ELCA MEMBERS ARE LEAVING

I remember the first time I heard about a Lutheran leaving for Rome (The Roman Catholic Church). Kazimierz Kawoalski had been a classmate at SEMINEX. I preached at his installation at Epiphany Lutheran Church in the 1980s in Laurelton, Queens, New York. Father Kawoalski became pastor to the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, a
Roman Catholic parish on the East Side of Manhattan. This was for Father Kawoalski, I believe, a commencement. He is at home in the Roman Catholic Church. Klaus Nurnberger (Professor emeritus, Fellow and Senior Research Associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa) has written about Lutherans who opt for other destinations. He did not write about why, but he does write about at least four destinations of people world-wide who leave Lutheran churches.(Dialog vol 44:4/2005 323-329) a) Those who leave for Catholicism, (b) Those who leave for Evangelicalism (c) Those who leave for Pentecostalism... and (d) Those who leave the church altogether. There are also Lutherans who leave and join, or form other Lutheran denominations, but that is another subject.

As I travel through the ELCA's Region 9, I worship in a large number of uncomfortably empty churches. What is clear is that those who leave the church altogether seem to be in the majority. Where are the "millennials?" There are about 80 million of them, born between 1980 and 1995. Where are the non whites? The ELCA, like many mainline denominations, is approximately 97 percent white and is increasingly becoming an "older body. Where are middle class men who are in their prime? Where are people in political life, or who are in academic professions?

There are indeed those for whom our understanding of the Bible or the dogmatic tradition has become too shaky, who long for 'solid foundations'. But there are also those who simply have come to ignore the existence of the church because they have found no plausibility, integrity, and relevance in our message to their contemporary world.(Klaus Nurnberger)

Yes, secularization is making inroads steadily into Christian enclaves, with fewer Americans interested in church at all, and the ELCA's decision to ordain gays and lesbians in partnered relationships, in the long run will not have proved to have mattered much in the overall scheme of church membership.

In The Godbearing Life, Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster wrote about how the church is failing a whole generation of young people, "especially youth at the margins." (p. 15). These authors believe that the church has failed to rise to the challenge of modernity. Klaus Nurnbergers believes the Church has failed to take into account what can be learned from the natural sciences; global pluralism; explosive events in the global capitalist economy, such as the recent oil eruption in the Gulf of Mexico and its impact on the natural environment; the glitz and glamour of Hollywood type marketing for the sake of profit; the disintegration of traditionalist religious under the pernicious strain of Modernism, and a new burst of fudamentalisms that reflects the pains of modernity and modernization.

Since the 16th century, alchemy has changed into chemistry, astrology into astronomy, feudalism into liberal democracy? What makes theology stick to patterns of thought that belong to another age? Why should a 'doctrinal situation' be 'stable', while the entire world is in accelerating flux? If our predecessors in the 17th century were bold enough to learn from Aristotle, whom Luther considered a heathen, surely we could learn from Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsch, Einstein, Heidegger, Bloch, or Derrida. (Klaus Nurnberger)

Lutherans are leaving in large numbers. The ELCA has lost three quarters of a million people since it’s inception.The average attendance in ELCA congregations is 99 a Sunday. Aging congregations have been on the decline for many years. Our pews are not even half full. Sunday schools are disappearing. Maintaining large physical plants is becoming cost prohibitive. But we are not called to merely thrive. Phyllis Anderson reminds us that "Our future is not as an organization or even as a denomination, but as a catalytic movement within Christ's church." (Source: The Future of Lutheranism, Augsburg Fortress 2008) While memories of the past are often selective, we dare not abandon the history and traditions that made us who we are, but it is with the future that we have a rendezvous. The world we find ourselves a part of is a hard place, but it is the task of theology to give the church the courage and the direction needed to take on the issues that confront the globe, rather than withdrawing into a safe doctrinal haven.