Lutheran (EL
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Marantha--Come, Lord Jesus!
Posted on 12/17/2009 9:55:29 AM PST by rhema
A young woman wrote to me after the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted that it would allow persons in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-sex relationships to serve in some cases as pastors. She asked why we in the Lutheran Coalition for Renewal were so exercised about a few prohibitions from the Old Testament, while we ignored others from the same passage.
She had a point. I enjoy shrimp, which is also forbidden in Leviticus. Of course, I also believe that loving your neighbor as yourself is binding on Christians, and that, too, comes originally from Leviticus.
Certain principles from the Old Testament are explicitly reaffirmed in the New, while others are made matters of freedom. While I have heard people argue that Jesus never spoke about homosexuality, that is simply not true. In Mark 10:6-7 and parallels, Jesus uses the male-female nature of sexuality to teach the purpose of marriage.
The Lutheran Coalition for Renewal is not primarily focused on homosexuality. In fact, it is down the list of our issues. How the Bible functions as authority for Christians, our failure to call people to faith as shown by the decline in membership and participation in too many congregations, and avoiding the revealed Name of God are bigger matters for us. We also realize that homosexuality is not the biggest challenge regarding marriage and family issues.
A key question concerns the nature of the gospel. A number of scholars have suggested that in our churches we have two competing gospels: a gospel of affirmation and a gospel of transformation. Simply put, we agree that God loves us just as we are. But is that all there is to the gospel? Or should we add that God loves us so much He won't let us stay that way.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcall.com ...
No church should be primarily focused on homosexuality — as it is certainly a tangential moral issue within Christianity as a whole.
But no church should excuse sin because of political correctness either. We (Christians) are not concerned about homosexuality to the exclusion of the multitude of other sins — we’re concerned about a supposed church ENDORSING sinful relationships.
SnakeDoc
The problem is that homosexuality may not be the ‘biggest’ issue facing the family and marriage, NORMALLY, but when those who want to MAKE IT AN ISSUE and want it called GOD-BLESSED and GOOD, it MUST become a big issue to the rest of us and it MUST be dealt with in strong, clear terms and we MUST be clear we will not approve of it because God’s Word has not changed about sexual sin. Not sex outside of marriage, not adultery, not homosexuality, not beastiality.
We don’t have adulterers demanding the church approve and bless adultery. We don’t have pedophiles or people that like sex with animals demanding and stating the church needs to change and grow and loosen up about their personal sexual perversions. We have not been so great with teaching the young about abstinence before marriage and look at the effects on our young people. But still even the people having sex before marriage and ‘playing house’, are not demanding resolutions and changes to the church body to accept, approve and bless fornication.
Because these people still know what they are doing is NOT God-approved or God-blessed. They still know deep down what they are doing isn’t right, it’s wrong. They know it. They aren’t trying to fool anyone or themselves. They aren’t forcing others to accept their personal sin likes as not being sin at all. They aren’t trying to pass laws against discrimination for their sexual sins.
This is why the radical homosexual leaders who are pushing this stuff must be viewed differently, and dealt with differently, in stronger terms and to be resisted greatly when they want to try to change how Christians as individuals and as a denomination, teach the truth about homosexuality and every other sexual sin.
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Marantha--Come, Lord Jesus!
Although homosexuality is mentioned in the Old Testament, the subject is also mentioned in several of Paul’s letters. My dad is a retired ELCA pastor who joined a Missouri Synod church, last year. He sent me a list of about 20 Bible verses that mention homosexuality, and he said that every time that behavior is mentioned, in the Bible, it is condemed.
Sounds like you have a good pastor and dad.
Well put.
ELCA Resources Offer Prayer to 'Mother' God
Worship resources also highlight the Biblical and theological crisis in the ELCA. One of the goals of Lutheran CORE is to insist upon the priority of the revealed Name of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in worship and educational materials produced by and for the church.
The ELCA publishing house is recommending a prayer addressing God as “Mother” in worship materials for Sunday, Dec. 27. The prayer is one of the Prayers of Intercession in the Sundays and Seasons worship planning resource widely used by ELCA pastors and is included in the “Celebrate” bulletin insert used by many ELCA congregations.
The ancient Latin phrase Lex orandi, lex credendi — which means “the law of prayer is the law of belief” — is taught to pastors and other worship planners as a reminder of the relationship between worship and the faith of God’s people. This important principle is sometimes translated, “As we worship, so we believe.” It highlights the importance of language used in worship and is a reminder of the significance of the Biblical and theological crisis in the ELCA.
Voila. No need for decades-long ELCA commissions to "study" whether the Bible really means what it plainly says. And no justification for ELCA-issued semantic contortions and eisegetical distortions of the plain sense of Scripture.
Pastor Steve Shipman “gets it”.
I left the ELCA for the Orthodox Church in 2008, over a year BEFORE the infamous ELCA “gay vote”. My main issues of contention with the national, synodical, and local “expressions” of the ELCA were over the Name of God, the rampant Serbophobia in the ELCA, and the mis-leadership of “bishops” who follow liberal fads rather than the Holy Gospel of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ. But the main reason I became Orthodox is because I already was basically Orthodox, after a nine-year relationship with a Serbian-American community. Homosexuality was way down on the list as an issue.
Most of the members of my former ELCA congregation realize that I was basically Orthodox prior to my chrismation—just like Jaroslav Pelikan (of blessed memory).
Meanwhile, the “progressives” in the ELCA and the Episcopal “church” nearly all say that anyone who leaves these denominations is doing so out of “homophobia”. This is nearly as slanderous as the “progressives’ “ delusional belief that “the Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo”, etc.
The “progressives” don’t want to face up to their own delusions, so they slander others while promoting heresy and perversion. May the Holy Spirit illumine them and save them!!!!
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