If I understand what Brian has posted recently, John, he told us that God answered their prayers differently in 2009 than he did in 2006.
Apparently the answer in 2006 and since the beginning of time, was "No, I won't grant your petition that your homosexual pastors should be able to engage in homosexual behaviors."
In 2009 God:
(1) Changed his mind.
(2) Realized the ELCA is advanced enough now to be able to handle homosexuality.
Or some combination of/or all the above.
If I had to speculate on how God thinks -- which we are unable to fathom -- I would think (3) God realized that many homosexuals have reached a maturity level so that they are willing and able to enter into a life-long, monogamous, loving relationship. Not too different from state legislatures deciding the same thing and that these relationship should be legal -- whether as registered domestic partners or marriage -- and share the same benefits of heterosexual married couples. It's not that God changed, but that we humans finally got it. For some people, the not goodness of being alone is solved by a person of the same gender. (It isn't solved by people of any sexual orientation by one night stands. Sexual behavior is not the same thing as companionship.)
We can argue similarly that in 1970, we finally "got it" that God can and does use females as ordained ministers just as effectively as males.
Do use a biblical example, Joseph believed that the right thing to do was to quietly divorce marry [?? Mary ?] since she had become pregnant - and he wasn't the father. What he believed was right, wasn't what God wanted him to do; so God acted to change his mind. Similar Peter's belief about unclean foods and the illegality of a Jew entering the home of a Gentile was changed by God through a series of events. I don't believe that Cornelius and his household were converted as much as Peter and the Jews who were with him in that story.
Are you arguing that it is a good thing when Christians "mature" (your term) to the same degree as their surrounding political institutions of this world?
Consider that τέλειος -- used in "Be
perfect as your heavenly Father is
perfect" also carries the idea of
being mature or
fully grown; and how Paul uses the word:
1Cor 2:6 Yet among the
mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. [But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.]
1Cor 14:20 Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking
be adults.
Eph 4:13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to
maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.
Phl 3:15 Let those of us who are
mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.
Col 1:28 It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone
mature in Christ.
Col 4:12 Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you. He is always wrestling in his prayers on your behalf, so that you may stand
mature and fully assured in everything that God wills.
Scriptures certainly point to a difference between mature/adult believers and immature ones. Note also that the conversion of Peter in Acts 10 was for him to go
against the culture of the Jews and even of Jewish Christians.