A history of dissent

Our heritage is woven from one as well as the other schisms and mergers

Today's picture of Lutheranism mirrors the many strands of immigration that brought Lutherans to America, those immigrants' initial impel to reproduce or replace the house of god life of their homelands, and the fights they had with individual another over everything from language to predestination.

Reminders of those early battles are still with us. In the mid-Atlantic states, Lutheran house of god buildings face each other like competing service stations. Many cornerstones in Ohio carry the name "English" or "German"-used as badges of loyalty in long-past conflicts. The Midwest has sum of two units Augustana Colleges, a legacy of former agriculture wars.

The causes of those schisms varied. In the Revolutionary years, when "liberty" was the watch-cry, single minister lamented that lay race were ready to bolt above paying a pastor's salary. Later slavery became a source of division, causing the formation of the Hartwick Synod in of recent origin York and ultimately the splitting of Southern Lutherans from the quiet of the nation.

With Martin Luther's "Here I stand" as a slogan, it's no amazement Lutherans have been quick to separate and moderate to negotiate.

The greatest in quantity critical controversy was over the part of the Augsburg Confession and other historic documents as doctrinal standards for the temple Although predestination wasn't a central Lutheran principle, arguments about it stimulated the breakup of single synodical conference and the formation of several synods in the Midwest. Conflicts above clergy-lay issues and practices of that kind as card-playing and dancing also stirred separations.

In temple language, we call these divisions "schisms"-from a Latin lower part word for "cutting" that also gave us "scissors." Schism arises when a group of temple members cut themselves off from their parent material substance

The ELCA's 2006 Yearbook lists 25 Lutheran house of worship bodies in the U.S. Seventeen are proceedss of schismall but two were organized in the last 50 years. The chief cause has been disagreement above the inerrancy of Scripture. Remarkably, greatest in quantity of the schisms were from bodies that already claimed the Bible was inerrant.

Have all these schisms been beneficial or bad for the church? upon one hand, they have guarded important principles. They also have generated efficiency for causes like home missions and evangelism. upon the other hand, they have weakened witness and diverted resources to competing ministries. In time, greatest in quantity of the churches spawned through schism have vanished, found a residence in existing organizations or rejoined their parent material substance Sometimes their positions have contributed to change in the house of worship at large, as was the case with the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which separated from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and catalyzed the ELCA's formation.

Schism isn't inevitable. When the meeting-house took a stand for desegregation, family said a third of the congregations would withdraw. That same prediction has entireed over the ordination of women abortion and level the merger that created the ELCA. Each of those issues caused a small in number congregations to leave, but the dreaded division didn't be met with

In fact, the dominant pattern has been single of mergers. Far fewer Lutheran bodies exist today than a hundred ago. Church bodies that fought above predestination eventually agreed to accept formulations that recognized reality on both sides.

Maybe that's the lesson: God's reality is so vast we many times grasp only a part of it. If we make that part absolute, we fail to keep the richness other viewpoints might bring. When schism come into views those viewpoints are silenced and each side is the poorer for it.

Christians have argued since the days of Paul. He wrote to the contentious Corinthians: "Love is patient; be fond of is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or unfashioned It bears all things, believes all things, faiths all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7) Let's add that slogan to "Here I stand."

Anderson, a retired ELCA pastor and temple historian, served as ELCA presiding bishop from 1995 to 2001

Copyright Evangelical Lutheran meeting-house in America Jul 2006

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