Where Was Benne in 1987?

Nadia exemplifies ELCA, but some of us saw it coming and wrote it up 31 years ago.

ELCA HITS BOTTOM

by Robert Benne - More at this link.October 2018

Whatever doubts I had were extinguished by recent events in the ELCA. The glaring departure from classic Christian teaching is so stunning it is scarcely believable. At the 2018 ELCA Youth Gathering held in Houston in late June, 31,000 youngsters of high school age listened to the most radical speakers the ELCA could possibly put forward. The prime keynoter was Nadia Bolz-­Weber, the tattooed and feisty founding pastor of an ELCA congregation called House for All Sinners and Saints. She has risen to become the featured celebrity of the ELCA and darling of progressive elites from NPR to the BBC.

She had been featured at an earlier Youth Gathering and stuck pretty much to her story of being rescued by grace (not much mention of Christ) from a life of drug and alcohol addiction—and from the fundamentalist Christianity she often blamed for her bad choices.  

---

A second keynoter was Tuhina Verma Rasche, described in an ELCA introduction as someone who “lives a hyphenated life as an Indian-American raised in a devout Hindu household. She sometimes wonders how she became a pastor in the ELCA and often wrestles with God’s call. Yet, through God’s persistence, she tries to answer the call to work for the representation of God’s full diversity within the church.” Her polished ten-minute presentation narrated how she was drawn to Christianity through the hospitality of a campus Lutheran group. Though she met God through the Holy Spirit, she, too, avoided any emphasis on Christ as the bearer of God’s grace. In her presentation the avoidance was complete...

Rasche has notoriety as a blogger and networker of #Decolonize­Lutheranism. Her blog is a bit hard to believe; it features two Advent devotionals entitled [expletives redacted - check the source]

***

GJ - Where to start? I stopped writing about ELCA in general, except to watch their hideous seminaries wind down and blow up (United Lutheran, helmed by a Presbyterian).

I have to wonder where all these Luthers were in 1987. Bishops did not leave - like Ken Sauer - until  2009.  They retired first and had their fat pensions. Certainly everything about the forming of ELCA promised total social and doctrinal radicalism.

The senior people who went along with this debacle betrayed the clergy and members. They were fat-bellied cowards who could not give up the good life or lose a few friends.

I have even less regard for the leaders of LCMS-ELS-WELS, who work with ELCA all the time and pretend to be different from them.