Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches - Formation

Formation

The AELC's forerunner was Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELIM), a moderate caucus within the LCMS that opposed the Synod's more conservative turn in the early and mid-1970s. ELIM was formed when, in the wake of conservative victories at the Missouri Synod's 1973 convention, moderate opponents had convened a conference in Chicago to chart out strategies. The conference's 800 delegates promised moral and financial support for church members who faced pressure due to their opposition to LCMS convention actions, and established ELIM as a network and rallying point for the moderate wing of the LCMS.

In 1974, the LCMS was rent by the Seminex controversy, a walk-out by the vast majority of students and faculty at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, that led to the establishment of a new, rival "Seminary in Exile." In 1975, presidents of eight LCMS districts were threatened with removal from office for allowing their congregations to ordain Seminex graduates as ministers, and four were removed in April 1976. In the wake of the Seminex controversy and these removals, a movement to leave the Synod took shape among dissident congregations and church officials, most of them members of ELIM. The largest number of departures came from the LCMS's non-geographical English District, which had joined the LCMS in 1911. Upon leaving the Missouri Synod, the English District leadership and many of its congregations immediately reconstituted the pre-1911 English Synod, and a number of officials and congregations from other districts followed their lead by exiting the LCMS.

In the end, approximately 250 congregations left the Missouri Synod. In December 1976, these congregations banded together to form a new, independent church body, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC). Not surprisingly, the AELC proved to be more socially and theologically liberal than the LCMS, and shortly after its inception, it departed from LCMS practice on ordination by opening the ministry to women with the ordination of Pastor Janith Otte-Murphy. The AELC was a disappointment in some respects, since it garnered far fewer dissident Missouri Synod congregations than its leaders had initially expected. With congregations totaling about 100,000 members, the AELC represented less than 4% of the membership of the 2.7-million-strong Missouri Synod.

In October 1977, the AELC ordained its first female minister, Janith Otte Murphy of Oakland, California, and Murphy subsequently took up an associate pastor's position at the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, California. The AELC was the third U.S. Lutheran church body to ordain a woman as a minister, following similar moves by the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America in 1970.

The Rev. Will L. Herzfeld, an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. and former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Alabama chapter, served as the AELC's second and last presiding bishop. He was the first African American to lead a U.S. Lutheran church body.