the actions were mutual and not just one side.
I am not trying to cause offense. I responded to a comment that maybe Orthodox would be overpower by forces of evil. As for the issues being settles, there is always hope.
there is always hope. this hope should be turned into obedience to the founder of the Church.
No, that is not what I wrote.you mean, you reather embrace gay marriage clergy than to accept the Mother of God and pray for the dead, and so forth?
Yes, he was the first bishop of Antioch and then later became the first bishop of Rome (where he was martyred and his body was buried), his successor therefore will be the bishop of Rome the one given the task of strenghtening his brethren and shepherding Christ’s sheep while “holding” the keys of the kingdom. Furthermore, the see of Constantinople is not that ancient it came several centuries after the Church was formed. And the schism did not take place in 1054 although relations were somewhat strained, it was in the 15th century that we broke all ties (in the council of Florence there was an attempt to reconcile our differences but because Constantinople was under Islamic rule this never came to be). God bless.
From my prospective, if you are sharing in Communion with them, that would imply accepting the policies. If you are rejecting the policies and rejecting Communion with them, you are no longer in the same church.
I can’t help but laugh everytime I hear “St. Olaf.” It makes me think of Betty White’s character, Rose Nylund, on “The Golden Girls,” that town she came from in Minnesota where everyone was dumb as a post lol…
Curiously, the first thought that came to my mind when I read this was that Luther is often chided here for not staying within the Church and fighting from within it for reform. I’m not saying you are right or wrong, Hobbitofny, just that for someone like Pastor Gary, your comment makes crystal clear, at least to me, the depth of the dilemma he may be facing. He, and those similar, truly need our prayers for the presence of the Holy Spirit in their contemplations.
This is exactly the problem.
Nor the results of that methodology.
I understand your disgust at the generalizations, Alix! But don’t worry, most of us here know the LCMS is a good conservative, more traditional and common-sense Lutheran group and the ELCA is the Lutheran version of the Episcopal Church. I would never dream of mixing up the two!
Well, you have.
I suspect conservative Lutherans are more likely to move to other conservative Lutheran bodies like the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.I just copied the following article from Comcast.net
Lutherans to allow sexually active gays as clergy
By PATRICK CONDON, AP
MINNEAPOLIS — Leaders of the nation’s largest Lutheran church voted Friday to allow sexually active gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy.
Gays and lesbians are currently allowed to serve as ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America only if they remain celibate. The proposal to change that passed with 68 percent approval.
At 4.7 million members and about 10,000 congregations in the United States, the ELCA is one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations yet to take a more gay-friendly stance on clergy.
The final decision on whether to hire gay clergy in committed relationships will lie with individual congregations.
Some critics of the proposal have predicted its passage could cause individual congregations to split off from the ELCA, as has been the case with other Christian denominations, including the Episcopal Church.
The debate over the so-called “ministry recommendations” got under way first thing Friday, and delegate Al Quie, a former Republican governor of Minnesota, proposed an alternative: “Practicing homosexual persons are excluded from rostered leadership in this church.”
The proposal, which would have left the church’s policy more or less unchanged, failed. Conservatives had lost an important vote Wednesday night when the convention’s 1,045 delegates approved by a two-thirds supermajority a “social statement on human sexuality” that said the ELCA could accommodate diverging views on homosexuality.
The Rev. Katrina Foster, a pastor in the Metropolitan New York Synod, pointed out that the church has ordained woman and divorced people in violation of a literal interpretation of scripture.
“We can learn not to define ourselves by negation,” Foster said. “By not only saying what we are against, which always seems to be the same — against gay people. We should be against poverty. I wish we were as zealous about that.”
If you are a Lutheran of the ELCA and this is the “last straw” for you, come home to the Catholic Church! We welcome you with open arms full of love! Just as we have welcomed many Anglicans and Episcopalians.
God bless you all . . . and let us “keep THE faith together!”
I did not join this forum for this kind of writings, but I also I need to defend Orthodoxy.
I missed the “cross falling upside down”. This is almost to good (and funny) to be true. Do you have a quote (link). Thanks.
I don’t think you can take a cross being turned upside down by a tornado as a sign of damnation, anymore than you can take a church being leveled by a hurricane or other such natural disaster as a spiritual condemnation of that church as well. Don’t read more into natural disasters then is really there.
Alix,
Perhaps someone Orthodox could better say, but I have heard mixed reviews of how the Western Orthodox parishes are doing. Of course some Orthodox are against anything different, but even among others, there are some indications of certain kinds of difficulties being encountered. My reading of the situation, which may be way off, is that the hierarchy is going to move slowly with this, and not let it get ahead of itself and turn into a problem.