Identifying with the Lavender Mafia was a great career booster for Hanson.
Minnesota is a hotbed for ELCA apostates, not just the WELSian ones.
James has left a new comment on your post "ELCA Coming Unglued - Lutheran Papacies Do Not Las...":
Phase I of the break from the ELCA:
Of all those congregations that leave the ELCA, most are joining the LCMC and NALC. If NALC and LCMC still share the same heterodox beliefs as the ELCA (with the exception of support for homosexuality), then what has been accomplished?
Sorry, I just don't get it.
Phase II of the break from the ELCA:
Perhaps a majority of people will eventually realize that they will need to leave the LCMC or NALC ("ELCA-Lite" churches) for a confessional Lutheran church (LCMS, WELS, TAALC, etc.)
Your thoughts about NALC and LCMC, Dr. Jackson?
***
GJ - They all vary as much as icebergs that calve from a glacier. The two new splits have already planned using the ELCA seminaries, just as one of the earlier splits decided to use Fuller! Oh...my...Groeschel.
I applaud the congregations and pastors leaving ELCA. But, by keeping women's ordination, all of them are continuing the same downward plunge. WELS and Missouri have women's ordination, too. They are just engaging in probing operations now, an example here and there, to reduce opposition and say, "No one objected before. We have been doing this for years."
It worked for Church Growth and a host of other inanities.
Women's ordination is not the biggest mistake--because there are so many--but it reveals an attitude toward the historic teaching of the Scriptures and Confessions. They will pick and choose, turn the time machine back a few years.
Those who see this imagine the answer is Eastern Orthodoxy or Rome, helped by their sinuflecting professors at St. Louis and Ft. Wayne.
The situation is not not hopeless, but the momentum is 99% the wrong way.
I noticed that the Lutheran Ministerium-USA held a conference where they gave about seven papers on the Means of Grace. They seem to be moving toward a serious confessional stance, but I know very little about them.
WELS, Missouri, and the Little Sect have ignored countless opportunities to be synods where the Lutheran Confessions are studied and followed, doctrinal issues debated in the open. Marvin Schwan unwittingly sealed the lids on their coffins by leaving a billion bucks so they could build some shiny mausoleums in his memory. And they did!
Almost all the blogs are political, controlled and managed by factions jockeying for power or keeping the apostates in power.
and mocks the efficacy of the Word.
