To the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and to the voting members of the 1999 synodical assemblies of the ELCA.
Dear Friends:
The Lutheran-Episcopal Drafting Team has prepared the enclosed document in further response to its mandate. We submitted an earlier version on April 9, 1998. Since then the 1998 synodical assemblies have met. The assemblies and their participants were provided with background materials and encouraged to discuss the draft and to make comment. They and hundreds of other individuals from throughout the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have sent us their suggestions, criticisms, and encouragements. We have chronicled, analyzed, and responded to them all. Of course, we cannot hope to have satisfied all correspondents, since much of the advice we received from some contradicted the advice given by others. We have taken the response to be a sign of vitality in the ELCA and a signal of the love and concern members show to this church, The Episcopal Church, and the church at large.
In the April 1998 draft, we supplemented the formal document with three explanatory statements by the Lutheran drafting team members. This time we are not doing so, though each of us is free to state our own cases in the forums of our choice. As was the case with the earlier draft, one of the drafters "does not recommend." His appointment to the committee was in part to assure that objections to the emerging Concordat of Agreement be voiced and heard. He fulfilled that role conscientiously. As was the case previously, the other two of us enthusiastically do recommend this draft as we commend it to you.
Let it also be said with gratitude that the three Episcopal team members were unfailingly attentive, helpful, and generous in the manifestations of their Christian spirit. They, too, are filled with hope that this draft will make its contribution to communion between our two bodies, as they set out responsibly to represent Episcopal concerns.
As chair of the drafting team, to whom the originals of most correspondence were sent, I want to take the liberty of making one point clear, since it has much to do with the framing of this document. "Why do you not talk more about our 'common mission' and less about 'episcopate?'" was the question of many who then went on to discuss the episcopate at length. We tried to stay within the structure of the original Concordat of Agreement, as proposed in 1997, in part because The Episcopal Church has already approved it. We believe it succinctly sets forth the rationale and hope for "common mission," and that the theme will best be worked out in the life of two bodies in communion with each other. We addressed the episcopate because we were charged to do so and because the correspondents did.
One question raised by many was this: was the drafting committee given and did it accept a narrower mandate than that approved by the Churchwide Assembly in 1997 and by the authorizing Church Council action. Why, it was asked, did we deal with "the historic episcopate" as integral to communion with The Episcopal Church? Why, we were asked, did we not show more imagination and come up with a plan that would allow for such communion without the episcopate? Every alternate proposal to this one included some such plan, and none was or could be acceptable to the Episcopalians.
The charge to us was not a narrowing of the assignment but a mere statement of fact, a faithful summary taken from decades of Lutheran-Episcopal dialogue. Our conversations with our three imaginative and accommodating Episcopal colleagues made clear that the critics were misinterpreting the situation. Not once in this year of intense work or in our consulting of the records of antecedent conversations through the years did we find a single Episcopal thinker who envisioned their departing from the Anglican Communion by exchanging ministries apart from the episcopate. We hope we have made the case for the integrity of our patterns of the ministry of Word and Sacrament within that context.
Our churches made a commitment in the 1982 interim eucharistic sharing agreement to address the matters defined in the Concordat of Agreement, which was first presented for study in 1991 and which came before our 1997 assemblies for action. That Concordat of Agreement was approved by The Episcopal Church but, as you recall, it fell a half dozen votes short of passage by a two- thirds margin in the ELCA Churchwide Assembly. The latest draft of "Called to Common Mission: A Lutheran Proposal for a Revision of the Concordat of Agreement" is intended to fulfill the commitment made by the ELCA's predecessor church bodies in the 1982 action.
"Called to Common Mission" opens the way for us to envision an exchange of ministries in the service of our "common mission." This draft foresees a great expansion and deepening of that mission by churches in communion.
In Christ,
Martin E. Marty
Chair of the Drafting Team