Pleasing nobody by pleasing everybody

The ELCA (http://www.elca.org), which we don't belong to, has released their Report and "Recommendations from the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality" last Thursday:

http://www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/tfreport_faq.html

Basically their recommendation is not to make any policy changes on paper, (on paper they're against blessing same-sex unions, and clergy who are homosexual in orientation are to remain celibate), but that in practice the policies won't be enforced, allowing instead for "pastoral discretion" on the local and synodal level. In other words, there will be change neither in official policy nor in actual practice. The "Blue Law" approach to moral compromise. That should make everyone happy, after they've spent so much time & money & dragged every single parish through their "churchwide study". An ELCA lay preacher remarked to me, in so many words, that there's potential for a real split on this issue.

Besides grieving for the lack of "Thus saith the LORD" conviction in this decision, I grieve for the death of the ELCA's goal of being a uniting church body, working towards ecumenical reunion of presently-divided Christians. The ELCA formed in 1988 out of the merger of three church bodies. One entire new church body has recently split off from them. If it happens again, they'll be back to pre-1988 conditions. According to stats at www.arda.tm, the ELCA loses, every 2 3/4 years, as many members as my own small church body has. In the last few years the ELCA has had a "concordat" of mutual ministry with the Episcopal Church - USA. I believe, in part, they were hoping that partnering with such a prominent church body, and one that claims apostolic succession, would be a giant step towards church reunification. But the EC-USA is now in "impaired communion" with a number of other Anglican churches, especially in Africa & Asia, which don't approve of their consecrating an openly gay bishop. By extension, it seems that the ELCA's communion would be "impaired" as well. The ELCA belongs to the World Council of Churches, which began as a sincere effort to bring about church reunification, but it seems to be increasingly alienating some of its original members from the Eastern Orthodox communion, who, I believe, sincerely & naively hoped that the WCC would help other Christian churches to become more like the Orthodox Church! Instead the opposite is happening.

When will someone point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes? When will people see that alienating Christians by departing from the the Church's historic teachings is counterproductive to church unity? Someday the "mainline" Protestant churches in the USA will have to merge, not just out of ecumenical concerns, but because they will have lost too many members to sustain all their separate bureaucracies. Meanwhile, I optimistically believe that as Christ's return approaches, true believers in all Christian churches will become increasingly more united - and ominously, false believers will also become more united with one another. I believe a drastic and surprising reshaping of Christian church bodies is coming this century, and it's already starting.