The Receipts Condemn the ELCA: The 2009 Vote

They did not just vote. They lowered the bar so the vote could clear it — and wrote that down too.

The Church and the Christian Church • Part One: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board

The Big Three:

On August 19, 2009, the ELCA’s Churchwide Assembly adopted the social statement Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust by a vote of 676–338 — exactly the two-thirds required, with nothing to spare.
Two days later, by a vote of 559–451, the Assembly opened the ministry roster to leaders in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships,” ending the celibacy standard that had governed the church’s rostered leaders.
That second change passed by simple majority only because the Church Council had first stripped away the two-thirds threshold — over the recorded objection of fifteen of its own eighteen synods and a majority of its own bishops.

A Note on What This Measures

Before the receipts, a boundary. This arc measures the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — the ELCA — and nothing wider. It is not a verdict on confessional Lutheranism. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod are large, faithful bodies that held the historic teaching; they are not on trial here, and nothing said of the ELCA reaches them. When a wall falls, the plumb line measures the wall that fell. It does not sweep in the walls still standing beside it. We name this plainly at the outset because the name “Lutheran” is shared, and a shared name is not a shared verdict.

The ELCA is the largest Lutheran body in the United States, formed in 1988 from the merger of three predecessor churches. Its Churchwide Assembly, which it calls the “highest legislative authority” of the denomination, meets every two years. In August 2009 it met in Minneapolis to settle two linked questions: what the church would teach about human sexuality, and whether those in same-sex relationships could be ordained and rostered. Both were answered that week. Both are on the record. We begin with the record because this is not a rumor or an alarm about what a church might one day do. It is what this church did, by its own hand, and preserved in its own minutes.

The First Vote: A Statement Passed on the Dot

On Wednesday, August 19, the Assembly took up Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, the denomination’s tenth social statement. After a long day of debate and thirteen proposed amendments, the vote was called. It passed 676 to 338 — 66.67 percent, meeting the constitutionally required two-thirds threshold, in the words of one contemporary report, “on the dot.” A single vote fewer in favor, or one more against, and it would have failed.

The statement did not declare a single teaching on marriage and sexuality. It did something more consequential: it named several contradictory convictions and held them as equally faithful positions a Lutheran might hold — a framework the statement calls “bound conscience.” We will examine that framework closely in Part Three, where it deserves its fullest hearing before it is answered. For now, note only what the vote itself reveals. One amendment offered that day would have named marriage a “normative, lifelong covenant between a man and a woman.” It drew real support. It did not draw enough. The Assembly declined to make the historic Christian reading the church’s settled teaching, and instead seated it as one voice among several. That decision was reached by the narrowest margin the rules would honor.

The Second Vote: The Roster Opened

Two days later, on Friday, August 21, the Assembly turned to the “Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies.” By a vote of 559 to 451, it resolved to open the roster of ordained ministers, associates in ministry, diaconal ministers, and deaconesses to persons living in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships.”

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Until that afternoon, the ELCA’s governing standard for its leaders was a document titled Vision and Expectations. It required that rostered ministers who were not married abstain from sexual relations — a celibacy standard that, in practice, barred those in same-sex relationships from the roster. The August 21 vote set that standard aside. What had been prohibited was now permitted; what the church had required of its leaders, it required no longer. This was not a statement of opinion, as the social statement had been. It was a change to who may stand in the pulpit and administer the sacraments. The bar was 559 to 451 — roughly fifty-five percent. Hold that number. It matters because of what was done, before the Assembly ever gathered, to make fifty-five percent enough.

The Vote Before the Vote

Here is where the ELCA’s record diverges from the others in this series, and why it condemns the church in a particular way. The other bodies we have measured changed their teaching by the thresholds their own rules required. The ELCA changed a threshold so that a change could pass.

The ELCA Church Council’s own Legal and Constitutional Review Committee had recommended that any motion altering the church’s rostering standards require a two-thirds vote — the same supermajority demanded to adopt a social statement or amend the constitution. The Council rejected the counsel of its own committee, voting 19 to 10 to delete that requirement and to recommend rules under which the ministry-policy change would need only a simple majority.

The church saw what was happening and objected. Fifteen of eighteen responding synod councils asked the Council to restore the two-thirds standard; only three supported the simple-majority path. A two-thirds majority of the Conference of Bishops, meeting that March, recommended the same higher bar. Two synods — Pacifica and Virginia among them — sent formal memorials to the Assembly asking that the supermajority be written into the rules. The record shows a church whose own bishops, whose own committee, and whose own synods asked it not to lower the bar. It lowered the bar anyway.

The Floor Fought It, and Lost

The fight reached the Assembly floor in its opening plenary. Twice, delegates moved to restore the two-thirds requirement, and twice they were turned back. The first motion — requiring a supermajority for any question “originating from or relating to” the ministry-policies report — was defeated, 436 to 584. The second, offered by the Rev. Steven R. Frock of the Western Iowa Synod, reached further: a two-thirds bar for any resolution “likely to result in a change of the practice and/or policy of the ELCA.” Frock told the Assembly exactly what he intended — to “put control over the policies and practices of this church back into the hands of the assembly, and take it out of the hands of a simple majority.” The chair questioned whether the motion was even in order; before it could be voted on its merits, a motion to object to its consideration was sustained, 754 to 228. Frock’s amendment died without a vote.

The rules were then adopted as originally printed, 861 to 137. The two-thirds requirement survived — but only for social statements and for changes requiring constitutional amendment. The Assembly’s own secretary, David Swartling, stated plainly on the record that the ministry-policy resolutions fell under neither category. They would pass, if they passed, by simple majority. Two days later, they did — at fifty-five percent, a margin that would have failed under the standard the church’s own bishops and synods had begged it to keep.

What the Plumb Line Reads

“Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them” (Amos 7:8, ESV). The prophet was not shown the builders’ intentions or the wall’s long history. He was shown a line, and a wall, and asked to read the one against the other. A plumb line does not bend toward the wall to flatter it. It hangs where gravity holds it, and the wall is true or it is not.

Scripture warns against the very instinct the 2009 record documents — the arranging of an outcome before the question is honestly asked. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12, ESV). The Council did not stand in the Assembly and deny the Word of God aloud. It did something quieter and, in its way, graver: it smoothed the path to setting the Word aside, and did so over the written objection of fifteen of its own synods. And Paul’s warning to Timothy names the pattern without needing a single word changed: a time would come when the church “will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3, ESV). The itch does not always arrive as open rebellion. Sometimes it arrives as a procedural motion in a morning session, mild and technical, carried before the real debate has begun.

The Only Door

The receipts are entered. They are not our accusation but the ELCA’s own record, in its own hand, preserved in its own minutes. We have not measured any person’s standing before God, which is God’s alone to weigh. We have measured a wall — the published, recorded acts of an institution — against the line, and reported what the line reads.

No argument on a page has ever raised the dead or turned a heart. Only the Holy Spirit convicts, and only the Holy Spirit draws a sinner home. We do not write to win a debate but to hold up the line and point to the one door that a record like this leaves open. That door has a name, and its name is repentance. It stood open for every body this series has measured, and it stands open still.

Next in the series: Part Two — the redline, where the historic teaching was kept on the page and quietly stripped of its authority.

For Further Study