GRACE OR QUOTA?

By Dr. Albert P Stauderman

The Joint Commission for a New Lutheran Church (JCLU) became the architects for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Faced with a decision between Law and Gospel, they chose the Law. They proposed a quota system intended to insure righteousness in every elective process in the ELCA. But "if righteousness comes by the Law, then Christ has died in vain."

As written into the governing documents of the ELCA, every elective body from top to bottom must be composed of men and women in equal numbers; 40 per cent clergy and 60 per cent laity; and 10 per cent of these must be people of color or of a language other than English. Besides being cumbersome, these provisions do not reflect the actual com position of the ELCA membership. They tilt the balance in favor of women and of racial and linguistic minorities. Discriminated against most are white male clergy.

This arrangement became firmly entrenched into our church because the original Joint Commission on Lutheran Unity (JCLU) was deliberately "stacked" in favor of minorities. Every election under the system has added to this imbalance. Maybe this is what God wants for His church, but it's hard to find any justification for it in the Scriptures Of in the Lutheran confessions!

Quotas Reflect on My Faith

I am averse to quotas because they are a reflection on my Christian faith. As a Christian, I should be motivated by grace to act out of love, a love that encompasses all people regardless of sex, race or ethnic origin. The Lord told Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you."

Quotas, however, tell me that love is inadequate! Yet the history of our church in the western hemisphere indicates that the love of Christ docs control Lutherans in their relationships. Already from the 17th century onward, Dutch pastors in the Virgin Islands went out into the fields to minister to slaves and to bring them the Gospel. Long before there was an ELCA, Lutherans reached out to Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and people from the Orient. "Multi-cultural ministry" is not a new concept!

The fact remains that our church is overwhelmingly of northern European background. In the American melting pot, congregations were gradually assimilated into an English-speaking culture. While some continued to serve specific ethnic groups, the trend has been away from isolation by language or national origin and towards a unified church. While there were once many German-, Norwegian-, Swedish-, Danish-, Finnish-, Slovak-, Wendish-and Icelandic-Lutheran designations, these distinctions have largely vanished. We have emphasized the "Lutheran" and dropped the hyphenations.

Of course we have fallen short. Old prejudices arc hard to overcome. Some may still feel that God speaks only German or Norwegian. We need always to repent and remind ourselves of the command to make disciples of all people. But we can reach out only with love and the Gospel, because the Law never empowers us toward this goal.

In returning these divisive elements to the church by adding distinctions between the sexes and between clergy and laity, the ELCA has contributed to a spirit of factionalism. The intentions may have been good, but the result has been disastrous.

Quotas at Work

In an apparent effort to justify the large minority percentage on the church's staff and elective boards, the first convention in 1988 adopted a resolution urging that within ten years, 10 per cent of the church's membership be minority persons. Six years later, it appears that this goal may hemorceasily achieved by adecline in majority memberships than by again of minorities. Membershipof persons ofcoloror of those using a language other than English has remained below two per cent. But total church membership has continued to slip. Perhaps more significantly, congregations and synods have retained more of their income for local purposes, requiring drastic cutbacks in churchwidc programs.

The emphasis on minorities has produced some alarming byproducts.

The traditional development of mission congregations to preserve the church relationship of those who move to new communities has slowed to a crawl. For many years in the life of the ELCA's predecessor churches, establishment of such missions was the chief method of retaining or increasing church membership. Now mission establishment is disproportionately directed toward "minority" ministries which grow slowly. Instead of adding to "inclusiveness," this seems to be a way of excluding ùbut not replacingùthe historic constituency of the church.

Frustrating Change

Leaders of the church have been frustrated and handicapped by the quota system and its problems. According to the frank and unrefuted account given by Edgar R. Trexler in his Anatomy of a Merger, the seeds for the quota system were sown in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee for Lutheran Unity (CLU). There, demands from a Black or "trans-cultural" pressure group were voiced by Dr. Will Hertzfeld of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churchesùa predecessor to the ELCA.

This disconcerted the meeting, since approaches from other outside bodies had been rejected. But before the meeting was over, the CLU had wearily agreed to forming the 70 member JCLU of which one-sixth (16.6 per cent) would be "minorities". In this group of three church bodies, where less than two per cent of the membership was classed as "minority", the imbalance was thus already established.

Protests were brushed aside. An informal poll taken by church periodicals showed that 60 per cent of the church members who responded were opposed to the quota system. But the JCLU, as offspring of the system, refused to budge. Opposition continued right up to the simultaneous meetings of the three church bodies in August, 1986. At that time each church hesitated to lake any action that might derail the merger. But within three years after the formation of the ELCA, more than 20 of its 65 synods asked that quotas be reconsidered.

Discontent reached to the pointùat the fifth anniversary Assembly of the ELCA at Orlando in 1993ùthat a resolution was adopted instructing the ELCA's Church Council to search for alternatives to quotas and to report to the 1995 Assembly.

Fortunately, the church is a living and moving entity. Nothing stays the same forever. Structural realignments have already been made, although largely to adjust to the reduced income. But at the time of the ELCA's organization, Dr. David Preus, president of the predecessor American Lutheran Church predicted that a major reorganization would be needed within 10 years.

Two years later, Dr. James Crumley, former president of the merging Lutheran Church in America, blasted quotas. He said, "The system is not serving us well, and should be discontinued." Although compelled by his position to support the system, ELCA Bishop Chilstrom has called quotas "a time-bound commitment on the part of the church. I would hope that we can move to a place where we do not need them any more."

Some of us feel that we never needed them, and that we should promptly give the church back to the Holy Spirit, whose guidance might very well prove more effective than the legalism of quotas.

* Dr. Stauderman is the distinguished former editor of The Lutheran, the official publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church in America, and now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He lives in Singer island, FL.