elca

WORTHINGTON — There was a time not so many years ago when neighbors within a community all knew each other well. They engaged in small talk across the tops of hedges and fences while their children played together in backyards. Borrowing a cup of sugar from next door, rather than...

HAWLEY - More than 70 percent of Hawley (Minn.) Lutheran Church members who took part in a Sunday vote backed cutting ties with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. That was the first of two votes yielding a two-thirds majority the church needs to secede from the ELCA.

HAWLEY - Hawley Lutheran Church, a congregation of more than 1,100 baptized members, could take the first step Sept. 19 toward breaking with its denomination. The congregation has scheduled a "special meeting" that day to vote on whether to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in...

WORTHINGTON -- To stay or go? The debate is being tackled with remarkable civility in southwest Minnesota, even as congregations across the nation threaten to split from the church. Some have accepted the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's controversial announcement it would...

COTTAGE GROVE - St. Luke Lutheran Church members voted Sunday to restore some funding to the Saint Paul Area Synod, which they quit giving to after the parent denomination decided to allow openly gay clergy last August. The church council proposed a compromise of sending half the...

Forty five years ago, I became a Lutheran as an adult. I had been brought up in a fundamental Christian church. The synod of this church was the American Lutheran Synod, known by some people as "German Lutheran." During the past 45 years, many dynamic changes in the church have changed....

DULUTH - The question was whether someone in a committed gay relationship should be ordained by the Lutheran church to serve as a pastor. It took the country's largest body of Lutherans 20 years to answer, and in August they said 'Yes.' Then members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church...

ERSKINE - Two churches in the Northwestern Minnesota Synod have voted in favor of leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, while a congregation near Pelican Rapids recently canceled a Dec. 6 vote on its own status with the ELCA. In Erskine, 80 percent of congregants at...

I'm writing in response to a letter from Bob Lee published in your paper on Jan. 6, 2010, regarding withholding funding to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Mr. Lee suggests that cutting funding to the ELCA is a viable response to the decision of the ELCA at its Churchwide...

Members, the ELCA has left us. The leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) turned its back on members of ELCA churches and threatens the very existence of the church by allowing non-celibate pastors in homosexual relationships to be ordained into the ELCA....

GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- It's not quite Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenberg cathedral door. But the head of the nation's largest Lutheran church might feel like he's being hammered on by some during a new kind of online public exchange of controversial topics with...