As a pastor in the age of the social network, I can’t respond to every parishioner who voices distress on my Facebook news feed. But when Derrick, a ­law-enforcement officer in my congregation, wrote that he was considering “making targeted donations to [his] home church that can’t be kicked up to the ELCA,” I figured it was time to pay him and his wife a visit.

Derrick, like over 36,000 others, had viewed a one-minute video, posted by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, featuring churchwide staff holding a die-in style demonstration at the denomination’s Chicago headquarters following the grand jury’s non-indictment of the white officer who shot and killed—under much disputed circumstances—an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The video includes a few moments from a prayer service in the lobby and then cuts to images of the sixty or so staff members lying still in the grass, with one individual sitting upright in a cruciform “hands-up” position.

Only those who were there can know the full content and context of what took place. Derrick’s interpretation of what he saw on the video was that the ELCA leadership, from its safe (he would say protected) distance had “taken a side” against law enforcement officers and their families. Sitting in their living room that Sunday night in Advent, I heard Derrick voice feelings of anger and hurt, and a sense that he and his colleagues who regularly put their lives at risk for others had been judged, devalued, and betrayed by this group of strangers who represented the denomination. When we had arrived at the heart of the matter, Derrick said, “If I’m in a high risk situation where my training calls for split-second action, and I fire my weapon, and he happens to be black and I’m white, and now I’m living with the fact that I killed a man, is the church going to turn its back on me?”

Judging from the extensive comment thread, Derrick was far from alone in his interpretation. (Notably, when I asked him about Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton’s statement, he found it appropriate and pastoral. “She said we needed to pray for everyone,” he said.) Rightness or wrongness aside, the action of these staff members raises questions about how the ELCA can most wisely live into its vision of being a public church.

This perennial impulse of the churchwide organization—“We need to say something or do something about x!”—can be traced partly to the ELCA’s original self-conception as being the big, united, “new” Lutheran church on the US scene. Even if it was something of an exaggeration to say that American Lutherans had united with the birth of the ELCA, the possibilities for “the fourth largest Protestant church in the United States” finally to have some real influence in Washington and society at large seemed endless. But as Edgar R. Trexler, a former editor of The Lutheran magazine, eventually concludes in his history of the ELCA’s formation, Anatomy of a Merger, “[T]he emphasis on forming a ‘new’ Lutheran church was the new church’s biggest liability... It was an optimistic word, suggesting that this new entity could do whatever it set out to accomplish. In some ways, a ‘wish-list’ kind of church was created” (1991, 257).

One could likewise argue that a tradition of imprecision around the “three expressions” ecclesiology of the ELCA itself opens the way for bureaucratic overreach. Early on, congregation, synod, and churchwide organization were commonly described as three “equal” expressions, a kind of pseudo-doctrine, reflective of compromise by predecessor bodies. When misunderstood—as a metaphor of scale, authority, or power—this legacy of “equal” expressions can lead those who work for the churchwide entity, or the synods for that matter, to believe that they have a mandate to make statements, sometimes hastily, on every social and political issue under the sun.

Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, of course, stresses that the church exists first and foremost as an event. “[The church] is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel.” The vast majority of the time, this event takes place in the local congregation. No less do Lutherans affirm that when we gather around Word and Sacrament we are united with the church universal across time and space.

“Congregations find their fulfillment in the universal community of the Church, and the universal Church exists in and through congregations,” states Chapter 3 of the ELCA’s Constitution on the nature of the church. Taken together, this confessional ecclesiology, which is both evangelical and catholic, reveals the synodical and churchwide expressions—so often groping for a more profound ontology—to be rather humbly positioned “in the middle.” While their work remains critically important in building capacity for mission at the local level, extending the congregation’s generosity, and in facilitating cooperation, including internationally, the character of these expressions is decidedly instrumental, at least most of the time. Synods and the churchwide organization are the church’s bridge builders.

On a more pragmatic level, if the ELCA wants to continue on its course of becoming a much smaller, monolithically liberal denomination, akin to certain other Mainline denominations in the US, it can disregard Derrick and the others it alienates by taking predictable sides at an official level on wedge issues in American society. It can become a tribe of the like-minded with a Lutheran brand mark. Such a path makes for a more comfortable and routinely affirming experience for the insiders who remain. But it also translates into a body whose one foundation has become obscured, a church less resourced for reaching evangelically outside of its own ranks.

