"Come out from among them and be separate!"

Bunnie Diehl blogs on the ELCA's upcoming decision to ordain some gays (but not others- as if that will last long!). She asks for our prayers for the ELCA.

An ELCA pastor repeats that request in the "comments" section. Well, that request causes me a grave struggle of conscience.

I must confess that even now, six years after leaving the ELCA ministry, I still struggle with some of the bitterness I felt in my own futile fight in the same cause that pastor is fighting in now. But beyond that bitterness is what I believe to be righteous anger at the damage being done to people I still love, even though they wouldn't listen; even though most of those sheep have voluntarily chosen to make nice-nice with the wolves despite all their under-shepherd at the time did to try to warn them.

For some the ELCA is a part of their ethnic heritage. For others, it's simply the church of their youth and their family. Nothing wrong with that, of course- until that ethnic heritage or family tradition becomes a matter of idolatry. Until it becomes more important than the Gospel.

Many take "putting the best construction on everything" beyond the point of rationality, to the place where they simply close their minds to any and all evidence of their church body's apostasy, and live in a fantasy world of their own choosing. Others simply comfort themselves with the misleading thought that "none of that effects us, here!" But whatever the reason or the dynamics, they have chosen to cling to that church body in the face of the obvious fact that it has long since abandoned the historic Christian faith, and isn't going to return to it.

I wish I had a dime for every time I heard an member of the ELCA say that he or she was going to "stay and fight." If I had to give a quarter back thereafter for every one of them who subsequently did a lick of fighting, of course, I would still be a wealthy man.

It is right and proper to fight false teaching when it attacks one's own church body. But if one chooses to fight it, one, in fact, fights it, rather than simply and passively wringing one's hands and talking about fighting. And once matters reach the point where it becomes obvious that the fight is lost, and the church body is no longer listening, one's duty becomes to leave it- however regretfully- and to affiliate with another church body, whose confession on the most basic matters of the Christian faith one shares.

One has a duty to reflect that, by staying beyond that point, one becomes an accomplice in the very errors one deplores. One finances them with one's offerings- and lends one's own name to them by one's very continued affiliation!

I'm not going to expand in detail upon my experiences in that fight. Suffice it to say that it has been obvious for a decade that the ELCA wasn't listening, and that this decision (as well as the upcoming ones in the next decade to bless all homosexual unions, to ordain practicing gays across the board- and to discipline pastors and congregations who are guilty of "homophobia") was not only already decided upon way back then in the circles that really mattered, but telegraphed quite clearly to anyone paying attention.

Those who remain behind have made their own choice. I am not interested in judging them for it. On the other hand, the dust that has been shaken off against that apostate church body by those who have left it would make a mighty mountain by now, and it should be much higher still. I cannot bring myself to pray that conditions in the ELCA might be such that those who should have left long ago are made temporarily comfortable in remaining still longer.

My prayer for those who are distressed by the current state of affairs, and yet remain, is that the repent and leave the ELCA for a church body with at least a modicum of integrity. I'm not sure that, in conscience, I can at this point offer any other prayer on their behalf- except, perhaps, that those who really and truly can't see the futility of their remaining consider that the dollars they send to Chicago to abort the unborn children of pastors' families (the ELCA health plan pays for abortion on demand), to promote the homosexual agenda, and to finance all manner of radical left-wing causes might better be spent working to save the unborn, promote the Gospel, and spread the biblical Christian Faith.

That, and that God would somehow sustain them in the saving Faith despite their inexplicable insistence on remaining in a church body which denies it.

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