This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 19 August 1999, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Churchwide Assembly, meeting in Denver, voted 1,007 to 11 to enter full communion with the Moravian Church in America under an agreement titled Following Our Shepherd to Full Communion.
The Moravian Church's own Northern and Southern Provinces had already accepted the proposal in 1998, the year before the ELCA's own vote, following a dialogue that began when a joint commission of five Lutherans and five Moravians first met at the ELCA's Muhlenberg College in December 1992, nearly seven years before the Denver vote closed the process.
The agreement itself recognizes each church's baptisms, eucharist, ordinations and ministry as authentic expressions of the one apostolic faith, the standard test full communion agreements use to determine whether two churches can share clergy and sacraments without either side absorbing the other.
What the 1999 Denver vote changed for the Moravian Church's standing was placing it in full communion with a Lutheran body many times its size, a seven year process that began with a ten person commission at Muhlenberg College and ended with all but eleven of more than a thousand ELCA delegates voting to recognize Moravian baptism, eucharist and ordination as their own.