Which Ball High graduate never misses a First Lutheran Oktoberfest, found his bride at an Episcopal school, serves on the board of Christus Health (a Catholic nonprofit), sits on the central committee of the World Council of Churches, and is the highest ranking officer of a mainline denomination to live in Galveston County?
The ecumenical answer is Carlos Peña, who was recently re-elected vice president of the 4.6 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But you can be forgiven if his name doesn’t quickly occur to you. Perhaps that is because Peña has chosen to be a bridge builder instead of an iconoclast.
And bridge building can be a tall order for Lutherans these days. As the national magazine Christianity Today noted in a story covering the convention at which Peña was re-elected: “At the biennial Church Wide Assembly of the ELCA, the church affirmed major policy recommendations to allow for the blessing of same-sex unions (which practice will soon inflate to same-sex marriage) and the rostering of gay and lesbian pastors in partnered relationships.”
The hotly disputed measure passed by a single vote.
Issues come and go, but the church is bigger than any set of issues, Peña said.
“To me, it’s just a matter of being fair, of representing all sides and not any faction within the church,” he said.
Like other church leaders, he has found that relations with other denominations often can be more cordial than those between battling wings of the denomination itself.
In an open letter to his church, Peña said blessings had followed destruction in Hurricane Ike and he expected the same would be true for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, after the tumult about doctrine declines.
He wrote: “I pray for the continuing efforts of the ELCA, my understanding of people different from me, and the future, though sometimes it is hard to predict. And I pray for my fellow Lutherans that they may have the strength to commit and weather the storm.”
In a less controversial move, the Lutheran assembly adopted full communion with the United Methodist Church. The move means the two groups will recognize the other’s baptismal and communion practices.
Other Lutheran churches remain divided on differing interpretations of communion.
Peña said he had witnessed daylong, deep, doctrinal dialogues between Lutheran theologians that failed to reach any resolution.
On more day-to-day matters, including hurricane relief, Peña said the denomination had been of enormous help in terms of providing both immediate and long-term assistance, using hundreds of volunteers from across the country to pitch in with clean up and repairs at both First Lutheran and the greater Galveston community.
As a lay leader, he sees a bright future for both his church and the island. Since Hurricane Ike, he said First Lutheran’s mission extends out into the neighborhoods, and he expects it to become a multicultural congregation that will benefit the entire island.
“Because I take great pleasure in serving others and serving God, I’ve been involved in a lot of different things,” he said.
