What’s so extraordinary?

October 11, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

20th Anniversary:  National Coming Out Day

For the past 5 years I have been a member of the Extraordinary Candidacy Project (ECP) Roster — a list of clergy and wannabees either removed from the clergy roster of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) or denied access to that roster by reason of our relationships to our life partners.

At present the ELCA still has an oppressive policy that categorically excludes from ordained service anyone who will not promise a lifetime of sexual celibacy—even though the policy itself is in violation of the historic Lutheran Confessions of the 16^th century which rejected clerical celibacy as a requirement, and against the writings of blessed Martin Luther.

It is not the first time that an individual or a group of people have been excluded from a Christian roster of priests and ministers. Sometimes it is done for clear moral failure. (People want to make that case against us, too.) Most often it is for the underlying violation of an authoritative decision. Luther himself was excommunicated from the church for a variety of reasons, chief of which was that he dared to talk back to the church hierarchy and so undermine their “authority.” The Pope continues to do this to people in the 21^st century as a way of silencing dissent. (More later.)

There is little doubt that the framers of the current ELCA policy excluding gay and lesbian pastors (see Section III. of “Vision and Expectations”) was also a cynical attempt to silence dissent. The generation of highly-placed church-crats which wrote the policy in 1990 were old enough to remember when even the threat of exposure of a lesbian or homosexual was enough to silence them—intimidate them, shame them, and chase them back where they came from (a closet).

To remove an ordained priest or pastor pretty much silences them. They lose their pulpit, their soap box, their career and livelihood. It’s over, folks, for most of them. They move on to other “day jobs.” Many lose faith in the Church entirely.

Only about a century before Luther inflamed a reforming spirit all over Europe, Other would-be reformers were effectively silenced by being disciplined, then stripped of their clerical rank, condemned as heretics, turned over to the secular authorities, and burned at the stake. This happened to William Tyndale and John Hus for the high crime of translating the Holy Scriptures into the language of the people, and encouraging ordinary people to read and understand (interpret) the Scriptures for themselves. As I mentioned in a sermon September 30, I still find it amazing that church “authority” could become so evil as to commit murder for translating the scriptures into the ordinary language of the people when St. Jerome did exactly the same thing 1,000 years earlier by translating the Hebrew and Greek into the “Vulgate” – the common Latin of the time.

Luther, however, survived being silenced. He publically burned the Papal Bull (a fitting image for our time) condemning him, along with the entire code of canon law, and went right on teaching, preaching, and writing. He was and remains extraordinary 500 years later.

What makes our clergy roster in the Extraordinary Candidacy Project extraordinary is that we belong to the generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christian clergy who like Luther before us refuse to be silenced. Being dropped, or excluded from the ELCA’s Roster has not gotten rid of us. We’re still here, we’re queer. Get used to it.

Officially, of course, the “extraordinary” word means that we have been ordained extra ordinem, beyond the “ordinary” procedure for calling and ordaining Lutheran pastors with the blessing (the signature on a letter of call) from a Bishop. As of 2007, ELCA Bishops are still not in a position to sign letters of call for LGBT pastors without risking their own removal or discipline. To their credit, some 20 of our 65 bishops showed up at the August 8 eucharist in Chicago at which the Rev. Bradley Schmeling presided and more than 650 people sang, prayed, and called upon the Holy Spirit to bring change to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Change is coming, but we continue ordinations extra ordinem through the authority of Lutheran congregations to call and ordain their own pastors, an inherent right which Luther himself vigorously defended in the 16^th century.

The July 2 decision of a Committee on Appeals of the ELCA to remove Pastor Schmeling from the roster of the church —without ever meeting him or hearing a single word of testimony on his behalf—was a crass and cynical gesture meant to silence him and get him off the pages of our daily newspapers. It isn’t working. Pastor Schmeling is still serving as the beloved pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta.

But perhaps even more extraordinary is that members of the ECP roster aren’t sitting around either grousing about this terrible church policy, or waiting for the policy to change (even though every two years it gets closer to the “tipping point” when it will. This roster of extraordinary pastors is extraordinary because we have gone on with our ministries — with serving people, preaching, teaching, presiding over the sacraments of the church, ministering to those in nursing homes and hospitals and prisons. Many of us reach out to and serve an entire population of wounded or alienated believers whom the larger church has completely ignored. And, we’re raising our own funds, through organizations like Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries, Lutherans Concerned and Wingspan Ministries in Minnesota, to carry on this work.

I am reminded of the saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words.” The Extraordinary Candidacy Project and Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries made the joint decision this past winter to organically join forces, becoming an entity which pulls together at the same pace and in the same direction, to preach the Gospel with or without words. The new entity —not to be seen as a separate church body, but an expression or a movement of the Holy Spirit at work—will be known as “Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries.”

And extraordinary they are. We are not a club representing and protecting the “sanctus quo,” but striving with God’s help to be faithful to a calling which we recognize and validate in one another, and which we pray will one day be understood and validated by the larger church. In the meantime, the ECP pastors jumped the gun on National Coming Out Day (October 11) by taking their “next step” in August when 82 of us came out publicly. Many of these people were gathered prayerfully with the voting members of the ELCA’s “Churchwide Assembly” in Chicago when the photo below was taken.

Photo: Paul Nixdorf

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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