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Lutheran CORE Convocation
September 25, 2009
Holy Spirit Parish at Geist, Fishers, Indiana
A Vision for Lutheran CORE
Paull E. Spring
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Bishop Paull E. SpringChair, Lutheran CORE
I. Bradley Schmeling, the defrocked Lutheran pastor from Atlanta, prepared a booklet of devotions for the Minneapolis churchwide assembly. In his introduction to the devotions, he writes of his dreams for the churchwide assembly, just concluded. “The question for today, the first full day of our work as an assembly, is whether this work space, a room in a convention center, can be a dance floor too. Will this gathering wiggle and move to the deeper rhythms of God's mercy and justice? Will we be able to end this week, look out into the world, and, with a grand gesture, announce to the whole creation, ‘This – this is the reign of God.’”' He has a way with words. And here I thought that the reign of God had come in Jesus of Nazareth, through his death and resurrection.
Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop, whose election as bishop set off a firestorm within The Episcopal Church, was interviewed on “Sixty minutes.” I was sitting in my lazy boy chair and listening to the interview. Toward the end, Gene Robinson announced joyfully and confidently about his election, “God is doing a new thing.” he said. I jumped off my chair and spoke to the television set, “Jesus Christ is God’s new thing, not your election.”
At the Minneapolis churchwide assembly this past August a voting member, I believe a pastor, said, “There is only one Gospel, the social Gospel.” That sounds to me a lot like the “public church”' language we have been hearing from Bishop Mark Hanson.
During another churchwide assembly four years ago, a voting member disclaimed on the floor of the assembly, “Lutherans do not believe in the Bible; Lutherans believe in Jesus.” No one corrected him.
We are here at Fishers to re-form ourselves. Reformation is a good Lutheran word. “Ecclesia reformanda.”' The church must always be about reforming itself. Others have diagnosed very well the problems with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – Paul Hinlicky, Robert Benne, Carl Braaten, James Nestingen, and many others. I invite you to go to their writings on the subject, and I defer to them with gratitude.
But we want to be part of the solution, with the help of the Holy Spirit. Back in March the Lutheran CORE steering committee issued its first invitation to this convocation. In the first paragraph we wrote, “This letter is an invitation to participate in the hope that God has given us. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we confess that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is that hope.” We here at Fishers are about this solution, which is Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen from the dead. “He must increase, and we must decrease.” We want to be part of the change to which Jesus is calling us.
II. So Lutheran CORE will be re-forming itself – God willing – along the following lines.
A. We will become more intentionally a confessional and confessing movement. A movement moves and is not static. Part of our movement will be back to the past, to Jesus and the great acts of our salvation...back to the past of 325, when the Nicene Creed was professed...back to the Reformation, that reforming movement within the whole church, when the truth of the Word of God was reaffirmed in the midst of the church catholic.
But as a movement, we want to look to the future as well. And we want to engage in the mission that God places before us in the present. We want to make a good confession in the midst of many witnesses."
Our movement will be a confessional one. We will root ourselves in God's Word of Law and Gospel, as recorded for us in the Holy Scriptures. We will surround our reading of the Scriptures with the ecumenical creeds and the witness of the Lutheran Confessions. We will confess the Word of God by way of the Lutheran Confessions.
B. We will become a churchly community and fellowship. We will find our identity in the words of the seventh article of the Augsburg Confession, "It is also taught among us that one holy Christian church will be and remain forever. This is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word." We will find our sense of community as Luther identified it in his treatise "On the Councils and the Church'' – the preached Word, Baptism, the Sacrament of the altar, the office of the keys, ordination, prayer and thanksgiving, and the promise of the holy cross. We do not aim to be schismatic or sectarian. We want to be church, God's people and Christ's body.
C. We will be a free-standing synod. The word "synod'' comes from two Greek words that mean either a "gathering'' or "on the way together.'' As individuals and as congregations some may remain members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for a time, but our relationship will be largely formal and external. Others may well choose other institutional relationships within the Lutheran family. Some may well choose to relate to Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, for example.
