Editor notes
By Daniel J. Lehmann
A positive look at ELCA today
‘Keeping on’ 5 years after votes T
his month marks the fifth anniversary of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly decisions to open our roster to partnered gays and les-
bians and the blessing of same-sex relationships. After much controversy, membership and financial
declines, impassioned exchanges on both sides of the issues—not to mention simple old-fashioned hand-wringing—let’s take a walk on the positive side. The ELCA is still some 9,500 congregations with 3.95 million members. In the
most recent year for which statistics are available (2012), we had 7,472 more bap- tisms than deaths, hopefully deflating comments about a dying church. Regular giving by members totaled nearly $1.8 billion while total receipts reached $2.45 billion. The total value of congregational properties and assets was $19.7 million, with total indebtedness of $1.8 billion, or a respectable and very manageable 9.1 percent. And 64.18 percent of our congregations had no debt at all. The church’s Mission Investment Fund, which uses investments from mem-
bers to fund building and renovation loans to congregations and ministries, saw its total assets rise 3 percent to $663 million. And the Endowment Fund Pooled Trust, Fund A, an investment vehicle available to any ELCA congregation, synod or related entity, recently noted that its assets surpassed $500 million. Last year the Churchwide Assembly took the confident step of authorizing
Always Being Made New: The Campaign for the ELCA. This $198 million cam- paign represents a 64 percent increase in designated funding for congregational, leadership, hunger and poverty, and global church ministries over five years. The list goes on, but you get the point.
Things are happening in our church that regularly and routinely point to our health as an institution and our engage- ment with the world. Problems, of course, remain. To mention just one, the ELCA faces a pastor
Things are happening in our church that regularly and routinely point to our health as an institution and our engagement with the world.
retirement explosion (this is a teaser—see our cover story this November) in the coming years. Yes, some 700 congregations left the ELCA since the 2009 deci- sions, but that self-exclusion is nearly over. Still no congregation has been forced to accept a pastor not of its liking. Still no congregation has been forced to bless gay unions. As one recent letter writer observed, losses were likely to occur either way the
votes went five years ago. Let’s back off the lament and be thankful for what this church has: faithful Christians doing God’s work as best they can, sharing the good news of Jesus and helping the other. We can all agree with Presiding Bishop Elizabeth A. Eaton that we are church
first, we are Lutheran, we are church together, we are church for the sake of the world—and get on with it.
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MICHAEL D. WATSON
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