Word: lutheran
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...Lutherans in the U.S. have struggled for much of the 20th century to overcome divisions inside their ranks. Personality conflicts and doctrinal quarrels have divided the churches, which were made up mostly of German and Scandinavian immigrants and hence were also split by language and geography. But painstaking diplomacy, conducted among as many as 18 denominations that existed a century ago, produced by 1963 a melding into two giant branches: the American Lutheran Church (A.L.C.), a power in the Midwest; and the Lutheran Church in America (L.C.A.), with substantial membership in the Northeast...
Last week at simultaneous conventions of the A.L.C. in San Diego and the L.C.A. in Louisville, as well as of the much smaller Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (A.E.L.C.) in Cleveland, the three Lutheran churches voted by thunderous majorities to agree, in principle, to unite. After applause and some tears, the conventions then used long-distance telephones to pray together: "Call us now to ever deeper levels of unity; gather us as long-dispersed Lutherans into richer communion...
...Commission for a New Lutheran Church, created by the agreement, will waste no time in nailing down the historic moment; it begins negotiations on the details later this month in Madison, Wis. The timetable calls for separate church votes on a union document in 1986 and a convention to approve the constitution of the new body in 1987. The resulting church, with 5.4 million members, would become the nation's fourth-largest Protestant denomination (behind the Southern Baptist Convention, United Methodist Church, and National Baptist Convention, U.S.A...
...congregations. But A.L.C. Presiding Bishop David Preus, until recently a foot dragger on union, predicts a happy ending. Says he: "It is apparent that the rank and file in our church wish to go ahead with dispatch." Remaining outside the process is the conservative, 2.6 million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod...
Organizations from all branches of Judaism, the Lutheran Council and old-line Protestants in the National Council of Churches agree. The U.S. Catholic Conference welcomes such legislation but is especially interested in overturning a 1948 Supreme Court decision and restoring voluntary "released time" religion classes on public school premises. The Greek Orthodox and many Evangelical Protestants also support the amendment...