Marion congregation votes to leave ELCA, second vote required
MARION – In what was likely the narrowest margin possible, one of the largest ELCA congregations in Eastern Iowa voted today to leave the denomination.
The vote of the congregation at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 8300 C Ave., Marion, required a 67 percent majority. The congregation voted 67 percent plus one vote to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 309-151. There are more than 1,800 members eligible to vote on church issues.
A second vote is required to confirm today’s vote. That vote has not yet been scheduled but has to be at least 90 days from today, according to the Rev. Perry Fruhling, the church’s pastor.
“Ultimately it was this congregation’s decision whether or not to leave the ELCA,” Fruhling said in a statement released today. “Our congregation has participated in numerous forums and heartfelt discussions on the issues. This is the congregation being ‘the church,’ and St. Mark’s has always exhibited a genuine way of dealing with difficult issues.”
Although less than a third of the voting members of the congregation voted today, Fruhling said he felt the vote was representative of the congregation as a whole.
“I think everyone would say the people there were representative of our larger congregation,” he said.
The congregation started a year-long series of discussions and forums following the August 2009 decision of the ELCA’s Churchwide Assembly to allow non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy to serve as pastors within the church. During a church meeting in January 2010, the St. Mark’s congregation passed a resolution declaring that marriage was between “one man and one woman.”
“Within our own church, faithful people have arrived at two very different places on interpretation of Scripture,” Pastor Fruhling said. “Some believe that the Scriptural texts we’ve studied do not refer to present-day same-gender, lifelong monogamous relationships. Others state that Scripture is clear, pervasive, and consistent in constituting homosexual sex as sin.”
St. Mark’s has more than 2,300 members in its congregation. The church has been a member of the ELCA since 1988 when the former American Lutheran Church, Lutheran Church in America and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church merged.
“We will move forward knowing that our own church values will not change,” Fruhling said in the statement. ”We will continue to emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and proclaim salvation by grace through faith in Him.”
