1. What Is the ELCA?
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a Lutheran church body formed on 1 January 1988 by the merger of three predecessor churches: the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. Its churchwide offices are in Chicago, its congregations are organised into synods across the United States and the Caribbean, and it is a member of the Lutheran World Federation, the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches. Among American Lutherans it is the largest single body and the one that carries the ecumenical relationships, which is why it appears in almost every Catholic conversation about Lutheranism in the United States.
Two of the three merging churches were themselves recent products of consolidation. The Lutheran Church in America came together in 1962 out of largely eastern and Swedish-heritage bodies, and the American Lutheran Church in 1960 out of German and Norwegian-heritage bodies of the upper Midwest. The third partner, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, was formed in 1976 by congregations and clergy who had left the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod after the conflict over biblical scholarship at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis that produced the 1974 faculty walkout and the seminary-in-exile known as Seminex. That third stream matters for understanding the ELCA. It arrived carrying a specific quarrel about how Scripture is to be read, and the ELCA settled that quarrel on the side of academic biblical scholarship.
Size and Trajectory
The ELCA's own annual reporting through its Office of the Secretary described roughly 5.2 million baptised members at the time of the 1988 merger, and recent reports have put baptised membership under three million with average weekly worship attendance a fraction of that. The decline has been steady across the whole period rather than concentrated in any single year, and it tracks the wider contraction of mainline Protestantism in the United States.
Membership figures are those published by the ELCA itself in its congregational reports and the annual statistical summaries of its Office of the Secretary. Denominational self-reporting counts baptised members on parish rolls, which is a broader measure than weekly attendance. The description of the ELCA as the largest American Lutheran body rests on the membership each Lutheran body publishes for itself.
Where This Page Sits
Lutheran doctrine in general, the life of Martin Luther, the shape of the Book of Concord and the wider global Lutheran map are handled in the pillar guide to what Lutherans believe. This page stays on the ELCA as a particular institution: its constitution, its assemblies, its votes, its concordats and its standing with Rome. Where a point belongs to Lutheranism as such, it is summarised in a sentence here and treated properly there.
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2. What Does the ELCA Believe?
The ELCA confesses the Triune God of the Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, teaches that Jesus Christ is true God and true man, and holds that a sinner is justified before God by grace through faith on account of Christ, apart from works of the law. Its constitution receives the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith and life. It practises two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and it teaches that in the Lord's Supper the true body and blood of Christ are really present under the bread and wine.
Stated that way, an ELCA congregation would recognise itself. Stated that way, a Catholic reader will also recognise a great deal. The creeds are the same creeds. The Christology is the same Christology defined at Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon. Baptism is administered with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the Catholic Church recognises that baptism as valid. A Lutheran who becomes Catholic is not rebaptised.
Justification as the Governing Article
Lutheran theology treats justification as the article by which the Church stands or falls. The claim is that the whole of Christian teaching is ordered around God's free acquittal of the sinner for Christ's sake, received by faith, and that any teaching which suggests the sinner contributes something meritorious to that acquittal has gone wrong at the root. Article IV of the Augsburg Confession states it in a paragraph, and the ELCA's constitution binds the church to that Confession as a true witness to the Gospel.
"For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law."
Romans 3:28The Catholic Church teaches justification by grace as well, and says so without qualification. The first canon on justification from the Council of Trent condemns the claim that a person can be justified by his own works, whether by nature or by the law, apart from the grace of God through Jesus Christ, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1996 defines grace as the free and undeserved help God gives us to become his children. Both churches put grace first. The historic disagreement fell on what happens after that: whether justification is a declaration that leaves the sinner righteous by imputation, or an act of God that really makes the sinner righteous by an infused gift, and whether the works that follow have any true merit before God. The faith and works guide sets out that distinction at length.
