Lutheran Statement on Sexuality "Just Not Doable"
“Personally, I think we should cancel the social statement work and just go with the social statements of our previous church bodies.
Prospects for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Sexuality Task Force’s recently announced plans to draft a social statement on homosexuality looks dim – at least according to one of the fourteen task force members.
“Personally, I think we should cancel the social statement work and just go with the social statements of our previous church bodies. I really dread trying to write a new one and deal with the changing mores that some of the task force members would recognize,” said Lou Hesse, a layman from Moses Lake, Washington.
In comments made to the Word Alone network - one of the pockets of conservatism in the five-million-member denomination – Hesse explained that attempting to address human sexuality at such a critical time would be akin to opening up Pandora’s Box.
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“If we open it, where will we be able to stop?” he asked.
Hesse and the 13 other Sexuality Task Force members met in Chicago on Feb. 18-20 to establish a timeline for the daunting task of drafting a statement on sexuality – specifically homosexuality – that would represent the general view of the national church.
At the meeting, task force members “expressed serious concerns” about the quality of the proposed statement, considering the January 2007 deadline placed on the report.
"We are very aware of the brief timeline," said the Rev. Margaret G. Payne, chair of the task force of the ELCA Studies on Sexuality and bishop of the ELCA New England Synod, Worcester, Mass. "One of the things we wrestled mightily with at this meeting was the question of whether or not we can in fact do the quality of work and the kind of study needed to produce a social statement for that timeline."
Earlier in the year, the task force released a report specifically tackling the issue of homosexual clergy and the sanctioning of homosexual unions. While the report agreed that the denomination’s current standards on homosexuality – restrict the clergy roster from those who are sexually active outside of marriage and prohibit marriage blessings to heterosexual couples – should remain in place, it added a third clause that gave bishops the authority to refrain from punishing those who broke the standards.
According to Hesse, opposition to the report has steadily surfaced in the past weeks. Some 105 letters and emails were sent to the task force, and of them, 70% of Lutherans said they opposed the report because it essentially sanctioned the blessing and rostering of homosexuals, 8% said they opposed the recommendations because it did not accept the blessing or rostering of homosexuals, and 9% said they had no opinion. Only 13% of the Lutherans who addressed the task force said they stood in support of the report.
In light of the opposition to the task force’s specific recommendations – which took several years to complete - , Hesse said to even begin a rough draft on the larger issue of sexuality in the current deadline is “just not doable.”
The task force first will have to decide its approach to human sexuality, said Hesse. “Are matters of human sexuality a matter of personal responsibility to God and neighbor, or are they systemic—that is, a matter of something outside oneself, driving ones behaviors, either positively or negatively? Or a combination of the two?
“Prior questions will have to be asked and answered. Things like what you believe about creation, what is the role of sexuality in creation, what is God’s intention around marriage and family life, about relationships? How do we define sin? Something we never could do in our work on the first recommendations.”
For more information about the ELCA’s sexuality task force, visit: http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/
