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(The following article was written by Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.)
In the below worship service led by a transgender pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, this man who presents himself as woman says "The grace of Jesus the Christ, the love of God the Creator, and the communion of the queer-making Spirit be with you all." The creed in this service states "I believe in Jesus Christ, Sophia, the Word". "Sophia" is a feminine image for God that feminists use to worship the "Divine Feminine." Along the same line, God is referred to in the service as "The Divine Seamstress". This is the strange new world of the ELCA. One cannot say that the extremes of the below service are not shared by the ELCA's national leadership. ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton has made two gay pride videos and at the ELCA's Youth Gathering an 11-year-old boy who thinks he is a girl was put on stage to promote transgenderism to 31,000 Lutheran teens. At the installation of the ELCA's first transgender bishop, Bishop Eaton prayed to God as "Parent, Child and Holy Breath" and as "Rain, Estuary, and Sea". I hear from people periodically who say they stay in their ELCA congregation because they have been members so long and they would have to leave their friends. But sometimes Jesus says to leave and "shake the dust off your feet". I believe that time is now for Bible-believing Christians who are still in the ELCA and supporting it with their offering dollars and their presence. Our first allegiance is to Jesus, not to our friends nor to our denomination. Sincerely in Christ, Pastor Tom Brock
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'National Day of Mourning' on Thanksgiving is on ELCA Synod's 'Notable events and observances'11/24/2021 The ELCA's Grand Canyon Synod has a page on their website titled "Prompts for Prayers of Intercession: November 21, 2021." On this page, under "Other notable events and observances" was the listing "National Day of Mourning (November 25th)." See here or below. "The National Day of Mourning began in 1970 as a form of protest to the 350th anniversary celebration of the arrival of the Pilgrims." (See here) Also listed is "Transgender Day of Rememberance (November 20th)." 
The ELCA's South-Central Synod of Wisconsin has a new "Assistant to the Bishop for Generosity." Rev. Peter Beeson, formally Rev. Rose Beeson (see here), is joining the synod staff.
This is the third known transgender person to be placed in a leadership position in the ELCA this year. The Sierra Pacific Synod of the ELCA elected transgender pastor Megan Rohrer bishop of their synod in May, 2021 (see here) and the East Central Synod of Wisconsin of the ELCA installed pastor Asher O'Callaghan as associate to the bishop, also in May . (See here) Theological liberals control the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. If you believe God's Word, it is time to get out of this denomination. 
(The following article was written by Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.)
The below article is tragic. Instead of helping young people with same-sex attraction and gender confusion see the light, they are helping them get comfortable in the darkness. If you or someone you know has same-sex attraction, go to restoredhopenetwork.org and you will see a list of ministries around the country that help people with same-sex attraction deal with it in a Biblical way. But you won’t see any of these groups highlighted by the ELCA, because Living Lutheran bans this view in its magazine. I should know, I am part of a such a group called “One by One” which inquired about buying advertising space and were not allowed because, we were told, our view is not congruent with more recent decisions of the ELCA. This in spite of the fact that the 2009 ELCA decision on homosexuality assured conservatives that their viewpoint would also be allowed in the denomination. But it is not allowed in the ELCA’s national magazine. Sincerely in Christ, Pastor Tom Brock (See article here.)
Below is an example of the constant message the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is putting out in their publications and social media pages.
This post comes from a child (who claims to be transgender.) 
(The following article was written by Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.)
Below is a glowing article from the website of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America about the denomination's recently elected first transgender bishop. This may be the first transgender bishop of any denomination anywhere as the ELCA leads the way in embracing new sexualities. The ELCA has also had two practicing homosexual bishops, one of which retired as bishop and is now an ELCA seminary president. If you read the below article you will notice the transgender bishop is not referred to as "she" but as "they." This is the bizarre, new world of a denomination that has abandoned biblical sexuality and has embraced a secular world-view. Sincerely in Christ, Pastor Tom Brock (See article here) Last week a transgender person was elected to be bishop of an ELCA synod. This week a transgender person was installed as an associate to the bishop of an ELCA synod. This happened in two different synods of the ELCA. (See below or here) (Read about new transgender ELCA bishop here) I have to believe that the people remaining in the ELCA do not really care what God says in His Word. 