But Lutheran CORE will be a free-standing synod for all faithful Lutherans. And we will take on most of the functions that characterize a synod – pastoral care for congregations and pastors, global missions, the formation of new congregations, providing resources for congregational ministry, support for a life in community, theological education, with a leadership structure that will be accountable and capable of decision-making. We will work sensitively on the candidacy and calling processes, hopefully through sensitive conversations with supportive bishops and synods in the ELCA. We will draw on the resources and experience of the WordAlone Network and our other reform movements.
We will be free-standing, not a part of the structure of the ELCA. For us the ELCA church wide expression has fallen into heresy, as a result of the decisions that were made in Minneapolis.
D. We will serve as an umbrella for other reform movements. There are now ten of them as partners with us in Lutheran CORE. We hope for more. Part of our vision is to stay together now. Our opponents would love to see us divide. "Divide and conquer," goes the saying. Our opponents have for a long time tried to contrast Lutheran CORE and the WordAlone Network, for example. But we're not going to allow this to happen now. We're going to stay together, and Lutheran CORE will continue to work with other reform movements, and we will say to the ELCA, "There is more that unites us than divides us."
E. Lutheran CORE, therefore will be a coalition, an association, an alternative community. For congregations who choose to join with us. For the other reform movements who are partners with us. And for the many individuals, lay people and pastors, who now feel marginalized within the ELCA. We will be a coalition of movements, congregations, and individuals.
III. As individuals, some of us will decide to remain within the ELCA – for the time being – and for different reasons. Personally, I plan to remain on the clergy roster of the ELCA and to retain my membership in an ELCA congregation. I plan to participate actively in the ministry of my congregation, which is a good congregation, composed of faithful Lutherans and with faithful Lutheran pastors.
But that's as far as it goes for me. The ELCA will hardly notice my participation in the ELCA, or the lack of it. I will no longer attend any more churchwide assemblies or synod assemblies. My wife and I have already re-designated our benevolence giving for causes other than ELCA mission support. My relationship with the ELCA will become paper thin. I suspect that some of us will maintain this limited relationship with the ELCA.
Others, however, will choose another path. Hopefully we will all be able to stay within the Lutheran community in some form. There are other Lutheran church bodies out there – Missouri, Wisconsin, and LCMC. And that's ok. Carl Braaten reminds us that there is no perfect church this side of heaven. But, regardless of the Lutheran church body you determine for yourself, you can still be a part of Lutheran CORE's ministry. Lutheran CORE will have no formal relationship with the ELCA. We will be a free-standing synod.
So we're not exactly forming a new church as such. But a free-standing synod, open to all faithful Lutherans, ELCA and non-ELCA. We're forming a synod, a community of believers, gathered together under Word and Sacrament, and engaged in mission and ministry for the sake of the world.
IV. We're going to organize ourselves today and tomorrow. We're going to adopt a constitution, which is based on the model constitution for ELCA synods. We're not going to over-organize ourselves into some faceless bureaucracy. But we need more structure than we have now. A synod, even a free-standing synod, needs some structure. Melanchthon says in the Apology, "The church is not a Platonic idea."
We are going to do the things that synods typically do: strengthening personal faith and congregational life, providing resources for congregational ministry, developing new congregations, supporting global missionaries, providing some forms for theological education for pastors and lay people, developing mechanisms for theological reflection and conversation on issues related to Scripture and the Confessions.
Over the next year we're going to form working groups that will put flesh on the bones of Lutheran CORE. There will be working groups on finances, synodical consultation, organization, mission, benevolence, vision and planning, theological education, congregational life and pastoral support.