The Two Kingdoms and the Christian in Public Life
Lutheran ethics work through the doctrine of the two kingdoms, God's rule through the Gospel in the Church and God's rule through law, reason and civil office in the world. The ELCA has developed this into a large body of social teaching adopted by its assemblies. Its social statements cover economic life, the death penalty, health care, the environment, race, criminal justice, human sexuality and abortion, and each is adopted only by a two-thirds vote of the Churchwide Assembly. They are teaching documents intended to guide deliberation in congregations, and they do not bind individual conscience in the way a Catholic magisterial definition does.
3. The Book of Concord and How the ELCA Subscribes to It
The Book of Concord is the 1580 collection of Lutheran confessional writings, and every Lutheran body defines itself by how it commits to that book. The ELCA's constitution takes a graded approach. It accepts the three ecumenical creeds as true declarations of the faith of the Church. It accepts the Unaltered Augsburg Confession of 1530 as a true witness to the Gospel. It accepts the other confessional writings in the Book of Concord, meaning the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles, the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, Luther's Small and Large Catechisms and the Formula of Concord, as further valid interpretations of the faith of the Church.
The wording repays attention. A true witness and a further valid interpretation are strong commitments, and they are weaker than the quia subscription used by the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, which binds its ministers to the Confessions because they are a correct exposition of Scripture, without remainder. The ELCA's formula gives its theologians room to read the Confessions as historically situated documents that testify truly to the Gospel without functioning as a comprehensive doctrinal code. That single difference in phrasing produced much of the distance between the two largest American Lutheran churches.
What the Confessions Say About Rome
Two of those documents are polemical against the papacy in the sharpest sixteenth-century terms. The Smalcald Articles and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, both connected to the 1537 Smalcald assembly, denounce the Roman claim to jurisdiction by divine right and use apocalyptic language about the papal office. The ELCA has never repudiated the Book of Concord, and it has also entered a relationship with Rome that plainly does not treat those passages as its operative position. Lutheran theologians in the dialogue have generally argued that the sixteenth-century condemnations were aimed at a specific set of claims and abuses, and that the target has moved. Catholic readers should know the passages exist, and should also know that no ELCA bishop is out preaching them.
4. Baptism and the Lord's Supper in the ELCA
The ELCA recognises two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, on the classical Lutheran definition that a sacrament is a rite commanded by Christ with a visible element attached to the promise of forgiveness. Confession and absolution, confirmation, marriage and ordination continue in ELCA practice as rites of the church, and they are not counted among the sacraments. The Catholic Church counts seven, and the difference is a difference about the definition as much as about the rites themselves.
Baptism
ELCA baptism is with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it is normally administered to infants. Lutheran teaching holds that baptism actually does something: it works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe, in the words of Luther's Small Catechism. This is a robustly sacramental doctrine, and it is one of the clearest places where Lutheran teaching stands closer to Catholic teaching than to most of the Reformed and Baptist traditions. Because the form and matter are correct, the Catholic Church recognises ELCA baptism as valid, and the practical consequence is that a Lutheran received into full communion with the Catholic Church makes a profession of faith and is confirmed rather than baptised again. Our guide to baptism works through why the Church treats validity this way.
The Lord's Supper
The ELCA teaches the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper, given and received under the bread and wine. Lutherans have historically resisted the term transubstantiation on the grounds that it explains the mystery with an Aristotelian account of substance and accidents that Scripture does not require, and they have equally resisted any account that reduces the Supper to a symbol or a memorial. Article X of the Augsburg Confession says that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat in the Lord's Supper. The theological shorthand many Lutherans use is sacramental union, and the phrase Luther's catechetical tradition made famous is in, with and under.
Catholic teaching agrees on the real presence and holds more. The Council of Trent taught the conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of Christ's body and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood, and gave that change the name transubstantiation. It follows for Catholics that Christ remains present in the reserved sacrament, which grounds adoration and Benediction. ELCA practice varies on reservation and does not include Eucharistic adoration as a normal parish devotion. The Eucharist guide sets out the Catholic doctrine in full, and the pillar guide to Lutheran belief works through the Lutheran account of sacramental union and the sixteenth-century dispute behind it.
