Reflections on "A Journey of Grace" by Herbert W. Chilstrom

               Reading Chilstrom’s book was a joy and a revelation! It was both wonderful to learn about the man who was the first Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, and to learn a thing or two about the inner workings of my denomination from the time before I joined, as well as some of the character of predecessor church bodies.

 

A Lived Theology

              I met Bishop Chilstrom once, at the Churchwide Assembly in 2009. I didn’t fully get who he was at the time and so I did not understand both the awe and vitriol being lobbed his way by our dining companions. I wish I’d had a chance to talk with him in a more meaningful way, in his book he comes off as a compelling and thoughtful figure.

His relationship with his brother, David, who was mentally disabled, and how his brother’s life exemplified for Herb an incarnational ministry and the Theology of the Cross, put flesh on some pretty heady concepts.

On one hand, David was the famous local son, not Herb, because he lived such a relational life, deeply embedded in the lives of everyone who lived within walking distance of the facility where he lived for decades. It reminds me of that mind blowing truth that all but the end of Jesus’ ministry took place in a 7 mile by 13 mile area.

On the other hand, Herb tells the story of his parents sending David off to a special needs school. Herb lost his best friend that day, and for the weeks and months that followed he cried himself to sleep, wondering, “How can this be? Where is God in all of it?”

As Bishop Chilstrom, Herb, writes, “I believe this experience was the beginning of what I later came to understand as the theology of the cross. I could not believe that God, as I had come to understand God in family and Sunday school, would cause things like this to happen. Instead I came to see that God comes to us at our most distressing moments in life, helping us to see that Christ, the Suffering Servant of God, understands our deepest sorrow because he has taken it to the cross.”

              Additionally, I appreciated reading about the pathos of being a Bishop. It is “lonely at the top” especially when also being a first. Then there was Bishop Chilstrom’s struggle with the tension between his role as bishop and his personal feeling regarding church policies, especially the ELCA’s 30-year conversation/fight over Human Sexuality. Chilstrom’s conscience told him homosexual relationships were no more innately sinful than heterosexual relationships, but he had to enact the policies of a denomination that wasn’t there yet. At times he considered quitting and becoming a Lutheran DJ—no literally, that was his plan at one point!

 

The Leak

              Speaking of the ELCA’s 30-year conversation about sexuality, I understand it better now. I’d always assumed the distrust and animosity that swirled so savagely through the ELCA around the subject had to do with just that, the subject. After all the questions around inclusion of the LGBT+ community seemed to pit grace against scripture, and talking about very personal, important, and relational parts of a person’s life can be uncomfortable to say the least. All that is true, but the other dynamic at play was the leaking of the first draft of the ELCA statement on sexuality.

Get this, most ELCA pastors heard about what was in the original draft document on the national 10 o’clock news. Someone leaked it to the press! As the news tends to do, it focused on the most controversial parts of the statement (Masturbation and Homosexuality) and didn’t offer any nuance (for example, that this was a draft social statement, not a change in “doctrine”), and the statement was still in the mail, so no ELCA pastor could comment with any certainty about what the draft contained! 

I may have heard about this situation before, maybe even in Seminary, but now as a lightly seasoned pastor, I get on a gut level what a betrayal of trust that was for everyone involved.

You are shaking hands after worship and family after family asks about the statement, and you have to reply, “I don’t know,” and they don’t fully believe you, because you should know something about it; the Synod wouldn’t leave you flat footed! Some people shout at you because they had to explain a sexual term the news presenter used to their child; they’re angry and they have to attack someone, and you’re the easiest target, and the softest too, because they know you, and they know you’ll forgive them even if they’re nasty to you.

Other folk whisper in your ear that they have a cousin who is “that way,” and you don’t know how to respond, because they have expressed bigotry toward gay people in the past… and that family doesn’t come back the next week, and don’t answer your phone calls.

The confirmands can’t stop talking about hairy palms, and it is so bad that you can’t get through the lesson about the second article of the Apostle’s Creed with them. Do you make that session a teachable moment? Well… you don’t have the statement itself to work off of, and if you’d talk about something that sensitive there would need to be some pre-work, probably parental permission.

The next week is a council week and there are some unexpected guests at the meeting, a group of concerned members who want to know why you didn’t prepare them—they wonder what they pay you for, if you aren’t at least the person in the know about what “they” are doing in Chicago.

