Full Communion, and the Arguments It Cost

The church has pursued ecumenical agreement more actively than most, and each agreement has been contested inside it. A Formula of Agreement in 1997 established full communion with three Reformed churches, resolving the sixteenth century dispute over the presence of Christ in the supper by declaring the remaining difference not church-dividing. In 1999 the church entered full communion with the Episcopal Church under Called to Common Mission.

That second agreement was the hard one. It required the church to adopt the historic episcopate, meaning that future bishops would be installed with Episcopal bishops taking part, so that the succession would be shared. Opponents inside the church argued that this made an order of ministry a condition of unity, which the Augsburg Confession does not, and the agreement passed the churchwide assembly narrowly after an earlier version had failed. A provision allowing exceptions for ordinations by a pastor was added in response.

Also in 1999 the Lutheran World Federation, to which the church belongs, signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the Roman Catholic Church, stating a common understanding of the doctrine at the centre of the Reformation. A decade later the 2009 churchwide assembly voted to allow congregations to call pastors in same-gender relationships, and a number of congregations left in the years that followed to form the North American Lutheran Church.