The ELCA Is Finally Reconsidering Its 2009 Compromise on LGBTQ+ People

There is an important pastoral letter from ReconcilingWorks circulating right now about the ELCA’s reconsideration of its social statement Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust. The problem is that explaining why it is important requires going back through almost twenty years of ELCA history and, even more than that, explaining a particular theological move the ELCA made in 2009 that probably made the changes of that year politically possible but also left us with an ecclesiological problem we have never really resolved.

So this is going to be a bit of ELCA inside baseball. But I think it matters well beyond people who pay attention to Churchwide Assemblies and social statements, because underneath all of this is a fairly basic question about what a church does when its members disagree, how long a compromise reached under one set of historical circumstances should govern a church after those circumstances have changed, and whether respecting somebody’s conscience means the church has to permanently preserve their position as one of its own teachings.

The immediate context is this. The 2022 ELCA Churchwide Assembly1 authorized two reconsiderations of Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, a social statement originally adopted in 2009. The first reconsideration looked primarily at language around marriage, same-gender and gender-nonconforming couples, and the variety of family configurations. Those revisions were completed at the 2025 Churchwide Assembly and passed 724-46. The second reconsideration, which is happening now, is specifically what the ELCA calls a “fresh consideration” of the church’s four positions of bound conscience. The task force has released a study and survey, with feedback open through September 30, and ReconcilingWorks has now issued a pastoral letter encouraging people to participate in that process and making some very specific recommendations about what should change.

To understand why any of that is important, you have to remember what 2009 actually felt like.

The ELCA had been arguing about gay and lesbian clergy and same-gender relationships for most of its existence. By the time the Churchwide Assembly gathered in Minneapolis in August of 2009, advocates for changing church policy had been working for years to get to a point where people in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships could serve openly as rostered ministers. There had been studies, failed proposals, disciplinary cases, congregations calling pastors contrary to church policy, pastors leaving or being removed from the roster, and the whole complicated long history of people living openly, semi-openly, closeted, celibate, or in ecclesiastical limbo while the denomination tried to figure out what it was going to do.

And the country was in a very different place too. Marriage equality was not yet the law of the land. The Defense of Marriage Act still existed. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” still existed. Same-sex marriage was legal in only a small number of states. Even among people who wanted the ELCA to change its policy, there was a strong sense that getting such a change through the Churchwide Assembly would be extraordinarily difficult, and this sense turned out be exactly right.

A social statement of the ELCA requires a two-thirds vote, and Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust passed 676-338, precisely two-thirds of those voting. The implementing resolutions passed afterward by different margins, including the resolution directing the church to find a way for people in publicly accountable lifelong monogamous same-gender relationships to serve as rostered leaders.2

All of this history and the vote contribute to understanding the theology that got built into the document, because ours (the ELCA at the time) was not a church that had reached anything approaching unanimity. The people working on the social statement and the ministry recommendations were attempting to change policy in a denomination that was very close to evenly divided, and they knew a social statement could not pass with a simple majority. They had to find a way of saying something that allowed the church to move while also making enough room for people who opposed the move that two-thirds of the assembly could stay on board.

The concept that became central to doing this was “bound conscience.”

The social statement identified four different conscience-bound positions concerning same-gender relationships. They ranged from the conviction that same-gender sexual relationships should not be recognized or blessed by the church all the way to the conviction that same-gender relationships could be lifelong, monogamous, publicly accountable relationships held to the same ethical standards and status as heterosexual marriage. Rather than resolving the disagreement, the statement formally recognized that faithful members of the ELCA held these different positions and called the church to bear with one another in the midst of them.

You can see why that worked politically, and I don’t want to tell this history entirely as though the compromise itself were some sort of moral failure. It did do something very important. The 2009 assembly made it possible for pastors and other rostered leaders in same-gender relationships to serve openly in this church. People who had been required to choose between honesty about their lives and their vocation no longer had to make that choice. Congregations could call them. Bishops could work with them. Couples could live publicly as couples. This was a major change in the ELCA, and there are countless pastors, deacons, spouses, congregations and families whose lives were materially better because that assembly managed to get those votes.

So I am not interested in treating the people who crafted the compromise as cowards from the perspective of 2026. They were operating under real constraints, and the compromise got the church across a line it had failed to cross repeatedly before.

At the same time, the political compromise got written into the theology of the church, and that is where things get more complicated.

I have a slightly odd relationship to all of this because in June of 2009, two months before the vote, the Journal of Lutheran Ethics published an essay of mine titled “Thank You, but No Thank You.” I was invited to respond to the proposed social statement, and I did not bury the lead: I said the Churchwide Assembly should vote down both Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust and the accompanying ministry recommendations.

