Lutheran gay clergy vote tests mainline churches

Let's see if this decision causes the same division in the Lutheran church that it has caused in the Episcopal church.

In its vote on Friday to allow open homosexual clergy, the nation's largest Lutheran denomination has laid down a new marker in a debate over the direction of mainline Protestant Christianity, a tradition that once dominated American religious life.

By voting to allow gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy, the 4.7-million member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will either show how a church can stand together amid differences, or become another casualty of division over sexual morality and the Bible, observers say.

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