Who May Receive
Most ELCA congregations practise an open table, inviting all baptised Christians who trust Christ's promise to receive, and many have moved to admitting baptised children before formal confirmation. A Catholic visiting an ELCA service would ordinarily be welcome at that table by the congregation's own rule. The Catholic Church's answer runs the other way, and section 12 explains why.
5. Scripture, Scholarship and Teaching Authority
The ELCA holds Scripture to be the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith and life, and it does not require its clergy or seminaries to hold verbal inerrancy. Historical-critical study of the biblical text is standard in ELCA seminaries, including source criticism of the Pentateuch, the two-source hypothesis for the Synoptic Gospels, and the treatment of authorship questions in the Pauline corpus as open historical matters. Lutheran interpretation places the weight of authority on the Gospel that Scripture delivers, on Christ as the content of the Word, rather than on a doctrine about the properties of the text itself.
Catholic teaching also affirms inspiration without requiring a fundamentalist account of it, and the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum 11 says that the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Catholic exegetes use the same critical tools. The divergence falls on what stands alongside Scripture. The Catholic Church holds that Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture flow from the same divine wellspring and that the task of authentically interpreting the Word has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church (Dei Verbum 9 and 10). Our page on Sacred Tradition develops this.
Where Doctrine Gets Decided
The ELCA has no magisterium. Doctrinal and social teaching is set by the Churchwide Assembly through a deliberative process: a study is commissioned, drafts circulate through synods and congregations for response, and a final text comes to the Assembly, where a social statement requires a two-thirds majority. Bishops teach and preside, and no ELCA bishop, including the presiding bishop, can define doctrine for the church. Authority is conciliar and legislative.
This produces a real structural difference in how the two churches change. When a question is contested in the ELCA, the answer emerges from votes and can be revisited by later votes. When a question is settled in the Catholic Church by a definition of an ecumenical council or an ex cathedra papal act, it is held to be irreformable. That difference will matter in every section that follows, because it explains how the same church could sign a joint declaration with Rome on justification and, ten years later, take a decision on ministry that Rome could not accept.
6. How the ELCA Is Governed
The ELCA describes itself as one church in three expressions: congregations, synods and the churchwide organisation. Each expression is the church, none is a branch office of another, and each has its own constitution, assembly and responsibilities. Congregations call their own pastors and own their own property. Synods, each led by an elected bishop, hold the roster of ministers, oversee candidacy for ordination and provide oversight of congregations in a defined territory. The churchwide organisation, led by the presiding bishop and the Church Council, carries the global mission work, the ecumenical relationships, the seminaries system and the churchwide assemblies.
The Churchwide Assembly
The Churchwide Assembly is the highest legislative authority in the ELCA. It meets biennially, its voting members are elected by the synods with quotas designed to secure lay and clergy balance and representation of women and of people of colour, and it elects the presiding bishop and the secretary. Constitutional amendments and social statements require a two-thirds majority. Ordinary business passes by simple majority. Almost every fact people search about the ELCA, from the 2009 sexuality decisions to the full communion agreements, traces back to a specific vote at a specific Churchwide Assembly, and that is the right place to look when a claim about the church needs checking.
The Office of Presiding Bishop
The presiding bishop is elected by the Churchwide Assembly for a six-year term and serves as the chief pastor and principal ecumenical officer of the church. Herbert W. Chilstrom was the first, elected in 1987 ahead of the merger taking effect. H. George Anderson followed in 1995 and Mark S. Hanson in 2001, and Hanson also served as president of the Lutheran World Federation. Elizabeth A. Eaton was elected in 2013, the first woman to hold the office. The post turns over by the same assembly vote, and the ELCA's own site names whoever holds it now.
An ELCA bishop is elected to a term rather than ordained to a distinct order of ministry in the Catholic sense. The ELCA holds one ordained office, the ministry of Word and Sacrament, and the episcopate is an office of oversight within it. That is a significant point for section 12, because it shapes what happened when the ELCA accepted the historic episcopate in its agreement with the Episcopal Church.
