Destroying Bible-Believing Churches, Part 1C: Apostate Hierarchies

Destroying Bible-Believing Churches, Part 1C: Apostate Hierarchies
Friday, June 25, 2021 by Dr. James W. Walraven

How did the ELCA hierarchy subvert their Bible-believing churches? In the previous entry I discussed how I ended up in the ELCA. We will now look at that process.

Once denominational leadership was in place, they began sowing seeds of doubt (shades of Genesis 3). Articles written by Marcus Borg, a member of the Jesus Seminar, appeared. The members of the Jesus Seminar are most explicit: Jesus never claimed to be God, nor did he rise from the dead. According to them, much of what the Four Gospels record are beliefs held by the writer or the community, but very little of what Jesus actually said. For example, they insist that the Gospel of John does not contain even one single genuine saying of Jesus. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, a “gospel” where Jesus never claimed to be God, is viewed as the most authentic of all. The net result: deny Jesus’s identity and that the Scriptures are in no way inspired.

Once one has thrown out the Scriptures, it becomes much easier to implement whatever one wants, regardless of how unbiblical it might be. Once one has started asking, “Has God said?” all kinds of reasons make themselves known to deny whatever it is one wants to deny. The next step—one that happened after I left, although I stayed in touch with the pastor—was to endorse the ordination of those who were in same-sex relationships. What I found out later from the local pastor was that the ELCA, in its founding documents, never affirmed the inerrant authority of Scripture.

As with the Episcopal Church (EC), many of the remaining orthodox ELCA churches left. But the ELCA, like the EC, played hardball. While they did not own the local church buildings as did the EC, they did have control over ELCA pastors. They stated directly that any pastor who left the ELCA would forfeit all their retirement benefits. That placed pastors near retirement age in something of a bind.

Beyond that, the denomination controls who gets placed pastorally. While the local ELCA church gets to make that decision, candidates are vetted by the denomination. While an existing pastor might be orthodox, once they retire, their replacement almost certainly will not be, needing hierarchical approval in order to be placed. Over time, Bible-believing churches in the ELCA will cease to exist.

The news is mixed for the churches that left. Some joined existing synods. Both the Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod are very conservative. Neither of those Lutheran denominations ordain women, let alone those in same-sex relationships. Others formed the new North American Lutheran Church, a body that does affirm the divine inspiration of Scripture, but no mention is made of its inerrancy. Like the ELCA, they ordain women as pastors and bishops (I’ll address the importance of the complimentarian/egalitarian debate later in the series). Long-term, the failure to affirm Scripture’s inerrancy will likely cause problems, as it did with the ELCA.

What gets even scarier is what has been going on at the main ELCA seminary in Chicago in recent years. Again, there is a warning to the SBC, a situation the SBC has already been through once before. Those who control the seminaries ultimately control the denomination. We’ll examine what has been going on in our next post.

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