NEW LEADERSHIP ELECTED

As a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), what takes place at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly every three years is important. Last week the faithful voting members from across the country gathered to do the important work of the Church. (They had to be faithful. It was in Phoenix in August!). One of those voting members was Ellen Rothweiler, our Minister for Learning. We give thanks to God for her service.

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One of the important tasks before the Assembly was to elect the two top leaders of the ELCA for the next six years. Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton has served for twelve years and provided sound, Spirit-led leadership for both her terms. She is retiring.

On July 30, the Assembly elected its first Black leader selecting The Rev. Yehiel Curry as our next Presiding Bishop. Curry is currently bishop of the ELCA’s Metropolitan Chicago Synod. From the Religious News Service, “Curry, who is 52, was elected on the fifth ballot during voting on the floor of the Phoenix Convention Center. He received 562 votes out of 799 votes cast. He previously served as pastor of Shekinah Chapel Lutheran Church in Riverdale, Illinois, and as mission developer at the church, which is predominantly Black.”

“Curry grew up Catholic on the South Side of Chicago and became a seventh grade public school teacher and later a social worker. An unexpected invitation to a worship service in St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church, back in the 1990s, led him to discover a calling to ordination.” He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, in 1995 and a Master of Divinity in 2013 from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, one of seven ELCA seminaries. He and his wife, LaShonda, are the parents of three daughters.”

Bishop Curry, like all his predecessors, has experience as a parish pastor. Unlike any before him, he is not a long-serving academic or synodical leader. Before his election as a synodical bishop in 2019, he was a pastor and mission developer starting a new congregation where it was needed. He knows the church and her struggles at the congregational level. That is important and hopeful for this parish pastor, and I hope, every congregant in the ELCA.

The second leader elected was The Rev. Lucille “CeCee” Mills who will serve a six-year term as secretary of the Mills was elected on the fifth ballot. There were 782 ballots cast, with 392 votes needed for an election. Mills received 404 votes and will be the first Black secretary of the ELCA.

Mills has served as an assistant to the bishop in the ELCA North Carolina Synod since 2019. Previously she served as an interim pastor, as program associate for African Descent Ministries with the ELCA churchwide organization in Chicago; and as pastor of Rejoice Lutheran Church, Chesapeake, Va. She received a TEEM certification from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., in 2002.

I am encouraged by the election of Presiding Bishop-elect Curry and Secretary-elect Mills. It should not be lost on us that the movement of the Spirit in the “whitest” denomination in American religion led us to two leaders of African decent who both express deep faith born of their encounter with the Lutheran ecumenical movement.

Perhaps we can finally throw off the vestiges of our immigrant past where too often Ole & Lena jokes, Lutefisk suppers, and Oktoberfest define us more than the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church is changing – it is always reforming and renewing. Now is perhaps the time for the ELCA to wake up, catch up, and move forward.

Other news from the Churchwide assembly will be shared in the coming weeks.

Pax Christi,
​Tim Olson – Lead Pastor