On May 8, 2021, the Sierra Pacific Synod of the ELCA elected transgender pastor Megan Rohrer bishop of their synod.
Thrilled with the news, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued a press release with posts on their website, Facebook page and their magazine Living Lutheran announcing the historic action of the ELCA's "first openly transgender bishop..." (See below) The news has been picked up by many national news outlets including this one from NPR. The ELCA mocks God. They mock God's Word. They lead others astray and they twist the Truth. The ELCA:
I can no longer have any respect for anyone who remains in the ELCA. That includes churches that remain too, from the very smallest to the biggest (the ELCA's Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines and Nazareth Lutheran in Cedar Falls, to name a few). Shame on you for staying in a denomination that is not faithful to Scripture but is leading people into sin and away from Jesus. Your participation is your shame and you have no excuse. You can not justify being part of this evil, faith-destroying denomination. (See the new release the ELCA published where they brag "Rohrer is the first transgender bishop in the ELCA" here) 
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has elected a transgender individual to be bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod. It is a move that should be seen as a complete slap in the face to God.
With today's election, this ELCA California synod makes Megan Rohrer the first transgender person elected as bishop by the ELCA, and quite possibly the first transgender bishop in the United States. (See additional information about Rev. Rohrer on Exposing the ELCA here) The ELCA is thumbing its nose at God, His Word and Truth and effectively showing that they are part of the uber left and its rejection of Christianity (read about transgenderism here). Rev. Megan Rohrer's Twitter page reflects the recent vote and lists preferred pronouns as "they/he." How can God-fearing, Bible-believing individuals remain in the ELCA? How can churches remain? If you are surprised by this ELCA action, take some time to look into what the ELCA has been doing, saying and teaching that is documented on this website. 
The below tweet is from the mother of a young transgender child who has been paraded around by the ELCA.
Below is the account of an orthodox, Bible-believing seminary student who attended the ELCA's United Lutheran Seminary. We conversed over email at couple years ago and then again last week. What follows is Joseph's letter to me and to everyone reading, about his experience attending the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seminary.
Dan, At the time of our correspondence, I was unsure of what direction my vocation was going to take so I did not want to divulge too much information about what I was encountering at seminary, for fear of retaliation from the so-called “powers that be.“ I use quotations because the people who are in charge of the ELCA are not actually the ones who are running the show. But I’ll get to that in a moment. The reason why I am writing today is because I feel that my personal story and experience might be of some benefit to your readers. First and foremost, I must be transparent in stating that I have since left seminary and Lutheranism altogether and returned to the Catholic Church of my roots. Recognizing that there are many Lutherans of a more traditional practice who might be skeptical of Roman Catholic theology, I want to emphasize the fact that we have far more in common with one another than those same traditional Lutherans might have with ELCA Lutherans, and the proof is in the proverbial pudding. Putting all theological differences and minutiae aside, I think I can say with certainty that traditional Lutherans and traditional Catholics are at least mutually faithful to the basic tenets of Christ’s teachings. With that said, I would like to share a little bit of what I experienced—and what I still observe from social media posts and the ongoing firsthand accounts of friends who are ELCA clergy—friends who I cherish. They are not the intended target of this expose. It has been said, ad nauseam I might add, that the ELCA is the “whitest denomination in America.” This is a common phrase uttered by some of the loudest, most bloviating “pastors” in the ELCA. Statistically speaking this may very well be the case. But what I find most interesting about that is the fact that the individuals who are so quick to utter this phrase are the same individuals who initiate every attempt at dialogue with the preemptive notion that if you’re white, you have an obligation to “listen” and not speak and this is actually done as a means of shutting down the dialogue before it can even begin. So if the denomination is 99%+ white, what they’re saying is that only they, the small 1%—many of whom are also white, interestingly enough— should be allowed to speak. This is neither dialogue nor an attempt at equality; it is a hostage situation. And in no venue was this made clearer than in the seminary classroom. I had a professor of New Testament studies who started the semester right out of the gate by informing the class that if you were a white, straight, “cisgender” male, you had an obligation to stay quiet and allow other people to speak before you. Understandably this put a number of us in the position of feeling like we were paying for classes that we were being discouraged from participating in. So I