But I was not opposing them because I thought they were going too far. I supported what was then called Dissenting Position 2, which argued for “full parity” in roster and call decisions for people in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships. In other words, I wanted the church to go further than the recommendations were going.

What bothered me in particular was the ecclesiology.

I wrote at the time that “what is proposed for our prayer and consideration in this social statement and recommendations is not simply instruction on human sexuality; it is also a proposed statement on ecclesiology,” and I argued that although the task force’s treatment of conscience offered something genuinely valuable for pastoral theology, it “fails at the level of providing a robust ecclesiology.”

That is the part that really jumps out at me reading the essay seventeen years later. I was already objecting in June of 2009 to precisely the ecclesiological problem that has now become unavoidable seventeen years later.

The question was whether a church could solve disagreement by formally installing the disagreement itself into the church’s teaching. Rather than saying, “The church has made a decision, some members disagree with that decision, and we will continue to live together in Christian love,” the structure being proposed was closer to saying, “The fact that we disagree is itself part of what the church teaches.”

The latter is pretty problematic.

I actually thought then, and still think, that the task force’s best theological work around bound conscience was quite different from the way the phrase subsequently came to function. The task force wrote that the emphasis of “conscience-bound” was not primarily on declaring oneself conscience-bound. The Christian is instead bound in love by the conscience of the other; when another member of the body of Christ suffers because their conscience is offended, the rest of us suffer with them. I called that an “apt biblical correction” in 2009 because it turns the idea away from the individual claiming some kind of theological immunity and toward Paul’s account of life together in the body of Christ.

That is actually a lovely and recognizably Lutheran way of talking about conscience. The problem is that it does not automatically tell us what a church should teach. And this is where I think we have allowed the phrase “bound conscience” to do far more work than it can really sustain.

For Lutherans, the language naturally calls to mind Luther at Worms, especially the famous declaration that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. Whether every word of the popular “Here I stand” formulation is historically exact is less important than the theological point: Luther’s conscience was not sovereign because it belonged to Luther. His claim was that his conscience was bound because the Word of God had laid claim upon him. Conscience was not simply another word for sincerely held belief. I mean, Christians can be sincerely wrong.

We know this, and our own history should make us extremely reluctant to treat sincerity as a guarantee of theological truth. Christians have defended slavery in good conscience. Christians have opposed the ordination of women in good conscience. Christians have defended segregation in good conscience. Christians have believed all kinds of things after serious prayer and study of Scripture that other Christians, sometimes generations later, have concluded were profoundly mistaken.

The fact that a conscience is bound does not make the conscience infallible. It certainly does not create an obligation on the church to preserve every conscience-bound position forever.

There is an important distinction here between respecting a conscience and treating the position produced by that conscience as permanent church teaching. Imagine, for example, an ELCA member who believes women should not be ordained. Such a person may be quite sincere. They may have studied Scripture carefully and their conscience may genuinely be troubled when a woman presides at the altar. A pastor should take that person seriously, listen to them, perhaps study Scripture with them, refuse to ridicule them, and recognize that we are still members together of the body of Christ. Their conscience makes a pastoral claim upon me.

But… but… their conscience does not require the ELCA to say that ordaining women and refusing to ordain women are two equally valid teachings of this church.

At some point the church discerned something. It made a decision. It teaches that women may be ordained. People can disagree with the teaching and remain Christians. They can even remain members of the ELCA. But the existence of disagreement does not mean the church has no teaching.

That is what I meant in 2009 when I said the bound-conscience proposal was more useful as pastoral theology than ecclesiology. Paul’s concern for the conscience of the neighbor is about how Christians live with one another, especially how the strong exercise freedom in relationship to those whose consciences differ. It is not a theory that requires the church to convert every persistent disagreement into a permanent menu of doctrinal options.

In fact, if we go back to Luther, the whole Reformation depends upon the opposite possibility: consciences can be re-formed, the church can be re-formed. Scripture can confront us or our encounter with the neighbor can confront us. Experience can expose something we had not seen or the Spirit can lead the church into repentance.

That means a bound conscience is not an ecclesiastical “do not disturb” sign. It is not a declaration that says, “I sincerely believe this, therefore neither you nor the church may ever challenge it.” If anything, the Christian conscience is always subject to formation because it is bound to something other than itself.

This is also why I think the current reconsideration should not be framed as an attempt to expel conservative Lutherans from the church or deny them freedom of conscience (even if in practice a LOT of them left after the 2009 vote). Those are different questions. We can continue to say that people who hold traditionalist views about same-gender relationships are Christians, members of the church, people whose consciences we respect, people with whom we worship and receive the sacraments, without saying that the ELCA must permanently teach their position as one of four equally legitimate positions.

