Schism at the grassroots in Hickory, N.C.: St. Stephen’s (ELCA) and Miller’s (NALC), which both became part of the ELCA in 1988, are in separate denominations again because of the Lutheran fight over sexuality.
Sixty years ago was the summer of love for American Lutherans. In June 1962, 7,000 people packed Detroit’s Cobo Arena for the founding convention of the Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination yet created in the United States, with 3.2 million members.
The product of a broader push toward church unity, the LCA followed the establishment of the American Lutheran Church two years earlier, both formed by the consolidation of smaller Lutheran synods. The era of mergers would culminate two decades later when the LCA and ALC joined to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in 1988.
My father, Theodore Thuesen, was one of the clergy who witnessed the LCA’s founding. His ethnic Danish synod, the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, was small—the liberal wing of Danish Lutheranism in America—but participated as a full-fledged partner in the LCA merger. “We thought it was good for us to be part of a much bigger, united church,” he told me. “And we very much liked and admired Franklin Clark Fry,” the LCA’s first president, dubbed “Mr. Protestant” in a Time magazine cover story in 1958.
I inherited the view that bigger is better, at least as far as the church is concerned. The Nicene Creed, after all, calls the church catholic, meaning universal. A bigger church meant more resources and a greater public witness. I was thrilled to take part in the messaging when, as a college student, I landed an internship at The Lutheran magazine at ELCA headquarters in Chicago.
But it turns out church unity was so twentieth century. The ELCA, which had 5.2 million members at its founding, has fewer than 3.3 million today. While much of that decline is from the widespread attrition afflicting the mainline churches, part of it is from the loss of conservative congregations after the ELCA voted in 2009 to ordain LGBT clergy in committed relationships. Many of those conservative parishes are members of a new denomination, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), created in 2010.
To see the effects of the NALC withdrawal, take the ELCA’s North Carolina Synod. In 2009, it had 237 congregations and 80,614 baptized members. Just three years later, it had 198 congregations and 62,292 members.
The breakup led to some strange situations. In my hometown of Hickory, North Carolina, near where I went to high school, there were three Lutheran churches of different denominations within a stone’s throw of each other: St. Stephen’s (LCA), Miller’s (ALC), and St. Stephens (Missouri Synod). After the 1988 merger, St. Stephen’s (LCA) and Miller’s were both in the ELCA. But because of the sexuality battle, they’re now denominationally divided again: St. Stephen’s stayed with the ELCA, and Miller’s joined the NALC.
The fight over sexuality has spawned breakaway movements in other denominations. After the Presbyterian Church (USA), itself the product of a 1983 merger, approved LGBT ordination in 2012 and same-sex unions in 2014, some conservative congregations joined groups such as ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.
In the Episcopal Church, after Gene Robinson became the first openly gay diocesan bishop in 2004, many conservative parishes rebranded themselves “Anglican” and affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America, which has cultivated alliances with bishops in the Global South.
And just this month, the United Methodist Church became the latest mainline body to suffer a split over homosexuality when a conservative faction announced the formation of the Global Methodist Church.
Change is the only constant in history, of course, and the analytical side of me agrees with fellow historian Mark Granquist that the mainline “urge to merge” from the 1960s to 1980s was a passing moment when Protestants embraced a corporate, bureaucratic model of governance that ignored simmering tensions at the local level.
But the theological side of me resists this new age of downsizing by schism. I find the conservatives’ faithful-remnant vision of the church profoundly unrealistic, not to mention driven by an issue that never should have caused a breakup in the first place. LGBT clergy need not be threatening to heterosexual Christians. And if sexuality is a proxy for a battle over biblical authority, I can’t join the conservatives there either. I’ll never agree to making Leviticus or the Apostle Paul an infallible guide to sexual ethics.
That said, the liberals deserve part of the blame for the present era of bad feelings. From the ELCA’s inception, conservatives felt disenfranchised by a quota system meant to diversify representative bodies but that ignored the denomination’s still overwhelmingly white, small-town base. In this context, the 2009 sexuality vote was the last straw. When a tornado passed near the Minneapolis Convention Center during the voting assembly, some conservatives preposterously claimed that it was because of God’s anger over homosexuality.
So a pox on both their houses? I’m afraid the pandemic has already taken care of that. Many congregations today are less concerned about church unity than about survival.
Still, I can’t help but lament mainline regression on the goal of church unity. The Lutheran Summer of Love of 1962 coincided with a much greater ecumenical milestone in the convening of the Second Vatican Council. At that time, even reunion with Rome seemed a real possibility to some Lutherans.
Today the Catholic Church has its own sexuality problems, while Protestants can’t see past their current breakups. In their present disunity, Protestants seem almost to have reverted to the situation described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer after visiting the United States in 1939. “It has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation of the earth to realize on earth the visible unity of the church of God,” he wrote. “In Minneapolis, four Lutheran churches of different observances are said to stand in a single street.”
I’m guessing that Bonhoeffer, who was likely gay (as Charles Marsh’s biography revealed), would have been grieved but not surprised by today’s feud over sexuality. It seems that discord is still American Christianity’s special calling.
© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
Membership statistics from the North Carolina Synod of the ELCA. Mark A. Granquist, “The Urge to Merge,” Lutheran Forum 47 (Summer 2013): 20-23. On the “Lutheran” tornado in Minneapolis in 2009, see Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 147. Bonhoeffer quotation from No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928-1936, from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 94. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
Illustration Credit: Photo by Peter J. Thuesen