Bishop Preparing Lutherans for Historic Vote

It’s a pretty heady time now for a high-ranking Lutheran cleric who was up for adoption when he was born at Los Angeles County General Hospital during the Depression.

When in 1932 Frances and Rueben Anderson of Pasadena saw the 6-week-old baby they were cleared to adopt, the infant was “scrawny and yellow looking” from jaundice.

“But thanks be to God they returned to pick me up weeks later,” said the Rev. H. George Anderson, who grew up in Alhambra and was sent by his adoptive parents to college and seminary in Philadelphia.

Elected in 1995 as presiding bishop of the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination, the 5.2-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Anderson will preside as his church body votes in August on whether to blend with four other major U.S. denominations, though stopping short of total integration.

“It’s a groundbreaking move, and historic in the sense that the old way of thinking was [to try for church] mergers,” Anderson said recently at the Warner Center Marriott Hotel where he will return Thursday to open a semiannual meeting of ELCA bishops. The five-day meeting of bishops here will not be taking action on the proposed interdenominational agreements.

Contrary to hopes expressed 30 years ago for the eventual merger of major mainline denominations, the present proposals call for each denomination to preserve its distinctive organizations, independence and traditions--more in keeping with what’s acceptable at the local church level, observers say.

Yet, Anderson said, it is hard to tell now what pastors and parishioners think.

“We’ll know more this spring when Lutheran [regional] synods hold their meetings and people actually begin to discuss the documents,” Anderson said.

The ELCA convention this summer will be the last of five to vote. The Lutheran delegates are the only ones taking two separate votes: First on whether to sign a bilateral concordat with the Episcopal Church, and then on whether to approve a four-way agreement with three denominations in the Reformed Protestant tradition--Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America.

If plans are approved, participating churches will have the right to:

* Recognize each other’s Communion services, as well as allowing joint worship services.

* Allow congregants to switch churches within the group.

* Mutual recognition and employment of ordained ministers, subject only to the regulations of each church.

* Cooperative commitments to mission efforts and joint decision-making on major issues.

Pastors have already noted that Presbyterians, Lutherans and other Protestant churchgoers today have little problem with denomination-switching and that joint ecumenical ventures have become commonplace.

However, Anderson said that “technically it is not possible, for instance, for a Presbyterian minister to serve a Lutheran congregation without having an emergency situation or without special arrangement.”

That would change if the five-church linkup is approved, allowing congregations to hire a minister from one of the affiliated denominations.

Anderson said the cooperating denominations may decide more often to share the high costs of acquiring property and building new churches in places such as Southern California.

The ELCA bishop, whose offices are at the denomination’s Chicago headquarters, said in an interview that he is “profoundly gratified” to be at the helm as the voting proceeds in the summer.

“My chance is to help build the structures to fulfill this dream of working more closely together,” he said. “The plans leave a lot to develop once there is a commitment to full communion.”

Anderson, who turns 65 on March 10, is no stranger to ecumenical diplomacy. He was a longtime leader in a Lutheran-Catholic theological dialogue that broke ground in 1983 with a joint statement on “justification by faith,” a principle that, among other things, holds that the churches do not believe that Christians achieve salvation by their good deeds alone.

Lutheran leadership, by reason of demographics, more often than not comes from the East, Midwest or Plains states--not from the relatively sparse Lutheran population in Southern California.

Indeed, Anderson spent most of his ministry as a seminary professor on the East Coast and was president of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, from 1982 to 1995.

But it is not unprecedented to have a westerner in the top spot. When Anderson was confirmed at age 13 at Grace Lutheran Church in Alhambra, he was taught by the Rev. Robert Marshall, then a fresh-from-the-seminary pastor who later become president of the Lutheran Church in America, the largest of the three Lutheran bodies that merged in 1987 to form the present ELCA.

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Convention Countdown

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Chicago-based denomination of 5.2 million members, will hold the last of five conventions this summer to vote on groundbreaking measures to allow intercommunion and recognition of each other’s clergy.

“It’s kind of like a relay race in which we have a chance to carry the baton over the finish line,” said the Rev. H. George Anderson, presiding bishop of the Lutheran church body.

The Episcopal-Lutheran concordat is only between those two denominations. A separate partnership agreement will be voted on by the Lutheran, Presbyterian (U.S.A.), Reformed Church in America and United Church of Christ delegates.

The location and date of the gatherings--called conventions, synods or assemblies--are as follows:

June 14-20 -- Reformed Church in America, Milwaukee.

June 14-21 -- Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Syracuse, N.Y.

July 3-8 -- United Church of Christ, Columbus, Ohio.

July 15-25 -- Episcopal Church, Philadelphia.

Aug. 14-20 -- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Philadelphia.