7. The 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification
The ELCA approved the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification at its Churchwide Assembly in 1997, two years before the text was signed in Augsburg on 31 October 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The ELCA is a member church of the Lutheran World Federation, so the federation's signature covers it, and the 1997 vote means the ELCA had already put its own name to the text. The date and city were chosen deliberately: Reformation Day, in the city of the Augsburg Confession.
What the ELCA Signed Up To
The Declaration states a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification. Paragraph 15 is the sentence both sides confess together: by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works. On that basis the Declaration holds that the doctrinal condemnations of the sixteenth century do not apply to the teaching of the other partner as that teaching is presented in the text. The full anatomy of the document, the paired Lutheran and Catholic explications, the 1998 Response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Annex that answered it, and the later associations by Methodist, Reformed and Anglican bodies, is worked through in the pillar guide to Lutheran belief and the Joint Declaration.
What It Left Open
Paragraph 43 of the Declaration says directly that the consensus reached does not cover everything each church teaches about justification, and it names the outstanding work: the relationship between the Word of God and church doctrine, ecclesiology, authority in the Church and its unity, ministry, the sacraments, and the relation between justification and social ethics. Beyond that list stand the sacrament of penance, indulgences, purgatory, the invocation of the saints, Marian doctrine and the papacy. The Declaration settled one article and left the church-dividing questions standing where it found them.
What Followed for the ELCA
Agreement on justification changed nothing about the ELCA's standing with Rome, and both sides said so at the time. What it did was keep the table open. The 2013 Lutheran-Catholic study From Conflict to Communion prepared the ground for a joint commemoration of the Reformation's fifth centenary, and on 31 October 2016 Pope Francis joined the Lutheran World Federation for common prayer at Lund Cathedral. The American dialogue continued on its own track, and section 10 sets out where that has reached. Our guide to the Reformation covers the centenary and the history behind it.
Know exactly what the 1999 Declaration did and did not settle
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Get Pro for $49 One-time payment. No subscription. 30-day money-back guarantee.8. Women's Ordination in the ELCA
The ELCA ordains women to the ministry of Word and Sacrament and has done so since its founding, having inherited the practice from two of its predecessor bodies. Both the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church approved the ordination of women in 1970, and the first women were ordained in each body that same year, with Elizabeth Platz ordained in the Lutheran Church in America in November 1970. April Ulring Larson was elected in 1992 as the first woman to serve as a bishop in the ELCA, in the La Crosse Area Synod, and Elizabeth A. Eaton became the first woman elected presiding bishop in 2013. Women now serve at every level of ELCA ministry.
The Lutheran Argument for It
Lutheran advocates of women's ordination generally argue from the doctrine of ministry itself. The Augsburg Confession describes the office of ministry functionally, as the office instituted so that the Gospel may be preached and the sacraments administered, and Lutheran theology does not treat ordination as conferring an indelible sacramental character. If the office exists for the sake of the Word, the argument runs, then the question is fitness to preach and administer, and Scripture's baptismal equality in Galatians 3:28 tells against a restriction by sex. The passages usually cited against, chiefly 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:12, are read as addressing specific first-century congregational disorder rather than laying down a permanent structure of ministry.
The Catholic Position
The Catholic Church holds that it has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood. Pope John Paul II stated this in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, declaring that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the faithful. The 1976 declaration Inter Insigniores from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had already set out the reasoning: Christ chose men as the Twelve, the Church has maintained that practice constantly, and the priest acts in persona Christi capitis in the sacramental sign, where the sign itself carries meaning. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1577 states that only a baptised man validly receives sacred ordination.
The disagreement is therefore about what ordination is before it is about who receives it. If ordination is authorisation to a public office of preaching and administering, the Lutheran conclusion follows readily. If ordination is a sacrament configuring a man to Christ the Head and Bridegroom, the Catholic conclusion follows and cannot be revised by a vote. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood sets out the sacramental account in detail. Neither church expects the other to move on this, and both say so.
