For Christians who hold fast to the Word as sufficient and infallible for faith and practice, it may be easy to brush aside the “libs in the churches” with rainbow flags and vociferous politics. It may be tempting to outright ignore them as mere pagans wearing a Christian skin-suit (1), trying to hang onto some vestige of Christian tradition while denying its power. In some instances, it’s good to ignore unbelievers who are “playing make-believe” with the church, but it must not always be the response, and there is at least one major reason why.
Your church could be next.
Serious Christians know that Jesus is the only way. No amount of political action or virtue signaling, whether towards the right or the left, will wash away guilt and garner new life from God. But that doesn’t seem to stop the progressives in American churches. Progressives do get one thing right: their beliefs and actions often align. They often say what they mean and mean what they say. Even if what they believe is taking them to hell, they are often consistent in their beliefs.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is one of these liberal, mainline denominations. They are the largest Lutheran body in the United States and recently held their Churchwide Assembly, a meeting that occurs every three years.
The ELCA has increasingly drawn scrutiny for its theological positions and practices, as they’ve diverged sharply from historic Christian orthodoxy. But it’s worth noting that they’ve departed by acting on their convictions. While I am certainly not praising unbelief or the rejection of basic biblical truth, I am pointing out that those who seek to walk with the Lord and believe His word often fail to uphold even the basics when the time of testing comes.
The ELCA’s Public Witness: Still a Cause for Concern
The ELCA’s triennial assembly showcased all the usual topics seen from churches that fly the rainbow flag. Gender and neighbor justice, patriarchy, world hunger, sexism, and racism all got top billing. The ELCA continues to focus more on current ‘social sins’ than biblical sins. They appear to be nothing more than a left-wing political rally masquerading as a Christian convention. Long gone are the days of any sort of biblical debate or rigor on the nature of Christ, how someone is redeemed, or the value of the Bible.
The topic of female ordination has long been decided in the ELCA. Casting aside clear scriptures like 1 Timothy 2, 3, and 1 Corinthians 11 in favor of more “modern understandings” of the Bible. They have moved the needle to “vital” issues like racism and patriarchy within Western culture, feeling that these are what need to be fixed in the world. At this most recent assembly, one female “pastor” delivered an impassioned address calling for a “world free of pride, war, and injustices.” She said, “I pray for a world where we lay down our pride and pick up our neighbor’s burdens and walk together towards the mountain of the Lord.” She then said, “Am I the only one?” and was met with a lackluster response of “no.”
It’s profoundly strange to call for prayer against pride when one of the chief cornerstones of the ELCA is support for Pride Month and all manner of sexual deviancy found in the LGBT multitude. How are other Christians, Lutheran or otherwise, supposed to take this seriously?
A Worse Atrocity
The second example of their ongoing apostasy was a video clip from the assembly played live during one of their sessions. The denomination’s in-house video states, “We find these biblical texts say things about women and girls that we now recognize as harmful.” As this younger female talks into the camera, a list of Bible verses scrolls past her on the right side of the frame. She glances at them and winces, almost, just almost like she’s parodying liberal Christianity, but sadly, isn’t.
The “harmful” texts?
Genesis 3:16, 1 Corinthians 11:3–16, and 1 Timothy 2:15. The ELCA claims that the Bible is not really inspired by God and contains errors that must be corrected – but, not just correct, but possess the power and audacity to identify them as “harmful.” For Christians who affirm the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16-17), such a position undermines the very foundation of the Christian faith. If God’s Word is subject to revision based on cultural norms, nothing in the Bible is safe from modern sensibilities.
A Rejection of Scriptural Authority
This cannot be stressed enough; she outright states, “Many Biblical texts say things about women and girls that we now recognize as harmful.” Notice that there is no nuance or apology, nothing about a “misunderstanding,” *but a simple, “We do not like these Bible passages about women, and therefore we reject them.” It’s ironic that at the very end of the brief video, the Bible that was sitting in front of her is handed to someone off-screen as if to say, “We don’t need this anymore.”
This conviction of rejecting God’s word is one born out of years of compromise with the culture, but it is a conviction they firmly stand on. Indeed, it is a fool’s errand to flatly reject God’s word, but at least they are consistent in doing so! This is something evangelical Christians must do too – not reject God’s word, but rather stand on conviction. Biblical conviction and action must reign in our hearts and work out in the hands of Christians who love the Lord and His word.
Consider Genesis 3:16, which the ELCA cites as problematic: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” This verse is part of God’s pronouncement after the Fall and describes the consequences of sin. It’s not a prescription for oppression or abuse, but a direct reality of how things are now that humanity’s first parents sought their own way. It displays the reality of strained relationships in a fallen world. But the ELCA frames these key passages as inherently harmful and instead cancels them. Yet she says in a cheery tone, “We believe all people are created equally in the image of God.” How is this not hypocrisy? How can they take Genesis 1 and 2 as something they affirm, and then ignore the events of Genesis 3?
