Lutherans breaking with church over gay clergy

Pastors oppose denomination's move away from roots

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By Tom Beyerlein , Staff Writer Updated 10:33 PM Saturday, August 21, 2010

FAIRBORN — The Rev. Robert Forsberg didn’t expect to be starting a new church at age 63. But a controversial decision last year by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to allow non-celibate gay ministers has splintered his former church along with hundreds of other congregations across the country.

“This is probably the first time they’ve taken something that was recognized as a sin and basically made it a non-sin,” said Forsberg, former pastor at St. Mark Lutheran Church in Fairborn. “It just came to a point of, can people of conscience accept this? I just couldn’t do it.”

Forsberg retired in protest from the ELCA after the celibacy requirement was dropped for gay and lesbian ministers who are in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous” relationships. Although about 60 percent of St. Mark’s members voted this spring to leave the ELCA, that total fell short of the required 66 percent.

Forsberg is now pastor of the new Light of Christ Lutheran Church, comprised of former members of St. Mark’s and two other Lutheran churches who oppose the ELCA’s new policy.

Lutheran Church in America officials say about 200 congregations have left the ELCA since the ruling. Those departures are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said the Rev. Paull Spring, the nominee to be the first bishop of the North American Lutheran Church, a new Lutheran denomination to be formed in Columbus on Friday, Aug. 27.

Spring said a larger issue than homosexuality is involved: Should the Bible set church policy or “is it to be the mood of the times?”

The ELCA is the seventh largest religious body in the United States and the largest Lutheran order, with 4.5 million members in 10,239 congregations. There are 66 congregations in the greater Dayton area, from Sidney to just south of Centerville.

The Rev. Gary Eichhorn of the Lutheran Church of Our Savior in Oakwood said the ELCA decision has been a non-issue at his church.

“I am not confident enough to say, ‘I know what God wants and this is it,’ ” Eichhorn said. “I’d rather let the Holy Spirit do that.”

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