It has been a year since Gloria Dei Lutheran haz been exiled from its own worship facility. The Northwest District of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod continues to hold the property in its own name. Gloria Dei Lutheran, also known as Community Lutheran, continues to meet in a home in the same area.
A year after the property was improperly taken from the congregation, by an ecclesiastical process called “suppression” that I explained in earlier posts, the outline of the future of the LCMS seems to be coming into focus.
It is evident that the District Presidents are amassing for themselves authority over congregations. This desire for centralized control of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is born of fear; fear that the same dark impulses that led the ELCA astray are now knocking at the door of the LCMS. For example, there is the fear that any discussion of the ordination of women may bring with it feminist theology, wholesale biblical error, goddess worship and acceptance of homosexual practices within the church. Experience within the ELCA shows that the concern is not entirely without support.
The impulse for centralized control is common to all human governance, whether secular or sacred. While the impulse for centralized control has risen within the LCMS before, the Synod has been able to recall its identity as a Synod that was based in local self-autonomy. However, the recent financial problems of the Synod and our nation generally, together with the natural tendency of bureaucracies to sustain themselves, may be too much for the Synod’s leaders to overcome.
And so we find a number of instances where District Presidents have seen opportunities to protect the Synod from dangerous or threatening situations, and acted accordingly. That the District may itself benefit from the actions taken, either financially, or in terms of control, would only be evidence that God blesses such actions.
But what the District Presidents have been doing reveals that as a group, they have lost trust in Christ himself as Lord of the Church. And so they have taken it upon themselves to protect the Church, without realizing the cost. In the process of saving the LCMS, they themselves may cause the LCMS to become twisted into something almost unrecognizable.
They are turning a congregationally based ecclesiastical structure into a hierarchical one.
If recent press accounts are at all accurate, reliance of the Synod and its legal counsel on the use of the Synod’s dispute resolution process as the exclusive method for resolving disputes within the Synod, and the corollary that recourse to civil authorities is contrary to scripture and those who use them are subject to discipline, is all evidence of both pride and arrogance on the part of those who argue so.
Incidentally, I do not agree with those that have concluded that the Synod has convinced the Supreme Court of the United States that Missouri Synod Lutherans have no right to seek remedies or relief for real or perceived injuries at the hands of the Church. The Court, even with five Catholic members, is much more likely to conclude that the US Constitution does not allow a Synod or any church body has no right to create an ecclesiastical Court system that bars the rights of Americans from the civil courts.. Our Constitution simply would not allow such practices.
Getting back to the main point, the leaders of the LCMS seem unaware that they are reflecting the ELCA in another way as well. There is a persistent tendency to confuse the True Church of Christ with those organizations which are of human origin. And of course our human pride assumes that the organization in which we lead is a reflection of the will of Christ, and if we are certain of our cause, we may not be as open to prayerfully discerning God’s true will.
The relevancy of all this to the Gloria Dei situation is that while the Synod argues that the dispute resolution process is either the exclusive forum for resolving disputes, or is at least a necessary precondition to seeking relief in a secular court, the Northwest District President , Paul Linnemann, has made every effort to prevent Gloria Dei and its people from pursuing the process that the Synod holds in such high regard.
In taking this position, President Linnemann has so far denied Gloria Dei a forum, promised by the Synod’s Constitution and Bylaws in which it may express its grievances or seek a proper remedy. In this amazing precedent, the District President may not only be pushing Gloria Dei to seek relief in a civil forum, but also may be putting himself in a position of personal liability, in the event damages are sought. It remains to be seen whether the District’s Board of Directors or others are concerned about this enough to take appropriate action.
As the LCMS emphasizes the concept of walking together, we might wonder, is anyone asking “:Where are we going?”
