The history of the Lutheran church in America is long and tangled. Starting before the American Revolution, Lutheran immigrants brought their faith to these shores and sought out other Lutherans to form synods and associations of pastors and congregations. From the start, however, there was never a single Lutheran church body in America. Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians sought out others who shared their language or place of origin in Europe. Other groupings were shaped by the theology and practices they brought with them. There were Lutheran pietists, Old Lutherans, True Lutherans, and Lutherans who had kept the name but little else. As the years passed, there were mergers and splits, fellowship relationships declared and terminated.A diagram illustrating the history of the various Lutheran bodies in the United States over the years contains dozens of alphabet-soup names, merging and diverging lines, and numerous explanatory footnotes. It nearly makes your head spin just looking at it.
Last August, a new Lutheran church body was added to the list. Responding to the decision of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to permit practicing homosexuals to serve as pastors, a significant number of ELCA congregations voted to leave their church body and establish a new Lutheran denomination called the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). The NALC views itself as being in the "center" of American Lutheranism. It retains, however, most of the beliefs and practices of the ELCA, except for ordaining homosexual pastors.
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GJ - But WELS is the ONLY college in the ELCA, LCMS, ELS, etc with a homosexual video - not to mention a special Facebook page promoting "Party in the MLC."
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bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "The history of the Lutheran church in America is l...":
Concerning the attraction of Byzantium and Rome to those who (would) go native and semi-pope and pope, it's interesting that one gay priest said that the smells and bells, gold leaf and colorful vestments enthralled him since childhood and during his career. Perhaps that's an unexplored reason that some people go high church, or wear colorful and gaudy vestments, and even transition out of Protestantism to Orthodoxy and Catholicism:
Interview With Gay Theologian David Berger: 'A Large Proportion of Catholic Clerics and Trainee Priests Are Homosexual', 22 Nov 2010
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,730520-2,00.html
excerpts: ...the church never lost its attraction for me. The Tridentine Mass was like a gateway drug for me. When I was 17, I was with the Pius Brothers in Lower Bavaria. What I saw there was a fascinatingly aesthetic baroque dream of leaf gold and Brussels Bobbin lace. I couldn't get away from it. It only became clear to me later what I had got involved with, and the dream turned more and more into a nightmare.
...Through my enthusiasm for the traditional mass and for conservative theology
Berger: Many gays are attracted by the clear hierarchies of the male world of Catholic rituals. Among clerics I discovered extremely effeminate behavior of the sort I knew well from certain gay scenes. People give each other women's names and attach very high importance to clerical robes in all colors. Just think of the nicknames Bishop Walter Mixa (who recently stepped down amid accusations of violence and financial irregularities) and his housemaster friend gave each other: "Hasi," or "bunny," and "Monsi," short for monsignore.
Berger: I hope that the church will at last confront the issue of homophobia. It must recognize that a large proportion of the Catholic clerics and trainee priests in Europe and the United States are homosexual.
