ELCA Presiding Bishop Sums up a Very Busy Week

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Referring to a current movie title, "Six Days and Seven Nights," the Rev. H. George Anderson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told the ELCA Church Council about his experiences the week of Nov. 9-15. His report included information from meetings with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC) and Lutheran World Federation (LWF).
The Church Council is the ELCA's board of directors and serves as the legislative authority of the church between meetings of the ELCA's Churchwide Assembly. The council is meeting here Nov. 13-16. Assemblies are held every other year; the next is August 16-22 in Denver.
Anderson met with other members of the Committee for Lutheran Cooperation on Nov. 9. That committee includes six ELCA leaders and their LCMS counterparts.
The bishop told the council it will see a recommendation to appoint a team of ELCA members to begin theological conversations with the LCMS. He added the LCMS leaders were clear that these would not be "church union talks."
Anderson was an ELCA delegate to the NCC's General Assembly, Nov. 11- 13. He told the council that an independent report commissioned by the = NCC "said the finance and human resource infrastructure (of the NCC) is broken."
Much of the discussion on how to fix the infrastructure became centered in the job performance of the NCC's General Secretary, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell. The need to fill key positions in the organization came into a scheduling conflict with the end of Campbell's term. The = NCC's assembly decided to extend Campbell's term one year while maintaining some flexibility for determining when a different person would become General Secretary.
Anderson flew to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend an executive committee meeting of the LWF Council, Nov. 14-15. He said he had hoped this meeting would decide when the LWF and the Vatican would formally sign a "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification" which the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches approved in June.
What Anderson termed "fax-to-fax diplomacy" between Geneva and Rome "rivaled this past week only by negotiations between Iraq and the United Nations" failed to yield a clear agreement between the two churches.=20 "Don't expect any fast breaking news on that," he added.
After an intercontinental flight back to Chicago, Anderson told the ELCA Church Council on Nov. 15 he was encouraged by the church's financial situation. "Our challenge is to use this bounty wisely," he said.
Referring to reports of an economic "rural crisis" and a recommendation to establish a rural desk within the church structure, Anderson said, "I'm wondering if we need to think of other ways to respond." In the City for Good, Lutheran Disaster Response and Leaders = for Mission are other ELCA programs that could use additional support, he added.
"It's a good time to be the church," Anderson concluded his report, "maybe even good enough to make a movie about it."
In a question and answer period, council member Ida Marie Hakkarinen of Greenbelt, Md., told the bishop that she has been asked for the ELCA's position on genetic experimentation, but she could not provide an answer.
The Rev. Charles S. Miller, executive director of the ELCA Division for Church in Society, presented the 37 council members and 11 advisors with a new book the division commissioned, "Genetic Testing and Screening,"=

which outlines a basic Lutheran ethic on genetic engineering.

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