Estranged Lutheran Groups to Meet
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The leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the nation’s two largest Lutheran bodies, have agreed to start making plans for formal joint discussions.
The two churches have not talked since the Evangelical Lutheran Church was formed a decade ago and relations between the two denominations have been frosty.
In July, at its national convention, the 2.6-million-member Missouri Synod adopted a resolution expressing its “deep regret and profound disagreement” with certain actions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church--particularly its acceptance of a joint Lutheran-Roman Catholic statement on the doctrine of justification.
The Missouri Synod is theologically more conservative than the mainline evangelical church--formed in a 1988 merger of the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Assn. of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, a breakaway group of Missouri congregations--and generally shuns ecumenical endeavors with church bodies with which it does not theologically agree.
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