took the professor’s advice and decided not to say a word in class. As the semester went on, that professor started to become passive-aggressively antagonistic toward me by calling on me at random times to contribute—usually when she knew that my opinion on the topic du jour would likely lead me to say something that the “wokesters” in the class would pounce on. I chose not to give her what she was looking for, as there is no winning on their idealistic playing field, and of course she decided to dock participation points from my grade. This same professor--and others--would dock points if you referenced God as "Father." When I explained that God as my Father was the only way I knew how to encounter Him, I was told "it's not all about you." At that time, I was still writing for a Catholic blog and I wrote a critique that was aimed at dispelling all of the nonsensical, heretical revisionist history being spewed out in her class. The fact that I wrote for this website was not, to my knowledge, known to my classmates at the time. Little did I know that the “Google sleuths” were hard at work trying to dig up material to use against me. And they succeeded, though I must say that I was not exactly hiding anything as it was all public information in plain sight. This led to almost weekly summonses to the Dean’s office where my guidance counselor and this same professor would be waiting to interrogate me and threats would be made to “call my candidacy committee.” In other words, my orthodoxy was being used against me. During one rather bizarre exchange, I was leaving class one afternoon and was blindsided by a seminarian who proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs, crying maniacally with snot bubbles and an Oscar-worthy act, calling me a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, an imperialist, a supremacist and every other “-ist” imaginable because she had come across an article I had written in defense of Western Civilization--I was, after all, a history major during undergrad. This was in a crowded hallway in front of my peers. This was supposed to be graduate school. I was repeatedly threatened by other professors, many of whom I genuinely believe felt pressured to enforce and live up to the standards set by the loudest and most unhinged seminarians and pastors, that they were going to contact my candidacy committee about things that I wrote in assignments or said in class. I was told on a number of occasions that fellow seminarians did not “feel safe“ being in the same building as me because I identified as pro-life. I was told that I was anti-woman and unchristian for opposing abortion on the unthinkable grounds that all human life is sacred. A self-described “abortion doula” said that she did not feel her kids were safe around me because I was a homophobe and micro-aggressive mansplainer. When it was learned that I had attended Latin Mass in my early 20's at the private chapel of Mel Gibson, I was branded a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. When that young high school student, Nick Sandmann, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March for Life while an activist banged a drum in his face, I applauded him in class for maintaining a dignified composure. I was branded a “colonizer” and anti-Native American for that. In my Congregational Education (I think that was the title) course, I gave a presentation in class on Martin Luther‘s devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, and I was told that I was trying to infuse patriarchal Catholicism into the seminary environment. I’m not really sure how that conclusion was reached based on the presentation I gave but then again logic and reason were probably considered “white supremacist“ on campus. Simply using the word “civility“ was considered racist. If that does not exemplify the soft bigotry of low expectations, I don’t know what does. And I suppose the part that amuses me the most is the fact that throughout this entire fiasco, my mentor and closest advisor on campus was a black Baptist professor—who I am still close with today—who was, at every stage of the game, flabbergasted by the charges lobbed against me. Of course the “wokesters” would call me racist for mentioning that, because in their world everything that they say is racist is de facto racist but this brings me back to my main point which is that the hierarchy of the ELCA, flawed as they may be theologically, is being held hostage. They no longer have any power because the small minority of individuals who openly brag about the fact that they are looking to dismantle everything, including orthodox theology, controls the narrative. If the presiding Bishop or other bishops say anything that the “wokesters” disagree with, they are swarmed upon and branded every negative thing under the sun. If those same bishops say nothing on an issue, they are charged with being complicit in bureaucratic and systemic white supremacy. So either way, the well-meaning bishops lose and the “wokesters” win at their own rigged game. By appealing to the court of secular public opinion, this small minority of heretical activist "pastors" are actively destroying the church from within and with great success. During my time as a vicar at a rather conservative Long Island parish, I was repeatedly told that the needs of my parishioners, many of them law enforcement officers and firefighters, didn’t matter because they were part of the “systemic white oppressiveness” that the “wokesters” were