutheran Church, which got folded into the American Lutheran Church through a merger in 1960. I attended ALC colleges, and eventually went to work at church headquarters in Minneapolis, in shipping and mailing for several years, finally as Administrative Assistant to the speaker on the “Lutheran Vespers” radio program, for ten months in 1979.

It was during this period (in 1970) that the ALC voted to ordain women as pastors. For me, it was immediately clear that the ALC had set the plain teaching of Scripture aside, and I determined that I would never again be a member of an ALC church. I saw the denominational action as “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.” This conviction put me in the odd position of working for a church that I considered, not (yet) heretical, but prodigal.

At some point during those years, somebody persuaded me to read a book on Christian feminism, which convinced me that I’d been wrong about women’s ordination. That conviction lasted right up until my next reading of the Epistles. My personal experience has been that it’s possible to believe in the ordination of women, but not simultaneously with reading the New Testament. One can maintain gender egalitarianism, or one can maintain the authority of Scripture. Not both at once. I know I can’t. (And nothing in the ALC/ELCA’s subsequent history has contradicted this opinion.) The ALC’s working principle, which I heard dozens of times during my years at headquarters, was “We believe that the Bible is the final authority in all matters of faith and life.” It was clear to me, for one, that that formula had been emptied of meaning.

In the years that followed, my personal relationship with the ALC was problematic, and not always in ways that redounded to my credit. I was mostly an unchurched believer, seduced by my loner nature into staying home on Sundays. Traditional as I am, I felt that my proper home was the ALC, but that ALC membership would violate my conscience. At one point I joined a (very conservative) church of the Lutheran Church in America, which was utterly inconsistent, as they had had ordained women before the ALC did. I will stipulate to that hypocrisy on my part, for the record.

The situation didn’t improve when I went to work as Administrative Assistant for an ALC church in Florida. I attended that church for several years, but refused to join. After the 1988 merger that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I found a congregation of the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, which I did join. Today I work for the AFLC’s schools, and have a spiritual home.

Developments within the ELCA over the years have never once surprised me. That the denomination would pay for abortions through its health benefits program followed naturally from its preference for the socially acceptable over the scriptural. The “Called to Common Mission” agreement of 1999, which established pulpit and altar fellowship with the even more liberal Episcopal Church (through the complete jettisoning of Luther’s definition of the nature of the church) was a foregone conclusion. Why would abandoning Luther be any roadblock to those who’d already abandoned the Bible? (The recently adjourned ELCA assembly also approved, with less publicity than attended the “gay” decisions, a similar arrangement with the United Methodist Church, thus ash-canning Luther’s teaching on Holy Communion.) When an ELCA seminarian (not especially conservative by my standards) told me that he was one of a very small minority in his class who were not universalists, it was no news to me. The ordination of women telegraphed it all, way back in 1970.

The point of all this is that, in my opinion, a lot of people who seem suddenly shocked, shocked! by the ELCA’s abandonment of biblical principles must have had their heads in the sand for the past forty years. There are varieties of ministries and varieties of callings, and I would never suggest that those who’ve stayed in the ALC and ELCA to fight the good fight were doing wrong. But those who think that the ELCA has suddenly gone off the rails are mistaken. It, and its predecessors, have been straying like lost sheep all through my lifetime, and I’m no young man anymore.