The first openly gay bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a registered Osage Indian and a graduate of Sapulpa High School.
The Rev. R. Guy Erwin was elected May 31 to a six-year term as bishop of the Southwest California Synod of the ELCA, just four years after the denomination approved gay clergy.
"I'm not a gay bishop, I'm a bishop who happens to be a gay man," Erwin said Thursday in a phone interview from his office at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where he teaches.
"The feeling I got was that it wasn't about my being gay, it was really about the assembly perceiving the Spirit leading them toward choosing me.
"My responsibility is to everybody in the synod. There are some for whom my election might be difficult. I'm here for them too. They're my people and I'm going to love them. I love them already," he said.
As bishop, he will oversee 126 congregations with 33,000 members.
Erwin said promoting equal rights for gays and lesbians in the Christian church was not his primary role, "but of course I'm committed to it."
"The primary work of the church is to bring the message of God's love shown in Christ to the world, and everything I do is going to be focused on that," he said.
Erwin was born and spent his early years in Pawhuska. He still has relatives there, and visits as often as he can. He still attends Osage tribal dances.
In 1966, when he was 8, his parents moved to Germany, where he learned to speak German, got interested in church history and was exposed to Lutheranism.
They returned to Pawhuska briefly, then moved to Colorado, and then to Sapulpa.
He was president of the Sapulpa High School student council in his senior year, graduating in 1976.
Erwin said he had a positive experience in high school, and did not think of himself as gay at that time.
"I think young people know more about themselves today than we did back then," he said.
He went to Harvard University, where he got involved in Lutheran campus ministry. He graduated with honors in 1980 and went on to get two master's degrees and a doctorate from Yale University.
It was during graduate school that he began to think seriously about the ministry.
He spent two years in Germany on a Fulbright Grant, working on his doctoral dissertation and preparing for ministry.
By then he was openly gay.
In 1987, the ELCA was created in a church merger, and soon after that, a group of gay and lesbian seminarians were denied ordination.
"The way forward was not clear for gays who wanted to be in the clergy," he said.
"I put those hopes on hold, but I still felt called to the ministry."
For the next 14 years, he taught and worked part time at a church as a parish associate, hoping that the ELCA policy would change, and working toward that change.
He moved to southern California to teach at California Lutheran and continued to serve churches as an unordained minister.
In 2009, the ELCA approved gay clergy.
"I was elated. I was one of the voting members at that assembly. We were tremendously excited," said Erwin, who is now in a committed relationship.
Two years later, on May 11, 2011, in a chapel on his university campus before 600 people, he became one of the first ordained gay ELCA ministers.
Erwin said he is "absolutely comfortable" with what the Bible says about homosexuality.
"I think the way we read the Scriptures today in my church is one that puts the priority of God's love above legalism. The great commandment to love God and love our neighbors encompasses our whole attitude toward the whole Scripture.
"Christians don't all read the Bible the same way. We're on the progressive, modern, critical end."
Bill Sherman 918-581-8398
bill.sherman@tulsaworld.com
Religion
The Rev. Charles Freyder, a chaplain at the prison, said many inmates wanted to help build the chapel and they could hardly contain their excitement.
Yom Kippur service. 11 a.m. Saturday, at Iglesia Oste Asamblea De Dios, 3615 W. 51st St., the new meeting place of Holiness to the Lord Congregation (Kodesh L' Adonai Kahal).