9. The 2009 Sexuality Decisions and What Followed
At its Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis in August 2009, the ELCA adopted the social statement Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust and then changed its ministry policies to allow congregations to call and synods to roster clergy in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships. The social statement required a two-thirds majority and passed with the minimum needed. The ministry policy resolutions followed by simple majority. These decisions are the single most consequential set of votes in the church's history and the reason many searches about the ELCA begin here.
The vote tallies and the wording of the resolutions are recorded in the minutes and official reports of the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly, published by the ELCA itself. The statement Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust remains available in the ELCA's own library of social statements.
What the Statement Actually Argues
Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust is unusual in that it does not claim consensus. It states explicitly that the ELCA holds four different convictions on same-gender relationships and commits the church to respect the bound conscience of members who hold each of them. On that basis the ministry policy was structured so that no congregation could be compelled to call a partnered gay or lesbian pastor and no synod bishop could be compelled to preside at an ordination against conscience. Whether a church can hold four positions on a moral question and remain one church is exactly what the objectors denied. The framework of bound conscience was the mechanism the ELCA chose to keep the disagreement inside the same body.
After the United States Supreme Court's 2015 decision on civil same-sex marriage, civil marriage became the ordinary form such relationships take, and candidates and rostered ministers in same-sex marriages serve under the 2009 policy. Congregational practice on blessing or solemnising same-sex marriages varies, and the decision sits with the congregation and the pastor.
The Departures
Congregations began leaving. The reform network Lutheran CORE had organised before the assembly and continued after it, and in August 2010 the North American Lutheran Church was constituted by congregations and clergy who had left. A second body, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, had already formed in 2001 in the aftermath of the Episcopal concordat and received many of the departing congregations as well. Congregations left in substantial numbers over the years that followed, and the ELCA's constitution requires two congregational votes separated by at least ninety days with a two-thirds majority each time, which made every departure a matter of public record.
The consequences reached beyond the United States. In 2013 the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, which the Lutheran World Federation's published membership statistics rank among the largest of its member churches, declared that it was ending altar and pulpit fellowship with the ELCA and the Church of Sweden over their decisions on same-sex marriage and ordination. Global Lutheranism did not follow the American mainline. African Lutheran churches have grown over the same decades in which the American mainline contracted, and they hold traditional teaching on marriage.
Comparisons of member church size follow the annual membership statistics the Lutheran World Federation publishes for its member churches, which rest on each church's own returns.
The Catholic Response
Catholic teaching holds that marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman, ordered to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of children, and raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptised (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1601). It teaches that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law and cannot be approved, and in the same passages it insists that men and women with homosexual inclinations must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and that every sign of unjust discrimination against them is to be avoided (Catechism 2357 to 2358). Both halves of that teaching are binding. Our guide to marriage and the sacrament of matrimony works through the Catholic doctrine.
A related divergence sits in the ELCA's 1991 social statement on abortion, which describes abortion as a last resort, opposes its use as a means of birth control or sex selection, and supports legal access in cases including danger to the life of the mother, pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, and a fetal condition diagnosed as incompatible with life. Catholic teaching admits no such exceptions: direct abortion is gravely contrary to the moral law at every stage, and the Catechism 2270 to 2271 states that the Church's teaching on this has not changed and is unchangeable. The abortion page covers the Catholic argument.
10. Called to Common Mission and the Full Communion Partners
The ELCA is in full communion with six churches, which in its usage means mutual recognition of one another as churches of the Gospel, mutual recognition of baptism, a shared Eucharist, the interchangeability of ordained ministers, and a commitment to common mission and decision making. The six are the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America and the United Church of Christ, joined through the 1997 agreement A Formula of Agreement, the Episcopal Church through Called to Common Mission, the Moravian Church in America through an agreement of 1999, and the United Methodist Church through an agreement of 2009.