More Confusion
But one must ask, do they actually believe this? Over 2,400 ELCA pastors and leaders signed a statement supporting materialistic Evolution (2) which is diametrically opposed to special creation as seen in Scripture. What do they really mean by “created” then? Who is God in this schematic? This is another example of wearing a Christian skin-suit. They are effectively taking Orthodox Christianity and wearing it as a costume.
Similarly, 1 Timothy 2:15, which speaks of women being “saved through childbearing” if they continue in faith, is rejected as oppressive instead of being understood in its context of God’s redemptive plan. This passage, when read in the totality of 1 Timothy and the rest of scripture, reveals God’s order and grace, not a toxic patriarchal agenda.
The ELCA’s selective engagement with Scripture mirrors what J. Gresham Machen described in his seminal work of 1923, Christianity and Liberalism. Machen argued that theological liberalism, which prioritizes human experience over God’s revelation, is not just another variant of Christianity but a distinct religion. The ELCA’s embrace of cultural Marxism is displayed in its rhetoric about “power, privilege, and prejudice.” For Bible-believing Christians today, this raises a crucial question: Can a denomination that dismisses large portions of God’s Word as harmful still be considered part of the true church?
Is this just another religion altogether?
The Danger of Cultural Conformity
The ELCA’s slide into absurdity is not merely an academic concern – it has practical implications for the church in America. Countless non-believers, millions of people, do not know the differences between Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, much less which churches believe and live by God’s ways and his word, and which ones reject it. The ELCA’s support for policies that directly contradict biblical ethics, such as abortion and open borders, is enough to dismiss them as non-brethren in the faith. But it all looks the same to the average unbeliever.
This is why faithful Christians must be able to distinguish between them.
The frustration with the ELCA’s “virtue signaling” is indeed real, and many Christians see through its veneer of moral posturing. Romans 12:2 warns believers are not to be “conformed to this world” but transformed by the renewing of their minds. But that does not excuse or erase their grandstanding. The good news is that the ELCA’s trajectory can serve as a tutor to the evangelical convictional churches of America today. They are a tale of what happens when a church trades its prophetic power for cultural cheers.
A Call to Biblical Discernment
While denominations like the ELCA may retain Christian terminology—speaking of “justice,” “love,” “peace,” and even “Jesus Christ”— they work overtime to redefine these terms. While God judges outsiders, believers are responsible for holding other Christians accountable. This is not about legalism but about preserving the purity of the gospel and God’s unchanging word.
Furthermore, faithful Christians who do not want to go down the unbelieving road of the ELCA must guard against slipping into complicity with sin, even small sins. This is why Christians in local churches must hold each other accountable, why Matthew 18 is vital, and why even husbands, wives, siblings, and close friends must repent when they’ve sinned against each other.
The ELCA’s decline– all liberal unbelieving decline– is always slow. And it always starts with a toleration of little sins here and there. It rarely looks like a hard-core rejection of truth at the time, but sooner or later, one action leads to another. It’s nearly always a slow drift.
While the ELCA is hemorrhaging members and has lost over 3.1 million people since its inception (a merger of three Lutheran groups that created the ELCA in 1988), it is still larger than the much more conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) (3). Similarly, the PCUSA, the much more liberal mainline denomination, is much larger than the PCA, which leans more conservative. Liberal Presbyterians still outnumber the conservative ones over 2 to 1 (3).
Yes, God remains sovereign; He knows, but he also calls His church to endure (Matthew 16:18), to trust him and live for Him. To believe. There is no doubt that a reaping and sowing is taking place within the American church at large, both among liberal and conservative groups. Conservative Christians would do well to heed the call to cling to Christ in all things and not tolerate sin, or denominational destruction will certainly follow.
Living Out Biblical Truth
It may go without saying, but basic Christian holiness needs to make a comeback. Couples need to stay married. Unmarried couples need to stop fornicating. Young people need to stop using pornography. They need to know what they say and how they say it. Repentance and restoration with one another need to be commonplace. That is where the rubber meets the road for the real Christian life. Playing buffet dinner with the Bible and the world needs to stop.
Machen noted that true Christianity stands in opposition to the world at the most crucial times. Faithful Christians who love Christ above all else must be willing to uphold biblical truths about gender, marriage, and all manner of life at the most inconvenient times, even when labeled as “oppressive,” “outdated,” or “misogynistic.” The ELCA’s continual rejection of biblical truth is another sobering reminder of the consequences of compromising God’s Word. A return to the unchanging foundation of Scripture is what is required to discern truth from error and live boldly for Christ.
This is the only form of Christianity that will remain in the future.
As Psalm 119:105 proclaims, God’s Word is “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Follow the light, stay on the path!
Cling to God’s word.
Notes/References
(1) Skin-suit: When someone is acting in a way that is not their true self, but rather mimicking or adopting a persona to fit in or deceive others, similar to how an alien might wear a human “skin suit” to blend in on Earth.
(2) https://www.exposingtheelca.com/exposed-blog/revealed-elca-leadership-on-evolution-creation
(3) https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-state-of-the-evangelical-lutheran
