Although Taylor’s term expired in May, he participated in last August’s watershed ELCA convention at which the policies were changed.
“In the Southern Ohio Synod, we were expecting there to be problems,” said Taylor. “We expected to lose either some congregations or giving (to the ELCA national body) because of it.”
Among the synod voting members, “there were people on both sides of the issue,” he explained, “but generally Southern Ohio voted not to change policy — or at least not yet.”
“The side that wanted the change, they felt they had been pressing for years” to get any movement, he said, “and the other side thought they had voted it down repeatedly” and the issue should, therefore, have been dead.
“The historian in me thinks there was going to happen at some point” because of larger societal changes, said Taylor, a professor of history at Wittenberg University. But the changes, he said, are “more complicated inside the church” because they also involve shifts of theological interpretation.
He said the changes lead to tears on both sides — of joy from those who saw it as move toward inclusiveness and of grief from those who felt their traditional church values had been pulled out from under them.
“There’s a lot of hurt,” said Taylor, “and it’s painful to watch.”
Taylor said he had “one major reservation about what we did last August” when policies were changed. “I thought the decision should have been subjected to a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority” — the rule that applies to church social statements.
Despite that reservation, Taylor said he is “deeply disturbed” about the formation of a new denomination because “splitting churches is not, from a Lutheran point of view, a good thing.”
“The history of Lutheranism in North America has been mergers — small groups merging into larger ones,” he said.
“The prospect of a large group splitting off is not welcome,” he said. “I hope and pray it doesn’t go as far as a formal and complete break, though I fear that’s where it’s headed.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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