Called to Common Mission
Called to Common Mission is the important one for Catholic readers. Approved by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly in 1999 and by the Episcopal Church's General Convention, it took effect on 1 January 2001. Under it the ELCA committed itself to the historic episcopate: Episcopal bishops in the historic succession took part in the installation of ELCA bishops, ELCA bishops thereafter stand in that succession, and the ELCA agreed that all future ordinations of pastors would be presided over by a bishop. The agreement was hard fought inside the ELCA. An earlier version, the Concordat of Agreement, had failed in 1997. Objectors argued that making the historic succession a condition of unity turned a matter of church order into a requirement of the Gospel, which Lutheran theology has classically refused. In 2001 the Churchwide Assembly added a provision allowing a synod bishop, in unusual circumstances and for pastoral reasons, to authorise a pastor rather than a bishop to preside at an ordination.
Each of these partnerships is worth reading against the tradition it joins. The Formula of Agreement links the ELCA to churches of the Reformed tradition whose Eucharistic theology Luther himself rejected at Marburg in 1529, and the agreement handles this by declaring the remaining differences not church-dividing rather than by resolving them. Background on those traditions is in our guides to Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Calvinism and Methodism.
The Catholic Dialogue
The Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue in the United States began in 1965, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, and has produced a long series of common statements. Its rounds have addressed the Nicene Creed, baptism, the Eucharist, ministry, papal primacy, teaching authority and infallibility, justification by faith, the one mediator and the saints and Mary, Scripture and Tradition, the Church as a communion of salvation, and the hope of eternal life. In 2015 the dialogue produced Declaration on the Way: Church, Ministry, and Eucharist, which gathered thirty-two Statements of Agreement drawn from fifty years of international and national dialogue and named the questions still unresolved. The ELCA Churchwide Assembly received Declaration on the Way in 2016.
Name the relationship precisely. The ELCA and the Catholic Church are dialogue partners with a substantial record of agreed statements and no shared altar. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism explains the framework Rome works within, and the guide to Catholic and Protestant differences maps the wider terrain.
11. ELCA and Catholic Teaching Compared
The table below covers the questions where the ELCA's own decisions set it apart, and each row states the ELCA position as the ELCA states it before the Catholic position. The general Lutheran and Catholic comparison, on the number of sacraments, infant baptism, and Scripture alongside Tradition, is laid out in the pillar guide to Lutheran belief.
| Question | ELCA | Catholic Church |
|---|---|---|
| Real presence | Affirmed. The body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed under the bread and wine. Transubstantiation is not taught, and most congregations practise an open table. | Affirmed, with the conversion of the whole substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, named transubstantiation by Trent. |
| Justification | By grace through faith on account of Christ, apart from works of the law. Good works follow as fruit. The 1997 Churchwide Assembly approved the Joint Declaration. | By grace, through faith working in charity, with justification really making the sinner righteous. Merit itself is God's gift (Catechism 2008). |
| Ordination | One office of Word and Sacrament, open to women and, since 2009, to clergy in same-gender relationships. Bishops are elected to terms. | A sacrament in three degrees, bishop, priest and deacon, conferring an indelible character, and validly received only by a baptised man (Catechism 1577). |
| The papacy | The Bishop of Rome is not held to have jurisdiction over the whole Church by divine right. Lutheran dialogue texts have discussed a possible renewed Petrine ministry of unity. | The Bishop of Rome holds full, supreme and universal power over the Church by divine institution (Lumen Gentium 22). |
| Marriage | A rite of the church rather than a sacrament. Same-sex marriages may be blessed, with practice left to congregations. | A sacrament between a baptised man and woman, indissoluble and ordered to the good of spouses and to children (Catechism 1601). |
| Purgatory and prayer for the dead | Purgatory is rejected. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession does not forbid prayer for the dead, and ELCA funeral rites commend the dead to God's mercy. | Purgatory is defined doctrine, and prayer and the offering of Mass for the dead are commended (Catechism 1030 to 1032). |
| Marian doctrine | Mary is confessed as the Mother of God and honoured through the church year. The Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are not held as dogma. | The Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption (1950) are defined dogmas, and Mary is venerated as Mother of God. |
| Deciding doctrine | Churchwide Assembly, with two-thirds required for social statements and constitutional change. Decisions are revisable. | Ecumenical councils and the papal magisterium. Solemn definitions are held to be irreformable. |
Set against the Eastern Churches, the distance is wider on the things that determine sacramental sharing. Rome recognises the orders and Eucharist of the Eastern Orthodox Church as valid, and does not extend that recognition to the ELCA. On the doctrine of grace, meanwhile, the ELCA and Rome have signed a joint text that neither has with most other Protestant bodies. The relationship is close in one place and distant in another, and both facts are true at once.
