March 15, 2005

CHICAGO – The two boards of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Division for Church in Society (DCS) and Division for Ministry (DM) met here March 10-12 in small groups and in plenary sessions, together and separately, and drafted a joint response to a report and three recommendations on homosexuality that their task force for the ELCA Studies on Sexuality developed for the 2005 Churchwide Assembly in August.

"We have indicated where we would come down, but we see our job as helping the Church Council constructively deal with the recommendations from the task force," said the Rev. James B. Martin-Schramm, DCS board chair and associate professor of religion, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa.

The council is the ELCA's board of directors and serves as the legislative authority of the church between biennial churchwide assemblies. It will meet here April 8-11 and prepare a resolution for assembly action on the recommendations.

The report and recommendations, released Jan. 13, provide possible answers to two key questions on homosexuality: Should the church bless same-gender relationships? Should the church allow people in such relationships to serve the church as professional lay and ordained ministers?

The task force recommended that the ELCA:

• concentrate on finding ways to live together faithfully in the midst of disagreements.

• continue to respect the pastoral guidance of a 1993 statement of the ELCA Conference of Bishops opposing the blessing of homosexual relationships but remaining open to pastors wanting to provide pastoral care for gay and lesbian Lutherans.

• continue under current standards that expect unmarried ministers to abstain from sexual relations – defining marriage as being between a man and a woman – but, respecting the consciences of those who find these standards in conflict with the mission of the church, the ELCA may choose to refrain from disciplining gay and lesbian ministers in committed relationships and from disciplining those who call or approve partnered gay or lesbian people for ministry.

"The boards of DM and DCS were supportive of the first recommendation," the boards said in their joint statement. "We recognize that we are a church divided along many issues, but that we share a common mission and vision in seeking to understand what God is telling us in this time and in this place."

The boards' statement said the DCS board appreciated the second recommendation's "allowance for prayerful support for couples in same-sex committed relationships," while the DM board's response was "more mixed." Members of both boards raised concerns that "prayerful support" and "blessing" are not defined and open to interpretation, and that "recommendations two and three inform one another and must be considered in tandem."

"Although both boards voted in a straw poll against adopting recommendation three as presented by the task force, many expressed a desire to ‘create space,' picking up a phrase from the task force report," the boards said. Some board members were concerned that "create space" was not defined either, while others "welcomed the term as a means to express their desire to allow exception for those who, as a matter of conscience, would act contrary to churchwide policy."

In another straw poll the DCS board favored the intent of recommendation three to create space, while more than half of the DM board voted against the concept. The discussion that surrounded the straw polls revealed that board members voted one way or another for a variety of reasons – sometimes conflicting reasons.

"We had a difficult time interpreting the results of our straw polls on recommendation three. The votes of members were cast for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because the members supported or opposed the recommendations," the boards said.

The boards considered three ways to create space that were developed by a committee of the ELCA church council: withholding discipline as described in recommendation three, creating a "provisional" roster of professional lay and ordained ministers who are otherwise in compliance with the church's expectations, and creating a process to grant exceptions from being in compliance with the church's expectations.

Straw polls indicated the boards preferred granting exceptions much more than the other two options. The boards followed the results of the polls with a series of concerns and questions that were raised during the discussions because there were a variety of reasons given for the votes.

The boards listed among their concerns that "the exception process is not a suitable expression of inclusion for gay and lesbian persons" and that "many want to create space but don't have a good suggestion for how to do it."

The boards' questions included:

• How would this recommendation be administered practically?

• Is this church developing a pattern of granting exceptions to churchwide policies?

• Is a vote on this issue premature? Is there a way to live together and have ongoing dialogue about these questions without voting at this time?

The task force report included a section describing two dissenting views expressed by some task force members. The boards decided to conduct another straw poll, asking board members to say which of the two views they "tended toward."

Twenty-three board members leaned toward a dissenting view that would amend current ELCA policies to allow people in committed same-gender relationships to serve as professional lay and ordained ministers. Seven board members leaned toward the other dissenting view that would ask those, "who for reasons of conscience will act contrary to the aforementioned policies, to graciously accept and endure the discipline of the church."

The boards said, "We recognize this outcome seems to reflect a perspective different from that which emerged from the churchwide responses" to the ELCA Studies on Sexuality.

"We avoided what was one of my concerns going into this, which was that we might get bogged down in the process – that there might be some inclination to revisit the work of the task force and redo it as opposed to receiving the report and responding to it," said the DM board chair, the Rev. Robert J. Karli, First English Lutheran Church, Austin, Texas.

Karli said he sensed some frustration among DM board members because "we were not able to come out with any more clear statement than the task force had come out with." He said the views expressed in the task force report had been a "microcosm" of the views held across the ELCA, and the views expressed by the boards proved to reflect those expressed by the task force.

"Personally," Martin-Schramm said, "I wish our church would bless same-sex unions and roster persons in those unions, so that we can get on with many more important issues, but I understand that the majority of my church isn't at that point."

"If the question then is how to create space among the three options," Martin-Schramm said, "it's pretty clear that the other two alternatives lacked much support at all from either board and that the only one where you have a significant amount of support is around creating a policy to grant exceptions."

"Creating a policy for granting exceptions was strongly the preference, but certainly not unanimous. There was a slim majority," Karli said.

ELCA News Service