Are Lutherans generally more liberal than Methodists? nt

[raccoon]

[patrice]

1. Ever since I started becoming more active for Social and Economic Justice,

over 30 years ago, some of the most consistently progressive people I have met have been Methodists.

(Followed by Unitarians, Catholics, and Buddhists.)

P.S. Of course, I don't ask everyone, but you do get to know people as you work together on whatever project. And that doesn't mention Quakers, who are the MOST progressive of all, but also a very small minority.

[tanyev]

2. WELS, LCMS, or ELCA?

The first two, no, absolutely not.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

The few methodists I've met have been pretty liberal.

NT.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. Dupe, delete

NT.

[JerseygirlCT]

4. You can't generalize with either

There are members in both churches that run the gamut.

ECLA Lutherans tend toward the more liberal end of the scale, for instance (though w/in the denomination there's still lots of variety), but Missouri or Wisconsin synod??? Yikes! Quite NOT liberal.

I'm afraid it's one of the situations where it must be taken person by person. A good idea in any event.

[CatholicEdHead]

5. Exactly, the ELCA is about the only liberal Lutheran group out there

Of course more and more liberal Catholics are being slowly forced out of the Church as ultra-conservative bishops have narrowed the definition so liberal Catholics are not part of the "faithful" (e.g. disagree with even one thing).

[JerseygirlCT]

6. LOL, I probably just left before they kicked me out the door. nt

[LiberalFighter]

8. And members of a church in one state might be more liberal

than a church of the same Synod in a different state.

[JerseygirlCT]

9. Parish to parish, even.

Person to person in a pew, even.

Generalizations will only take it so far with most of the mainstream churches.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. There are conservatives and liberals in both denominations

and several subvarieties. As a preacher's kid, I can explain what's happening with the Lutherans, even though I now identify as an Episcopalian.

As a poster above has mentioned, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELC) and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) are theologically and socially very conservative, almost high-church fundamentalists. By the way, "Wisconsin" and "Missouri" in these cases refer not to where the present-day churches are located but where the synods were founded. I've seen an LCMS church in Hawaii.

The ELCA is a union of several synods that were originally founded by Scandinavian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, each holding services in its own language. As the ties to Old Country weakened and everyone started holding most of their services in English, a series of mergers began, until there were two major mainstream Lutheran bodies, the LCA (Lutheran Church in America) and the ALC (American Lutheran Church). Sort of the like the Judean People's Liberation Front...

Anyway, some time during the 1980s, there was an upheaval in the Missouri Synod, which tried to censure some of its seminary professors for teaching that the Bible isn't literally true. These professors and sympathetic students formed their own unofficial seminary. Eventually, individual congregations lined up on the side of either the liberals or the conservatives.

Eventually (I'm not sure of the exact year), the dissident Missouri Synod liberals joined up with the LCA and the ALC to form the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

In addition to the Big Three, there are smaller Lutheran groups, all fundamentalist. In general then, an ELCA church is likely to be on the more liberal side, but any of the others are going to range from conservative to so conservative you can hardly believe it.

[trotsky]

10. Growing up Lutheran...

in an LCA church that later became ELCA, you've got the details nailed there Lydia.

Those Wisconsin and Missouri Synod Lutherans are scary. This very own forum's ultra-theological-conservative Zebedeo attends a church that belongs to one of them, but he won't say which.

[tanyev]

11. I am Missouri Synod and I wouldn't use the word scary.

I have had more and more reservations over the past few years, but so far I've had the good fortune to belong to congregations that weren't extreme and where the pastor was careful to keep politics out of the pulpit. However, I was very disturbed when I found out last summer that our synodical convention opened up with a videotaped welcome from George W. Bush. I've never heard of such a thing in this synod before. In May I will finish up a volunteer commitment I made and then my husband and I are going to start looking for an ELCA church.