12. Where Catholic Agreement Stops Short
Catholic agreement with the ELCA stops at four points: holy orders, the Eucharist that depends on them, the authority that could settle a disputed question, and several matters of moral teaching. Each of these is a doctrinal barrier rather than a matter of style or preference, and none of them is affected by the 1999 agreement on justification.
Holy Orders
The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism speaks of the ecclesial communities separated from the Catholic Church in the West with warmth and with a plain limit. Unitatis Redintegratio 22 states that these communities, chiefly because of the absence of the sacrament of order, have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness. Called to Common Mission brought ELCA bishops into a line of episcopal succession by Episcopal hands, and Rome does not regard Anglican orders as valid either, following the 1896 apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae. The route does not deliver what it would need to deliver. Add the ordination of women, which Catholic teaching holds cannot be valid, and the position is settled.
The Eucharist and Intercommunion
Catholic canon law permits a Catholic to receive the Eucharist, penance and anointing from a non-Catholic minister only in churches whose sacraments the Church recognises as valid, which covers the Eastern Orthodox and does not cover the ELCA. The Catholic invitation runs the other way with its own conditions: a baptised Christian who is not in full communion may ordinarily receive only in danger of death or grave necessity, and only where the person cannot approach a minister of his own community, asks on his own initiative, manifests Catholic faith in the sacrament and is properly disposed. Those conditions describe a narrow exception for grave need, and a Catholic should not present themselves for communion at an ELCA service.
Authority
Behind every other difference sits the question of who can settle a question. The ELCA can revisit any decision at a later Churchwide Assembly, and its structure of bound conscience allows contradictory positions to coexist within the same church. Catholic teaching holds that Christ gave the apostles and their successors a real teaching authority, that a defined dogma binds, and that the Bishop of Rome holds a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church. The papacy page sets out the Catholic case from Matthew 16:18, Luke 22:32 and John 21:15 to 17 and the practice of the early centuries. Until the question of authority moves, agreements on individual articles remain agreements on individual articles.
Moral Teaching
The 2009 sexuality decisions and the 1991 abortion statement place the ELCA and the Catholic Church in real disagreement on marriage, on the ordering of sexuality, and on the protection of unborn life. Catholic teaching regards these as matters of the natural moral law rather than of ecclesiastical discipline, which means they cannot be traded away in a dialogue. The ELCA reached its positions through a legitimate process under its own constitution, and Catholic teaching judges the outcomes wrong.
What Remains Genuinely Shared
None of the above cancels what is real. The Catholic Church recognises ELCA baptism as valid, and holds that all who are justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ and are rightly called Christian (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). Lutherans and Catholics confess the same creeds, read the same Gospels, and have signed a common declaration on the article Luther called decisive. Unitatis Redintegratio 3 describes those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptised as brought into a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. Imperfect communion is the Council's own phrase, it is exact, and it is the reason the dialogue has continued without interruption since 1965.
What This Asks of You Now
If you are Catholic with Lutheran family, the useful move is to learn both positions well enough to state the other side fairly, which is the only starting point that has ever produced progress. If you are an ELCA Lutheran reading this, you have read the Catholic position stated without hedging and you should hold us to representing yours accurately. If you have drifted from practice in either church, the pressing question is about your own soul. Christ said that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and readiness is asked of every soul now, in ordinary time, through prayer, Scripture and the sacraments. Begin today with whichever of those is nearest to hand.
Take the Lutheran-Catholic question deeper than a comparison table
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