Lutheran denomination to allow gay clergy

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America yesterday became the largest religious denomination in the nation to allow actively gay and lesbian clergy to serve as pastors.

Gathered in Minneapolis this week for the biennial Churchwide Assembly, representatives voted, 559-451, to permit congregations to hire homosexual men and women who are in committed relationships. The 4.8-million-member church already permitted the ordination of gays and lesbians but required them to remain celibate.

The denomination is following a theological trail blazed in recent years by the Episcopal Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalist Church, all of which ordain homosexuals in committed relationships.

"I'm just stunned and grateful," said the Rev. Jay Wiesner, pastor of University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation in West Philadelphia and a voting member at the assembly.

"Tears are streaming down my face," he said in a telephone interview minutes after the late-afternoon vote.

Although he was hired last year by the 200-member congregation, neither the Southeast Pennsylvania Synod nor the denomination officially recognized Weisner's pastorate because he is openly gay. "Many of us serve that way," said Weisner, 36.

The new policy obliges the denomination to "eliminate the prohibition of rostered [i.e. clerical] service by members who are in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships."

Congregations that object to same-sex partnerships are not obliged to hire gay or lesbian pastors.

Created in 1988 by the merger of three Lutheran denominations, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the seventh-largest denomination in the United States and the fourth-largest Protestant church. It has about 10,400 congregations and nearly 18,000 seminarians, deacons, pastors, and bishops, as well as about 1,000 lay leaders also counted as "rostered."

Church conservatives had vowed a concerted effort to block the policy change. Spearheading that effort was the Rev. Paull Spring of State College, Pa., president of the Lutheran Coalition for Reform (CORE).

"It breaks my heart," Spring wrote in an e-mail minutes after the vote. The Evangelical Lutheran Church has, he said, "departed from the teaching of the Bible as understood by Christians for 2,000 years."

Mark Chavez, CORE's full-time director, warned that the new policy would damage the denomination's relations with other churches.

Yesterday's 55 percent approval had seemed likely after the assembly on Wednesday approved by a two-thirds vote a policy statement asserting that committed, lifelong same-sex partnerships could be positive and deserving of support. Called "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust," that policy also acknowledges deep disagreements among Lutherans on the topic.

Those differences were evident yesterday.

After standing in long lines at the microphones, voting members on both sides of the question took turns addressing yesterday's plenary session.

"When will we decide a relationship is 'committed' or 'lifelong'?" asked a member from North Carolina. He called the proposed policy "fundamentally flawed."

A bishop from northwest Minnesota urged the church to delay any such change until a greater consensus had formed within the church.

But a northern Illinois bishop said the hundreds of Lutheran youth leaders who gather each year at his synod's summer camp always want to debate the question of gay clergy. The teens, he said, "vote 99 percent in favor."