One Table Many Heresies

In the Booklet "One Table Many Blessings" there are a collection of 'devotionals' for the ELCA Assembly that meets until the 23rd of this month. The booklet says this about itself:

Mingled with the devotions you will find twelve stories and pictures from the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Each is a story of a family: of individuals within church families, of couples with and without children, of extended families of kin. Some are clergy, some laypeople. All give witness to the importance for the church to recognize and support the ways their ministries and families are called by God and are poured out in service to the neighbor. In Christ, we are one family, and our families take many shapes.

I would like to bring to light one of these stories. The story is of two lesbians ('Rev.' Phyllis Zillhart and 'Rev.' Ruth Frost) who are both Ordained ministers. They have been together for 25 years this fall, and have a fifteen year old daughter who they raise with two gay 'men.' While there is much to be said about this unnatural parenting arrangement, I would like to set that aside and focus instead on something that they say about there daughter. This is their statement:

The “village” that has helped raise our daughter includes LGBT people of faith and our allies. She has marched in Pride parades every year of her life. She is clear about who her parents and her village are to her. She is not clear what the Lutheran Church as a whole is to her. Her generation will decide what place the Church will have in their lives based on the justice and hospitality they see extended to or withheld from LGBT people.

Notice what they link the activity in the church body to... It is how the church treats "LGBT people." Now, last I checked, and maybe I have missed some memo - but is it not the Gospel that dictates our Church activity. After all, why would we call a gathering of non-christians, in the name of there invented Christ? It Certainly isn't The Church. Maybe it is a church, like a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall is a church. The Church is those who are regenerated by Christ, who are in relationship with him.

"Reverends" with all due respect, It is not the way we treat GLBT people, but rather it is those who are Christ's Sheep who will come into the Fold. Moreover, If we do not call for both your repentance, and the repentance of all sinners, the church will be of little eternal meaning in the future.

There is another part of this One Table Many Blessings, that I would like to address, it is the 95 Persons who signed the document acknowleding their Homosexual, Bi-Sexual or Transgendered status and having been "separated from the ELCA roster in one way or another, through removal, resignation, retirement (sometimes early), postponement, leave, being dropped from candidacy,or are awaiting call." These people have rightly been disciplined, for their lack of repentance, and now, thanks to this choice by the denomination, they will be told that they are no longer in sin by being in a same-sex relationship. It seems to be that the result of liberalism, is the acknowledgment of sin, as non-sin.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4 ESV)