That distinction becomes even more important when we look at what has happened since 2009, because the compromise did not freeze history.

Marriage equality became federal constitutional law in 2015. Gay and lesbian pastors who had once existed in a special category of “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships” got married. Queer clergy became a normal part of the life of the church. They became senior pastors, deans, bishops and churchwide leaders. Congregations that were once told that the admission of partnered gay clergy might tear apart the church discovered that, for the most part, Pastor Bob having a husband or Pastor Susan having a wife simply became another fact of congregational life.

At the same time, the conversation about sexuality and gender changed significantly. A framework built almost entirely around whether a man could be in a relationship with a man or a woman with a woman increasingly failed to describe the people actually living in the church. Bisexual, transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming Christians quite reasonably pointed out that even the phrase “same-gender relationship” assumes a relatively fixed binary model of gender.

Other ELCA teaching developed as well, including Faith, Sexism, and Justice, which says that even amid disagreement about sexual orientation and gender identity, the church is united in opposing discrimination, objectification, abuse and control of bodies. ReconcilingWorks points directly to that tension in its new letter and asks how Human Sexuality can continue to legitimate discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people through what the letter calls the “cloak” of bound conscience.

And then there is the simple fact that the ecclesial political landscape has changed.

Again, I do not want to pretend the ELCA is unanimous. It is not. Churchwide Assembly voting members are not a scientific sample of every person in an ELCA congregation. There are conservative ELCA congregations, conservative pastors and many members who remain unhappy about the decisions of 2009.

But the numbers are nevertheless astonishing. The social statement passed in 2009 by 676-338, precisely the two-thirds needed. The first set of reconsideration amendments passed in 2025 by 724-46. That’s not a typo. The vote passed 724-46. That’s about 94% to 6%.

That is simply not the same church political moment as 2009.

So one of the questions before us now is whether an ecclesiological arrangement created specifically to move a closely divided church across a two-thirds threshold in 2009 should simply remain permanent because it succeeded.

I don’t think it should.

There is nothing especially Lutheran about turning a successful political compromise into an eternal theological principle.

ReconcilingWorks is responding directly to the current task force process, and at first glance some of what it is asking for can sound mostly like updated terminology. The letter argues that the social statement should no longer limit itself to the binary language of “same-gender couples,” because that language does not adequately describe the diversity of sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions now present in the church. It also criticizes what it calls heteronormative assimilation: the expectation that queer relationships establish their legitimacy primarily by conforming themselves to a heterosexual marital model.

I think both of those points deserve serious attention, although I would probably articulate the theological alternative a little differently than the letter does. Simply replacing “same-gender couples” with “consenting adults,” for example, cannot by itself carry the weight of a Christian sexual ethic. Consent is essential, but Christianity has more to say about relationships than whether everybody involved consented. We ought to be able to talk about mutuality, faithfulness, trust, responsibility, non-exploitation, public accountability, hospitality, care for dependents, concern for the neighbor and the fruits relationships bear in the lives of the people and communities around them. Interestingly, ReconcilingWorks itself uses precisely this kind of richer language earlier in the letter when it describes marriage as a vocation rooted in mutual love, shared responsibility, public accountability, hospitality and service.

So I do not necessarily think every proposed replacement sentence in the pastoral letter needs to become the final language of the social statement. But I strongly support what the letter is doing, because it is forcing the ELCA to ask whether the four-position structure itself has reached the end of its usefulness.

ReconcilingWorks proposes, among other things, a possible additional conscience-bound position for people whose convictions do not fit any of the existing four. I understand why: that is literally one of the questions the task force is asking in its current survey. But I think the more interesting possibility is that what we need is not a fifth position.

Maybe we need to stop building the church’s teaching around a numbered list of contradictory positions. The real work of reconsideration is to distinguish more clearly between what the ELCA teaches and how the ELCA lives pastorally with people who dissent from that teaching. That would actually honor conscience more seriously, because it would stop using conscience as a euphemism for institutional indecision.

And I think there is one more important piece of the 2009 history to name here, because the bound-conscience settlement did not only preserve disagreement. It also created something of a two-tier structure for clergy.

The ELCA was saying, for the first time, yes, people in same-gender relationships can serve openly as pastors and other rostered leaders. But it was not simply incorporating them into an undifferentiated set of expectations for ministers. Their inclusion remained located inside a special ecclesiastical framework created because a significant portion of the church did not believe their relationships were legitimate.

