The Vice President of the ELCA, the highest-ranking lay leader in my denomination, just asked a question: If you were to change the organizational structure of the ELCA, how would you do it?
Last
year I engaged with this question in a sustained kind of way on this blog. Here
are links to some of those thoughts.
-In my first
post, initially planned as a one-off, I thought back to major changes in
the ELCA since its establishment and laid out a couple of alternative models of
church that took them into account, but the idea caught my imagination and I
was off to the races.
- I took some time defining
Church.
- I thought a bit about the
task of lay folk.
-I meandered around what it means
to be ordained.
-I made the case that practicing
the liturgy is reasonable, an argument I am still
making in a variety of forms.
-I made some arguments about a more decentralized
or more centralized
polity.
-I engaged
with an Atlantic article everyone, even non-church-types were sharing.
-I shared a
map of what the ELCA (missing the Caribbean Synod) would look like if we cut
the number of Synods in half.
-I wrestled with some questions about authority: Who
is the Pastor’s Boss? How
do we share our money?
-More recently, I tugged at the thorny question of power and
responsibilities surrounding congregational
closings and named some alternative
framings for leadership and organization.
What do
these dozen or so posts add up to? A few ponderings inspired by the ELCA’s hopeful
intention to reconstitute ourselves, so that we might be more faithful in the
world as it is, so we might move on from “living into” the merger of 1988 to
living together in 2025 and on into the future.
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