ELCA Lutherans to Incorporate Native American Worship and Spirituality into Churchwide Assembly

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is set to have its triennial gathering of Churchwide Assembly on August 8-12. Happening only once every three years, nearly 900 voting members of the wicked and perverse denomination, representing 3 million wicked and perverse members, will descend on the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio, to discuss new business and hammer out some new resolutions, such as how best to give counslling to people traumatized by the overturning of Roe v Wade.

During the conference, they also pledge to “honor and celebrate Indigenous people through presentations and worship.” According to their press release, ELCA Presiding Bishop Pagan Elizabeth A. Eaton will “open the assembly on Tuesday, Aug. 9, with a land acknowledgment noting that the gathering is taking place on the original and ancestral homelands of the Shawnee, Miami and Kaskaskia peoples.”

The next day, they will honor Indigenous people by ensuring the “words and music for the service of Holy Communion are derived from a variety of Native American sources and designed with the help of Indigenous people who are leaders in the ELCA.” They explain:

The worship service will begin with a prayer song offered by Imnizaska Family Drum. Other elements during worship will include a prayer to the four directions, which will incorporate a gathering of waters from the four directions within the territory of the ELCA, and a time of repentance as called for in the Repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery.

The “four directions” are typically represented in the Native American Medicine Wheel. According to NLM: “The Medicine Wheel, sometimes known as the Sacred Hoop, has been used by generations of various Native American tribes for health and healing. It embodies the Four Directions, (East, South, West, and North) as well as Father Sky, Mother Earth, and Spirit Tree—all of which symbolize dimensions of health and the cycles of life.” While each tribe interprets the directions differently, they can represent anything from seasons of life to different ceremonial plants like tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar, or animals such as the eagle, bear, wolf, and salmon.

While we know it will be be a syncretic trainwreck, this isn’t the first time the ELCA has done this. They’ve put on Indigenous People’s Liturgical Celebrations before, with the understanding that the denomination would “practice accompaniment with native peoples instead of a missionary endeavor to them.”

The services typically consist of :

1. Exclusively referring to God the Father or Jesus as “The Great Spirit” or “Creator.”
2. Having a ‘Smudging Ceremony‘
3. Give Creedal statements like “We believe in Creator, Father-Mother Spirit, who called the world and all that is in it, into being, who spoke the creative-forming word, and all came forth who created women and men and set them free to live in love, in obedience to the will of supreme love and in community with all.
4. Repudiate the ‘doctrine of discovery.’
5. Have a strange rendition of communion and the Lord’s Prayer.
6. Reference the Land back Movement, which involves giving reparations and organizing and sacrificing to get Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands by returning any land and structures built on the land back to native tribes. Prior to this. the ELCA passed a resolution “acknowledging and repenting from the church’s complicity in the evils of colonialism in the Americas, which continue to harm tribal governments and individual tribal members.”

We await to see how bad it gets.

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