ELCA launches initiative joining Indigenous-led Truth and Healing Movement
Indigenous Lutherans lead a worship service during the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's churchwide assembly last year in Columbus, Ohio. (RNS photo by Emily McFarlan Miller)
The head of the country’s largest Lutheran denomination announced April 12 that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is launching its own Truth and Healing Movement to help its 3 million members better understand the “colonizing impacts” the church has had on Indigenous people, both past and present.
“We must be in better, right, and healthy relationships with the Indigenous people of Turtle Island,” ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton said in a written statement. “As we know, the truth and our knowing and embracing it, is the first step toward healing for all of us.”
The initiative was born out of the mainline denomination’s 2016 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and A Declaration of the ELCA to American Indian and Alaska Native People, delivered publicly last year at its churchwide assembly in Columbus, Ohio.