Maybe you did text study with a colleague or two. They want you to join them in sending a formal complaint; there is a consensus that this would never have happened if we were still LCA.

              Imagine that experience repeating itself over 10,000 churches. Yipes! Talk about a self-inflicted wound! No wonder questions of human sexuality consumed three decades of our life together. No wonder when we as an organization have idle hands we return to those fights and cliques that were developed during the argument. The ELCA was traumatized by that event!

 

Predecessors & Polity

              Finally, there was a lot of talk about the various Lutheran Church Bodies that existed before and alongside the ELCA. I’m a young one, relatively speaking; I’ve never not been an ELCA Lutheran.

Prior to the ELCA there were four major strands of Lutheranism floating around that shaped the ELCA:

The Lutheran Church in America. This denomination was more top down and clergy focused. When they talked about Christian unity and ecumenical dialogue they tended to think about uniting with the Anglicans, the Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox traditions. Broadly speaking it was “liberal” and East Coast centric, and the baston of “German confessionalism.”

The American Lutheran Church. This denomination was more congregational and lay oriented. When they talked about doing stuff with other Christians, they talked about doing stuff with folk from the Calvinist tradition and with other protestants in general. As a rule, it was a more “conservative” and midwestern denomination; many members came from Norwegian or German pietist traditions.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. This denomination is decidedly conservative and hyper-confessional to the point that they don’t consider ecumenical dialogue or doing stuff with other Christians as something Lutherans should do. At one point the leader of the LCMS was a relative of the leader of the ALC. There was a moment where those two church bodies may have united, but that ship sailed. They are a very German denomination.

The American Evangelical Lutheran Church. This is a group of people and congregations who left the LCMS. They left after several LCMS seminary professors were essentially tried for heresy and the students at that seminary revolted—This situation was called Seminary in Exile, Seminex. This much smaller group’s goal was to unite with the LCA, or become the hinge for the formation of a new Lutheran Church.

              As a minor point of interest, Chilstrom believes he became Presiding Bishop mainly because, while he was LCA, he was from the Midwest and came out of the Swedish Lutheran tradition, that was simultaneously very confessional (like the LCA) but also had a Scandinavian pietistic streak (like the ALC); additionally, his wife was a minister in the ALC. So, he was a great bridge between two of the streams of tradition feeding into the ELCA.

              One of the what ifs I wonder about is what if the AELC/LCMS split had gone a little differently, or Seminex never happened? What if the ALC/LCMS cousins had forced a merger? What if the LCA had scooped up the AELC quickly? But, that’s not what happened. Instead, the ELCA was formed by the merging of the AELC, LCA, and ALC. We are a denomination that is neither top down nor bottom up, but instead interrelated in three expressions: Congregation, Synod, Churchwide. Chilstrom acknowledges that this is an expensive church, as all of the expressions are fully functioning, funded, and empowered entities.

One interesting point about paying for all these expressions, or more to the point not paying for it, is that the ALC had a dual giving pattern; each congregation gave to their district (think Synod) and Churchwide, whereas the ELCA’s giving patter is that congregations just give to the Synod, who in turn gives to the national church (though as I wrote elsewhere this isn’t always how it works out). It seems that after the merger most former ALC congregations, while giving to the Synod in the same way they used to give to the District, chose to retain locally the money that they used to send on to Churchwide. For the sake of unity, no one on the Churchwide staff was comfortable pointing out that former ALC congregations were being less generous than former LCA congregations.

There are two major players on the Churchwide level, in addition to the Presiding Bishop and their staff, the Church Council who have a lot of authority, but no power, and the Conference of Bishops who have a lot of power, but no authority. While the Conference of Bishop is theoretically an advisory group, Presiding Bishop Chilstrom found they could act as a surprising brake on his decisions when they disagreed with him. At times the structure of the ELCA felt to Bishop Chilstrom like it did not live up to its interrelated design, and instead took on the character of a federation of 65 synods and 10,000 autonomous congregations.

This review may have gone into the weeds, but I assure you that has to do with yours truly, not the book I'm reviewing. It is well worth a read. It features encounters with such varied people as Mikhail Gorbachev and Billy Graham. It is a faithful and kind telling of the formation of the ELCA and the formation of Chilstrom's faith.