Episcopal News Service November 14, 2006
Executive Council welcomed for worship at Lutheran headquarters
ELCA's Presiding Bishop thanks Episcopal Church for its witness
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[ENS] The Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Mark S. Hanson, told members of the Executive Council November 14 that the Episcopal Church's "public witness" in struggling to live in unity amid diversity "gives hope to all of us."
Hanson, leader of both the 4.8 million baptized members of the ELCA and of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), made his remarks after the Executive Council and Episcopal Church Center staff celebrated a noon Eucharist with some of the ELCA's Churchwide Office in suburban Chicago.
He said Lutherans pray for and "feel the burden" that the Episcopal Church and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori bear in having struggles over diversity and human sexuality, played out in a more public way than in the ELCA.
"This is the same set of questions that the Lutheran World Federation is dealing with," he said.
Hanson also thanked the 25th Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, for his friendship and leadership.
Hanson said that the two denominations have "only begun to imagine" what work can be done through their nearly six-year-old Called to Common Mission agreement.
He said that local partnerships made possible by the agreement may well have lessons to teach the two denominations and their global organizations about how people of faith can work together.
Full story: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_79696_ENG_HTM.htm
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