I complained about one of the stranger consequences of this in 2009. The proposed social statement said the ELCA did not favor cohabitation outside marriage while the ministry recommendations were preparing to roster same-gender couples who, in most states, could not legally marry and whom the ELCA itself had not yet established a clear churchwide mechanism for marrying. I called it getting the cart before the horse.

Civil marriage eventually resolved much of that particular contradiction, but the deeper structure remained. Heterosexual clergy simply belonged under the ordinary categories of ministry. Queer clergy belonged because the church had built a special theological accommodation for a disagreement about whether they ought to belong.

That may have been the best arrangement we could get through the Churchwide Assembly in 2009. But seventeen years later we should at least be willing to ask whether it is still just. And this is where I find myself in a different relationship to my old essay title.

In 2009 I wrote “Thank You, but No Thank You” because I really did want to thank the task force for years of extremely difficult work while also arguing that the proposed statement and ministry recommendations should not be adopted in the form they had reached. The Churchwide Assembly disagreed with me, and in retrospect I am grateful that it managed to accomplish what it did. The changes of 2009 mattered enormously. They allowed pastors and deacons who had previously been forced into impossible choices around vocation, honesty and relationship to serve openly in the church, and they allowed congregations to call them without existing in a kind of disciplinary shadow. I do not want to write as though that achievement was compromised into meaninglessness simply because the framework that made it possible now looks inadequate.

But I also do not think gratitude requires permanence.

To the Task Force reconsidering Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, to the leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and to our siblings throughout the church:

We write in support of the August 11, 2026 pastoral letter from ReconcilingWorks concerning the current reconsideration of Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust.

We are grateful that the Churchwide Assembly has asked the ELCA to reconsider the four conscience-bound positions embedded in the 2009 social statement, and we are grateful for the work of the task force undertaking that reconsideration. We also believe the process now gives this church an opportunity to address an ecclesiological problem left unresolved since 2009.

The framework of bound conscience emerged from a particular moment in the life of the ELCA. Our church was deeply divided over the recognition of same-gender relationships and the service of partnered gay and lesbian people as rostered ministers, and the framework helped the 2009 Churchwide Assembly make an enormously important change while remaining in relationship across profound disagreement.

We honor what that compromise accomplished. Many pastors and deacons have been able to serve openly and faithfully because of it, congregations have been blessed by their ministries, and the church is better because people no longer had to hide their relationships in order to answer a call to public ministry.

At the same time, we do not believe a compromise necessary to the political and ecclesial circumstances of 2009 must become permanent church teaching.

We therefore join ReconcilingWorks in urging the ELCA to use language that reflects people of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions rather than continuing to organize our teaching around a binary understanding of “same-gender” relationships. We also join ReconcilingWorks in questioning the assumption that heterosexuality or heterosexual marriage should function as an unquestioned norm against which all other relationships are measured. Christian sexual ethics can and should speak more deeply about mutuality, consent, faithfulness, trust, shared responsibility, non-exploitation, public accountability, care for the neighbor and the fruits our relationships bear.

We also join ReconcilingWorks in asking this church to take seriously the tension between the four-position framework and the ELCA’s subsequent teaching opposing discrimination, objectification, abuse and control of human bodies.

And we encourage the task force to consider an even deeper question: whether the ELCA continues to need a numbered set of contradictory conscience-bound positions at all.

We strongly affirm the importance of conscience in Lutheran theology, but a bound conscience is not an infallible conscience, nor does a sincere conviction require the church to preserve that conviction indefinitely as one of its own teachings. Christian conscience is bound to the Word of God and remains subject to formation and reformation through Scripture, the proclamation of the gospel, the life of the church and our encounter with the neighbor.

We can therefore respect the consciences of people who disagree with the direction of this church without requiring the ELCA itself to remain permanently undecided.

The ELCA of 2026 is not the ELCA of 2009. For seventeen years this church has lived with LGBTQIA+ pastors, deacons, spouses, families and lay leaders serving faithfully throughout its ministries. The nation’s laws have changed. Our language has changed. Our understanding of gender and sexuality has developed. Our own social teaching has developed. Our experience together as the body of Christ has taught us things.

The church should be allowed to say that it has learned.

We are thankful for those who built the compromise that helped the ELCA cross an extraordinarily difficult threshold in 2009. We honor their work and the courage it required.

But the purpose of a bridge is to help us cross.

It does not have to become the place where the church lives forever.

For these reasons, we support the pastoral letter from ReconcilingWorks and encourage the task force to reconsider not only the wording of the four positions but the continued necessity of the four-position framework itself.

In Christ,

The Rev. Dr. Clint Schnekloth
and the church council of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas