When local Lutherans split

Monday, December 13, 2010
GetReligion

Excerpt:
How quickly a newly reorganized group gets together is one measure, I guess. It’s so hard to compare these things considering how different every denomination’s polity is. But I just find the raw number of congregations leaving to be interesting. As I noted back in August when “only” 200 congregations had left, this is far more than the reported number of congregations that left the Episcopal Church during its recent unpleasantness. Now it’s up to almost 300 but still the Episcopal split received more coverage. It’s also interesting what’s considered “small” in terms of a split. My church body has about 6,000 congregations, I think. And if we lost 175 congregations in a year, it would be a big deal. A huge deal, actually.

Anyway, the story gets at another reason, perhaps, for the decreased coverage. That’s because the splits are more amicable:

The bitterness that marked the Episcopal Church split is mostly held in check among Lutherans. One reason is that, unlike in the Episcopal Church, property ownership is generally not an issue for defectors. As long as a former ELCA church aligns with a Lutheran denomination, it keeps its property.


A second reason is the sensibility within the Lutheran faith.

“We don’t call this a schism,” said David Wendel, pastor of St. Luke’s and one of 17 regional deans for the NALC. “Lutheranism has a flexibility that allows for this realignment.”

TMatt looked at some of the reasons for why the Episcopal Church receives a disproportionate amount of media coverage … back in 1994. But it is also certainly true that a polity like that shared by the ELCA is just not going to elicit the same type of media coverage as you’ll find elsewhere. If a congregation wants to leave, it does. Kind of hard to juice that for sensational media coverage. the rest