Bishop looks to retirement

Lutheran leader leaving after 12 years

By CAROLYN CLICK - cclick@thestate.com

He is known as the steady-as-you-go bishop, the pastoral man with swept-back silver hair who comes across, by his own admission, as the “non-anxious presence” in the room.

Whether resolving a congregational conflict or tinkering with the occasional office plumbing leak, Bishop David A. Donges is that most reliable of Lutherans, a kind man of temperance and deep, abiding faith, his colleagues say.

“I learned a long time ago that of a hundred worries and problems coming down the road, most are in the ditch by the time they get to you,” he said.

Now, after 12 years as the state’s highest ranking official in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Donges is making way for a new bishop to lead the South Carolina Synod and its 163 congregations.

More than 700 of the state’s 63,000 Lutherans will gather this weekend at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center to cast ballots, ushering in a new era for a Protestant faith planted in South Carolina nearly three centuries ago.

It is at once an exciting and sobering time for a denomination that, like other mainline Protestant denominations, is struggling with declining membership.

“It’s certainly a time for us to say thanks for all that has been and to look forward to future opportunities,” said the Rev. Mary Anderson, pastor of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Columbia, the church that first called Donges to South Carolina.

CONSUMMATE CHURCHMAN

The 67-year-old Donges, who retires officially July 31, preached and presided Friday night at the celebration of Holy Communion. Today, Lutherans will gather for a banquet in his honor.

He has been the consummate churchman, reaching out across the denomination and the world to establish connections with the Lutheran church in Japan and Tanzania, said the Rev. Herman Yoos, pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Columbia.

“He has made us aware we are more than just congregations,” Yoos said, “that we have a connection to the (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) and the wider church around the world.”

There is, too, a palpable feel of change in the air.

“I think this is the most wide open race I’ve seen since I’ve been in South Carolina,” Yoos said.

Donges, a cradle Lutheran from Pennsylvania, has not sought out controversy nor has he shied from it.

But he has found himself front and center in disputes as public as the fight over the Confederate battle flag and as private as a painful tussle over the placement of a grave site in a Lexington County churchyard.

In 1980, when he first came to South Carolina as the senior pastor of Incarnation Lutheran, he joined in the fractious debate over removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State House dome.

“My only embarrassment was that flag on top of the State Capitol,” he said last week. “I certainly respect the heritage of the state and all of that, but that is a place of sovereignty and that flag had no business being there.”

Twice, the South Carolina synod passed resolutions advocating its removal. In 1997, Donges joined 500 other clergy in a silent march around the Legislature.

Then, in 1999, he and other bishops agreed that the Conference of Bishops would respect a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People boycott and bypass Charleston for a meeting.

Donges’ wife, Carolyn, called him the next morning in Denver, where the national Lutheran assembly was meeting, and read the morning headline from The State: “Lutheran Bishop Supports Flag Boycott.”

“I came back to a real storm of controversy,” he said. Hundreds of e-mails and letters, some ugly and virulent, poured into his office and for six or seven months he endured one of the most uncomfortable periods of his tenure.

“We weathered that storm pretty well and the flag did come down,” he said. “Deep down our people knew it was the right thing to do.”

Some pastors disagreed openly, but others applauded his boldness.

“I appreciate him coming forth with that,” Anderson said.

Now, he said, Lutherans, like other mainline Protestant denominations, are wrestling with issues of human sexuality, including homosexuality and recognition of gay unions.

In March, a task force released a draft statement that will be discussed at the 2009 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Assembly.

The document has satisfied neither the right nor the left, he said, but Donges surmises that the great middle of the church — the parishioners he describes as “the heart and mind and soul of the church” — will find in its 50 pages the same nuanced ambiguity and paradox that defines their own thinking. In other words, there is no clear answer.

Unless the 1960s battles over civil rights and the ordination of women, “the reality is that the vast middle of the church does not know what is the right thing to do and therein lies the dilemma.”

DAVID FROM ST. DAVID’S

Born into a Lutheran family in the western Pennsylvania town of Davidsville — where he attended the only church in town, St. David’s Lutheran Church — Donges is an unabashed Lutheran.

He is committed to a denomination that he acknowledges has been sidelined by a cultural shift toward nondenominational and nontraditional worship.

“Denominational loyalty is dropping every day,” he said. “It used to be if you were born into a Lutheran family, by golly, you stayed Lutheran. Now you go where the programs are.”

It is a trend that puzzles and, perhaps, saddens him. He worries that the “feel-good” theology of some modern churches is focused on what the Bible says, rather than what the Bible means.

“It just doesn’t seem to encounter the world in the ways in which I think the Lutheran Church does, although we can’t pack arenas or stadiums,” he said.

“I don’t know of a church in the world that has a theology, a history, a liturgy, the pastoral care emphasis, the social conscience, preaching, word and sacrament as does the Lutheran Church,” he said.

“I don’t know of a church in the world that has those gifts, all those gifts, and I think our people sometimes don’t have a clue.”

His exit from public church life will mean more time for golf, one of his passions, and more extensive travel with his “Sweet Carolyn,” a retired educator to whom he has been married for nearly 39 years.

The couple had no children and are devoted to each other — he has given her a red rose on the 13th of each month for those four decades to mark the anniversary of their marriage on Dec. 13, 1969.

At heart, he said, he remains an “optimistic Lutheran,” confident in the grace of God and the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ.

“We believe in our Confessions that the church is and always will be.”

Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.