The Practicing Progressive

Issue 10
February 12, 2007

I am sure we have all had a good laugh over the announcement that Pastor Ted Haggard, after three months of spiritual counseling, is “completely heterosexual”, so let’s move on to less humorous news.

Like the report out of Atlanta this week that told of the ecclesiastical trial of Lutheran pastor, Bradley Schmeling. Unlike Pastor Haggard, Pastor Schmeling long ago announced his homosexual orientation and, according to all accounts, has served his congregations and his denomination, well during the ensuing years. Schmeling’s problem and the cause of his appearance before the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Board of Discipline lie with his honesty. Wishing to live an authentic life, he informed his bishop that he had fallen in love with another man and was living in a monogamous relationship with him. The bishop, as bishops are wont to do, immediately pressed charges against Pastor Schmeling for disobeying the guidelines for pastors of the denomination.

In its 14 page decision and with a slim one vote majority, the board announced that it felt “compelled” to remove Schmeling from the ELCA clergy roster for disobedience. At the same time, the board said it was “nearly unanimous” in its disagreement with the current set of pastoral standards enforced by the ELCA and urged the denomination to consider making significant changes.

While I can sympathize with the board’s wish for a different outcome, I am appalled by their lack of courage. Somehow giving precedent to the enforcement of institutional mandates over compassionate albeit “illegal” action seems antithetical to the foundational identity of the Lutheran movement. Had Dr. Luther waited for institutional change before leading his followers on a different path, we would have one less denomination today. The explanation employed by the Board of Church Discipline sounds perilously close to the obstructionist tactics Christians have used in the past to deny women and minorities their equal rights as children of God. What if Rosa Parks had waited until Montgomery’s Town Board officially approved the rights of African-Americans to sit in the front of the bus? What if Nelson Mandela had waited for his apartheid government to change its unjust and evil ways? What if the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire had caved in to ecclesiastical pressure rather than celebrating Gene Robinson as its bishop?

I am ashamed that my church remains mired in a morass of theological mumbo-jumbo when the spiritual lives of thousands of faithful gay, lesbian and bi-sexual laity and clergy continue to be undermined. I am angry that the leadership of my church, so concerned with pacifying its conservative members, chooses to perpetuate institutional injustice. The ELCA long ago left the fold of Biblical literalists, so why does it continue to cling to archaic understandings of human nature only endorsed by Christian fundamentalists and other, equally ignorant and damnably bigoted, fanatics?

What many found so laughably ludicrous about the Haggard announcement this week was the seemingly blatant lack of authenticity inherent in the declaration. No one of any competence in the fields of psychotherapy or human sexuality, I suspect, gives any credence to the pronouncement. Even those of us untrained in such specialties can see through the sham and shake our heads at such foolishness.

And yet when a dedicated pastor who, by all accounts except that of the institutional church, has led an exemplary life, he is condemned for failing to meet arbitrary guidelines, guidelines that appear to make authenticity and integrity subservient to long discredited worldviews and archaic biblical biases.

Let us hope that someday soon the ELCA will look back to its roots and turn to its future unafraid of re-formation.