The problem of order. . .

Quite by accident I happened to look over some papers that had been left on my desk.  They included all sorts of uninteresting things but one was a worship folder from November 15, 2020, from the Chapel of the Resurrection at Valpo University.  Now Valpo had long associations with the LCMS and, although it has none of those associations currently, it claims a Lutheran identity.  Its chaplaincy is under the auspices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Indiana-Kentucky Synod.  I have spent many hours on the campus of Valpo over the years but none since the early 1980s.  Reading at the end of the worship folder was this Special Note:

When an ELCA Minister of Word and Sacrament (Pastor) is unavailable for an extended time to preside at Holy Communion for a worshipping community of the ELCA or which is served by a minister of the ELCA, the local synod bishop may authorize a lay person or a Minister of Word and Service (Deacon) to preside at the sacrament for a stated period of time. Bishop Bill Gafkjen of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod, ELCA has provided such authorization for Deacon Kristin through the end of this calendar year.

The announcement caught me quite by surprise.  While I have known and commented long about the checkered past of Missouri in treating the office quite fuzzy, the announcement in print gave evidence that Missouri was not at all alone in the matter of who is authorized to preside at the Lord's Table.  It is clear that Lutheranism has a past and a present in which it is oft presumed that who stands in persona Christi is merely a matter of a few words on a piece of paper, temporarily assigned as needs might be, and not a matter of what we confess in the Augustana.  

Of Ecclesiastical Order they teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called.

A regular call, called according to the [traditional] rite of the Church, involves something different than expediency but training, election, ordination, and installation.  It is not mere formality but ecclesiastical order and respect for apostolic practice (those who would diminish the sacramentality of ordination by suggesting that ordination is merely apostolic custom have a remarkably low view of the apostles!).  I will not argue all the reasons here except to suggest that surely the man was prescient and wise beyond his years when Conrad Bergendoff admitted:

In no area of doctrine has the Lutheran church in America had greater difficulty than in the matter of ministry. All the varied experiences, traditions, and adjustments provide rich material for a study of this subject. (p 19, The Doctrine of the Church in American Lutheranism)  It literally begs the idea that Lutherans have a real doctrine of the Church and the Ministry!  For surely if we did, such strangeness as a deaconess or elder or parochial school teacher or other individual would not receive a slip of paper suggesting that they are authorized temporarily to substitute for a duly called and ordained pastor.

Frankly, I cannot imagine such a thing happening were O. P. Kretzmann still President.  But that would not preclude it from being offered to him as it was by this ELCA Bishop Bill.  Lest Missouri chuckle, let me remind you all of the Wichita recession of the Augsburg Confession in 1989 and the thirty years war it took to re-establish order.  Still our own hands are not clean.  But, apparently, few Lutheran hands are in the US.  At least when it comes to the matter of presiding without benefit of ordination.