Dear Friends:
The Lutheran-Episcopal Drafting Team has prepared the enclosed document
in further response to its mandate. We submitted an earlier version on
April 9, 1998. Since then the 1998 synodical assemblies have met. The
assemblies and their participants were provided with background
materials and encouraged to discuss the draft and to make comment. They
and hundreds of other individuals from throughout the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America have sent us their suggestions, criticisms,
and encouragements. We have chronicled, analyzed, and responded to them
all. Of course, we cannot hope to have satisfied all correspondents,
since much of the advice we received from some contradicted the advice
given by others. We have taken the response to be a sign of vitality in
the ELCA and a signal of the love and concern members show to this
church, The Episcopal Church, and the church at large.
In the April 1998 draft, we supplemented the formal document with three
explanatory statements by the Lutheran drafting team members. This time
we are not doing so, though each of us is free to state our own cases in
the forums of our choice. As was the case with the earlier draft, one of
the drafters "does not recommend." His appointment to the committee was
in part to assure that objections to the emerging Concordat of Agreement
be voiced and heard. He fulfilled that role conscientiously. As was the
case previously, the other two of us enthusiastically do recommend this
draft as we commend it to you.
Let it also be said with gratitude that the three Episcopal team members
were unfailingly attentive, helpful, and generous in the manifestations
of their Christian spirit. They, too, are filled with hope that this
draft will make its contribution to communion between our two bodies, as
they set out responsibly to represent Episcopal concerns.
As chair of the drafting team, to whom the originals of most
correspondence were sent, I want to take the liberty of making one point
clear, since it has much to do with the framing of this document. "Why
do you not talk more about our 'common mission' and less about
'episcopate?'" was the question of many who then went on to discuss the
episcopate at length. We tried to stay within the structure of the
original Concordat of Agreement, as proposed in 1997, in part because
The Episcopal Church has already approved it. We believe it succinctly
sets forth the rationale and hope for "common mission," and that the
theme will best be worked out in the life of two bodies in communion
with each other. We addressed the episcopate because we were charged to
do so and because the correspondents did.
One question raised by many was this: was the drafting committee given
and did it accept a narrower mandate than that approved by the
Churchwide Assembly in 1997 and by the authorizing Church Council
action. Why, it was asked, did we deal with "the historic episcopate" as
integral to communion with The Episcopal Church? Why, we were asked, did
we not show more imagination and come up with a plan that would allow
for such communion without the episcopate? Every alternate proposal to
this one included some such plan, and none was or could be acceptable to
the Episcopalians.
The charge to us was not a narrowing of the assignment but a mere
statement of fact, a faithful summary taken from decades of
Lutheran-Episcopal dialogue. Our conversations with our three
imaginative and accommodating Episcopal colleagues made clear that the
critics were misinterpreting the situation. Not once in this year of
intense work or in our consulting of the records of antecedent
conversations through the years did we find a single Episcopal thinker
who envisioned their departing from the Anglican Communion by exchanging
ministries apart from the episcopate. We hope we have made the case for
the integrity of our patterns of the ministry of Word and Sacrament
within that context.
Our churches made a commitment in the 1982 interim eucharistic sharing
agreement to address the matters defined in the Concordat of Agreement,
which was first presented for study in 1991 and which came before our
1997 assemblies for action. That Concordat of Agreement was approved by
The Episcopal Church but, as you recall, it fell a half dozen votes
short of passage by a two- thirds margin in the ELCA Churchwide
Assembly. The latest draft of "Called to Common Mission: A Lutheran
Proposal for a Revision of the Concordat of Agreement" is intended to
fulfill the commitment made by the ELCA's predecessor church bodies in
the 1982 action.
"Called to Common Mission" opens the way for us to envision an exchange
of ministries in the service of our "common mission." This draft
foresees a great expansion and deepening of that mission by churches in
communion.
In Christ,
Martin E. Marty
Chair of the Drafting Team