Some might argue that, with the post-2009 departures and the formation of a breakaway denomination like the North American Lutheran Church, the ship has already sailed on the original vision of the ELCA as a broad, unified Lutheran church body. However, we can still uphold this vision if our churchwide expression can show restraint at the right times and maintain a sharp focus. In recent years, a number of encouraging signs that the denomination is coming around to a more modest self-conception have appeared. Presiding Bishop Emeritus Mark Hanson, going back at least to 2009, put a great deal of effort into helping the church give fresh consideration to what he called the “ecology of the ELCA.” This organic metaphor connected well with another term historically used in the denomination to describe the relationship of its various parts: interdependence. Whereas the subtext of “equality” language often had to do with matters of authority, asserting against congregationalism the importance of the synodical and churchwide institutions, Hanson’s shifting of the conversation toward ecology, sustainability, and interdependence placed the emphasis on relationship.

In 2011, a “Living into the Future Together” (LIFT) taskforce, commissioned by the ELCA Church Council two years earlier to study the ELCA’s ecology in light of changing societal trends, presented its report, which was adopted by the churchwide assembly that August. Recommendations included a simplification of the churchwide organization’s structure, a (qualified) hiatus on bringing new social statements to assembly, and shifting assemblies from a biennial to a triennial cycle. Synods were designated “...­this church’s chief catalysts for mission and outreach,” and the primary role of the churchwide organization, according to a summary of research findings provided in an appendix, should be “to support synods in their local mission efforts, to continue to guide the global mission work of this church and to continue to support a system of lay, lay rostered and clergy leadership development.” Stated the report, in sum, “...this church needs to renew its focus on developing disciples who understand the primary function of the church as engaging the local community for the sake of the Gospel” (emphasis mine).

Does a more modest denomination necessarily mean a less publically engaged church, one that no longer takes seriously its prophetic calling in society? No, it does not. It simply means that our energy and resources shift toward the local, where people get to know each other on a deeper level than they can on a YouTube channel. Stephen Bouman, Executive Director for ELCA Congregational and Synodical Mission and a longtime champion of broad-based community organizing, writes near the end of his book The Mission Table, “Mission initiative needs to return to the grass roots of the church in renewed relationships among local congregations (Lutheran and ecumenical partners) and in rerooting the lives of our congregations and institutions of the church in their communities…. All mission is local” (2013, 97).

Where attachments are loose, trust can and will erode quickly. It doesn’t take much. Every relationship is thicker on the local level. Just a few weeks before the ELCA posted its demonstration video, one of our congregation’s west African members, a junior in high school named Ella, was detained by police as she was walking to work. The officer in question made her stop and put her hands up, demanding to know “where the rest of her gang was,” and then transported her to a Victoria’s Secret store to watch a surveillance video of a robbery that had just taken place. When it quickly became apparent that Ella was not the woman who had committed the theft—the suspect in the video was an African-American female with dyed orange hair—our member was released and permitted to go to work.

On the night I met with Derrick and his wife, I mentioned this incident as an example of how one of our own youth had been impacted by racial profiling in our community. He was aware of it. He also knew that the first person Ella had called when she got off work was her confirmation mentor, and how Ella’s mentor had accompanied her and her mother to the police station the next day to express their outrage. He knew that our senior pastor also had gotten involved, harnessing years of strong relations with the mayor to secure apologies from the chief of police and assurances that proper protocols would be followed in the future, including by the officer who had detained Ella. I could tell Derrick’s empathy again lay with law enforcement. And yet, if he was disappointed with leaders in his own congregation advocating for Ella “against” police, disaffiliating or holding back offerings had not even entered his mind. In his home church, the connections were too rich, the spiritual investment in his family too deep.

The statement the same church made to and on behalf of Ella was concrete and purposeful. If change is called for on a more systemic level, the primary arena of action for us is DuPage United, our Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate. In the same way, across the ELCA, the local congregation, working in concert with its ecumenical and interfaith friends, is the frontline when it comes to doing justice and working for peace. We need a churchwide organization modest enough to be our supply chain, and much more rarely our mouthpiece.

Mark D. Williamson is Associate Pastor of St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wheaton, Illinois.

Works Cited

Bouman, Stephen P. The Mission Table: Renewing Congregation and Community. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2013.

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Living into the Future Together: Renewing the Ecology of the ELCA. Chicago: Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, 2011. Available at: http://liftelca.wordpress.com.

Trexler, Edgar R. Anatomy of a Merger: People, Dynamics, and Decisions that Shaped the ELCA. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991.