We recently received an update from the Bishop about the goings on at Churchwide Assembly (CWA) this year. A lot happened in that multi-day meeting in Columbus Ohio, but one of the things that the Bishop wrote about has caught my imagination: “The commission will report to the 2025 CWA with the potential for a reconstituting convention to be called. It has been 35 years since the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began so it seems time to examine whether what served us well then still holds. I’m excited to participate in this work, especially since change is one our synod’s core values.”
In Aristotelian ethics, there are three things a person or organization needs before doing something: Glasses, a Tool Belt, and a Map. You need Glasses to see the situation you are in. You need the Tool Belt to do the actual work—the types of tools you have limit and shape the actions at your disposal. You need a Map to know where you are going, what you hope to accomplish with your action.
From what I’ve seen of the ELCA, it feels like we’ve dealt with the Glasses and Map questions. For example, back in 2009 the ELCA did a big self-assessment eventually called “The LIFT document” and in 2014 the Presiding Bishop defined who we are this way: “We are church, we are Lutheran, we are church together, and we are church for the sake of the world.” For that matter, our current goal as a denomination is to: “contact a million new people and introduce them to the ELCA as a community of Jesus.”
What we’ve not dealt with, is restocking our tool belt. By that I mean the ELCA’s constitution, how we define the rules of the game. The ELCA was formed by a merger of three different forms of Lutheranism, and where there were disagreements we often papered over them, were a little vague, allowed for regional variety, and said, “we’ll define that more clearly when we’ve lived into the arrangement.” Well, we’ve now lived into this arrangement for 35 years, and it might be time to intentionally go through that tool belt: your beloved trusty hammer that you got from your great grandfather, well, maybe it is time to hang it up on the mantel and replace it with one of the other ones you own that has less sentimental value and you’ll actually use with full force, clean the rust off the screw driver and use WD40 the wrench, and buy a whole new tape measure—they have some with lasers and internal levels now!
As I said, the prospect of a reconstitution convention has caught my imagination. Imagine the ELCA as a self-aware and confident church, newly equipped for the opportunities and challenges of 2025, empowering each and every congregation to reach 112 people in our local communities with the Gospel of Jesus Christ!
