A radical ELCA Lutheran women’s retreat you will want to avoid…

(The following article was written last year by Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.)

Luther Crest Bible Camp in Alexandria, Minnesota, is a ministry of the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is putting on a women’s retreat with “bi-furious” Pastor Elle Dowd, see “their” description below. Dowd serves on the Clergy Advocacy Board for abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Is it any wonder the ELCA is shrinking in membership? To promote this kind of heresy and disguise it as a Christian retreat reminds me of what the Bible says about Satan, he “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

In Christ,
Pastor Tom Brock


From Dowd’s website: “Elle Dowd (she/they) is a bi-furious pastor who preaches, writes and teaches about God’s desire to liberate us from the things we use to oppress each other: cis-heterosexism, racism, ableism, queerphobia, colonialism, misogyny, childism, capitalism and white supremacy.

She believes we must deconstruct the harmful systems infecting the Christian Church and other American institutions, that a queer/femme interpretation of scripture is at the center of grace, and all bodies – including yours – are beautifully and wonderfully made.”

From Luther Crest retreat description: “Elle Dowd is a bi-furious recent graduate of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, a current PhD student at the Chicago Theological Seminary, the campus minister of South Loop Campus Ministry , and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Elle has pieces of their heart in Sierra Leone, where their two children were born, and in St. Louis where they learned from the radical, queer, Black leadership during the Ferguson Uprising.

She was formerly a co-conspirator with the movement to #decolonizeLutheranism and currently serves as a board member of the Euro-Descent Lutheran Association for Racial Justice, does community organizing in her city as a board member of SOUL, serves on the Clergy Advocacy Board for Planned Parenthood, writes regularly as part of the vision team for the Disrupt Worship Project, and facilitates workshops in both secular conferences and Christian spaces. In 2021 she published a book with Broadleaf, Baptized in Teargas, about her conversion from a white moderate to an abolitionist is available now in print, e-book, or audiobook.

To get in touch with Elle and to keep up with updates, you can visit their website www.elledowd.com , and subscribe to their newsletter.”