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« on: October 22, 2010, 01:59:34 PM »
When I originally posted this inquiry way back in lo! 2007 I was a board member of Lutherans for Life. I was asked to join more or less because I was an ELCA pastor and there was interest in expanding the LFL membership to include more ELCA Lutherans. I think the numbers of then-current ELCA members I reported was way, way off, and I cannot say why. It is perhaps because, my impression, LFL doesn't keep track of Lutheran affiliations among the members very well. Or maybe I just got hold of the wrong statistical set.
I am no longer a board member. I wisely resigned a year into it . . . because I was a lousy board member. LFL deserved someone with a longer attention span, fewer family obligations at home, and a lively interest in being made to discuss things in a committee. On those grounds, I was uniquely unqualified.
However, the people I met through LFL were, first of all, pro-life, and second, Lutheran, and so far as I could tell, only incidentally Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. No one I ever met thought of LFL as a uniquely LCMS outfit. Nor do their hiring practices necessarily reflect that.
In 2009 I was one of the workshop leaders at the LFL national convention in St. Louis. The featured speaker for the evening was a Roman Catholic, and I shared a dinner table with four different kinds of Lutherans, by my count, including one of the LFL staffers, an ELCA lay woman. Several ELCA people attended my workshop.
I didn't meet any nuts, crazy people, or other assortments of unlikable sorts.
Bottom line for me, there is no other Lutheran organization for pro-life Lutherans.
I think - an opinion, but I hope a not uninformed opinion - the low number of ELCA members in Lutherans for Life reflects an ELCA denominational culture that ignores abortion and dismisses pro-life efforts as socially divisive. An ELCA member who tried to create an LFL congregational chapter would be unwelcome in most ELCA congregations. I doubt very much that any ELCA congregation would carry LFL pro-life inserts - or pro-life inserts of any sort - in Sunday's bulletin. But I do know of at least two that have carried Planned Parenthood materials.
The ELCA statement on abortion - which I once described as "theological road kill" - and the practice of the ELCA health plan in treating elective abortion as a reimbursable medical expense precludes the possibility of most ELCA pastors from doing anything publicly in the congregation to support, endorse, or encourage LFL membership. It prevents them from offering any public encouragement for any opposition to abortion.
(An aside, I am no longer a member of the health plan; I quit in the early 1990s when the ELCA church council forced the Board of Pensions into the business of paying for elective abortions. My private health insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City, will not pay for an elective abortion.)
My in-laws in South Carolina are the Roman Catholic diocesan representatives to Forty Days for Life. It is a heavily ecumenical outfit. There are no ELCA congregations participating, nor any ELCA Lutherans individually that I am aware of.
In 2002 at the Central States Synod assembly a number of us produced a resolution forming a task force to gather resource materials for women who might be seeking an alternative to abortion. We were attacked, viciously I think, from the floor by an array of people who each more or less suggested that even providing such material was a denial of a woman's right to choose. (The resolution passed, narrowly.)
Gregory Davidson suggests above that LCMS folks themselves start talking to ELCA people. That's not bad, but I am doubtful. I would like to hear of any one Lutherans for Life representative being allowed to introduce LFL to an ELCA council meeting.
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