A special concern is the calling process for pastors and congregations. We hope to draw on the experience of the WordAlone Network here. We also hope to utilize the experience of the eight former ELCA bishops who have aligned themselves with Lutheran CORE. We hope to engage these former bishops in consultations with supportive synods and bishops in the ELCA on this matter. There are some sitting bishops, perhaps around ten, who are quiet supporters of ours, but "for fear of the Jews." We hope to work through these sitting bishops in the calling process – as well as in the candidacy process.
So that, a year from now, we will have another convocation. We will review reports from these working groups, and we will elect officers and adopt a budget.
V. Now, we've never done this before, a free-standing synod. That means that it's not as tidy and neat as I would wish. I've even had trouble describing it to others. It is a work in progress, a free-standing synod, an alternative form for doing church together.
There have been movements that have come and gone in the church in the past. Monasticism, for one; the Reformation for another; the various awakening movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
But a free-standing synod is still something of a novelty for us. It is not a split in the church, but a free-standing synod, at least for a time.
For how long? No one knows. Maybe five years or so. No one knows. Perhaps God's Spirit will speak his Word anew to the ELCA. Perhaps we can join others in reconfiguring the shape of North American Lutheranism. We want to do this for sure. So we don't want to be too organized or get too comfortable with ourselves. "Here we have no abiding city," says Hebrews.
And yet, God is calling us to do something. The ELCA has fallen into heresy. It is a time of confession and a time to resist. It is, please God, also a time for new life and transformation and for mission.
VI. Let me conclude with some personal matters and reflections.
I have been through the alphabet soup of one segment of American Lutheranism. I was born and raised within the ULCA, with Franklin Clark Fry as president. I was ordained within the LCA, with Dr. Fry and then Robert Marshall and James Crumley as church presidents and bishops. I served as a parish pastor for three congregations in western Pennsylvania and was active in synodical affairs. I was then called and installed as a part of the new crop of bishops in the ELCA in 1987.
You can imagine how difficult these last several years have been for me. To be facing an ecclesiological crisis after forty-four years as a pastor. Following the Minneapolis church wide assembly, I said to myself, "This is my last churchwide assembly." I said the same thing, also to others, after the recent synod assembly of the Allegheny Synod, "This is my last synod assembly." This past July I participated in an ordination and laid my hands on a new pastor. I came home and said to my wife of forty-two years, "This was my last ELCA ordination."
Last May our fine congregation in State College adopted a budget for the coming year. The next week I spoke with our pastor, a faithful and orthodox pastor. I told him that we could no longer contribute to synodical and churchwide mission support, and that we intended to re-direct our benevolence offerings toward the congregation's day school, his discretionary fund, and to Lutheran CORE and Allegheny Lutheran Social Ministries.
You can imagine how difficult this has all been for me. You can imagine it, because you have likely had a similar path and struggle. Like you, I fight daily against bitterness, despair, and "other great and shameful sins."
Lutheran CORE will become de facto my church, perhaps our church, our church beyond the local congregation. We will function as a synod, as much as we can. We will serve as a church. I speak of Lutheran CORE as a churchly community - a confessional and confessing movement, with a churchly character and a synodical ministry.
We need to stay together in some fashion. Some of our opponents would love to see us divide. But, God willing, we're not going to allow this to happen. The cause of God's Word and our identity as Lutheran Christians is too important to allow division among us.
And we're not going to let bitterness overcome us either, for then we would destroy ourselves. Those who stand against us are not our enemies; they are our brothers and sisters. We owe it to them and to those faithful ones who remain within the ELCA to be true to our convictions, but gracious in our dealings with them.
Those who know me will know that my favorite heroes in the New Testament - next to Jesus - are the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. The Virgin Mary, whose vocation was to bear the Word of God within her and to give it birth and life. And John the Baptist, as in the Isenheim altarpiece, pointing with his index finger at Jesus on the cross. This is our mission and calling. Like the Virgin Mary we bear the Word of God to the world. Like John the Baptist we point all people to the crucified and risen Lord. That, please God, is our mission and our vocation.