trying to dismantle. It was my obligation, they would say, to “challenge” them and oppose their “racism.” I never saw any racism at this parish. I simply saw people who loved God and loved their neighbors. This was a parish that routinely filled the church for all three Sunday services—unlike the first parish I was initially assigned to in Philadelphia where we averaged around 11 people for the one service they held every Sunday, but hey, at least they were “woke” and “relevant.” I lasted for three weeks at that parish until a parishioner said he would no longer attend the parish if I was there because he saw something I wrote on social media about the possible connection between mental illness and gender dysphoria. No conversation took place about it, I was simply told that I needed to find a new placement because this individual “didn’t feel safe” around me. I never realized what a menacing, imposing individual I was. Nevertheless, the fact that the parish that is attracting hundreds of people every Sunday with their orthodoxy is viewed as a threat to these individuals—and the fact that this same parish has to largely insulate itself from the rest of the ELCA for fear of retaliation—is all you need to know about who is running the show. Students who lean conservative or are at least moderate tend to stay silent and keep their heads down, which is shameful because these individuals are paying for the same education as everyone else and deserve to be able to participate in their own pastoral formation just like everyone else. The fact that they have to be afraid that anything they say which might be perceived as "offensive" (which in almost every case means they're upholding orthodox Christian teaching) is a disgrace. I know that the "woke" individuals read your blog, Dan, because it serves as conversational fodder fairly often on campus so I'm sure if any of my former classmates or their crony gurus read this, they'll have all kinds of snarky responses and defenses for their actions. They'll say I'm bitter and jaded and racist and all kinds of other things, but the fact is that they engage in deflection at every turn because they know exactly what they're doing. They are actively destroying the ELCA from within and they don't even try to hide it. These narcissistic activists are perfectly fine with seeing 3 million baptized Lutherans without a church in order to push their narrow-minded, heretical agenda of fabricating a Church of Christ without Christ, to reference Flannery O'Connor. They look to burn it all down yet they offer nothing of substance to replace it with, other than idealistic pipe dreams of egalitarian utopianism and yet, in reality, what they're really trying to do is seize power in order to become the oppressors that they seem to see in everyone else. They don't want equality; they simply want to control the narrative. I could go on and on but these are some of the highlights from my year at ULS. Best Wishes, Joseph M. Di Marius Among the many problems (see here) with the so called "Equality Act," is that "the Equality Act offers few protections for religious organizations and institutions that hold to traditional views of marriage and oppose things like gender reassignment surgeries." (See here) The ELCA understands this problem but are fulling endorsing the "Equality Act" anyway.  http://support.elca.org/site/MessageViewer;jsessionid=00000000.app20021a?em_id=5600.0&dlv_id=8893¤t=true&em_id=5600.0&NONCE_TOKEN=F17930CBA58EA4196111EBD9A7087B27  (The following article was written by Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.) Bishop Laurie Larson Caesar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Oregon Synod has joined with ELCA Head Bishop Elizabeth Eaton to promote the acceptance of transgenderism. To see Bishop Caesar perform a "marriage" of two homosexual men, click here: https://youtu.be/KKTZBExjWqk I will say once again, this is not my grandma's Lutheran church. Neither is it the church of Martin Luther. And it is certainly not a church based on the Bible. It has become the church of "anything goes." In Jesus our Savior, Pastor Tom Brock 
Transgenderism normalized and celebrated by the ELCA in front of 30,000 teenagers. (read more about it here)
Twisting and rewriting God's Word is Satan's specialty. That is what comes to mind when we read the following Facebook post by ELCA pastor Clint Schnekloth. Rev. Schnekloth recently posted a transgender version of the Lord's Prayer. There is no God-honoring reason for you or your church to remain in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar. - Proverbs 30:5-6. Rev. Schnekloth has been frequently featured on Exposing the ELCA for his blasphemous, unBiblical and radical statements. (See here) --- Your support of Exposing the ELCA helps us continue our ministry. Gifts can be given by credit card, or PayPal at www.paypal.com/paypalme/exposingtheelca. If you'd like to give by check send me a message (here) for more information. |
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 Dan Skogen
Former ELCA seminary student and former ELCA member who is fed up with the ELCA's consistent mockery of God's Word. If you have been helped and blessed by Exposing the ELCA's ministry, please help us continue to proclaim the truth of God's Word to ELCA members who need to hear it.
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Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. - Ephesians 5:11
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