Ethiopian Lutheran church calls on ELCA to repent

 The Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (EECMY) has warned the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) that its decision to bless homosexual relationships and allow practising homosexuals into the clergy threatens to disrupt long-standing cooperation between the two churches. In a letter addressed to Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson of the ELCA, the EECMY reiterated its position that Scripture allows for marriage between man and woman only, and called upon the ELCA to overturn the results of its 2009 Churchwide Assembly for the sake of international Lutheran unity.

Delegates to the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus Council of the Church.

Lutheran Church–Canada president, Rev. Dr. Robert Bugbee, who also serves as vice-chairman of the International Lutheran Council (ILC), noted that the Ethiopian church’s situation is not uncommon. “African Lutherans keep registering their alarm with the drift away from Scripture and the Confessions they see in many segments of western Lutheranism. A number of them—including Mekane Yesus—have sought working agreements with the Missouri Synod, or have made inquiries with the ILC, which continues to monitor the situation. In many cases, the churches making the decisions the Africans find so troubling are the ones who first brought the Gospel to their people long ago, and so their relationships are deep and of long standing.”

The letter follows on the heels of the EECMY’s sixth Council of the Church during which the EECMY condemned recent decisions by the ELCA and other church bodies to abandon the Church’s historic definition of marriage. At that time, the EECMY called for a year of prayer to give these church bodies time to repent and return to an orthodox view of marriage before taking more drastic measures. The ELCA’s response to the EECMY’s letter will be taken into consideration at its seventh Council of the Church, at which time the EECMY has promised to take “appropriate actions.”

The letter to Bishop Hanson also noted the historic ties between the ELCA and the EECMY, praising the legacies of Lutherans who were instrumental in the growth and development of the Ethiopian church. It called on the ELCA to honour these forbears and their commitment to the Word of God by repenting of its recent actions and submitting to the Bible’s teachings on marriage.

With 5.2 million members, the EECMY is the largest Lutheran church in Africa. Earlier, three presidents emeriti of the EECMY had expressed their concerns to the ELCA over its 2009 Churchwide Assembly vote, calling the actions “a defiant departure from the Biblical truth and from our global Evangelical Lutheran tradition.”

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