An Interview with Bp. Donald McCoid

We asked a few ques­tions of Bp. Don­ald McCoid, ordained for 42 years, bishop since 1987, and Exec­u­tive for Ecu­meni­cal and Inter-Religious Rela­tions in the Evan­gel­i­cal Lutheran Church in Amer­ica since 2007.

Tell us how you got involved in Lutheran-Catholic dialogue.

Grow­ing up I didn’t know much about the Catholic church. I had friends that were Catholic but I was igno­rant of the church’s prac­tices and poli­cies. I didn’t have a judgment—I just didn’t know much about it. As I began to learn more about the Catholic church, I wanted to know a lot more about it! It’s helped me in many ways become a bet­ter Lutheran. I have looked for ways to build bridges between my faith under­stand­ing and those of peo­ple who are Catholic from the point of view of the­ol­ogy and liturgy. I was prob­a­bly most renewed by the litur­gi­cal renewal move­ment because of the advances of the Catholic church, post-Vatican II.

Can you spec­ify how this made you a bet­ter Lutheran?

Sacra­men­tally. I now have a sense of the cen­tral­ity of word and sacra­ment in the life of the church. I grew up in a con­gre­ga­tion that had very infre­quent com­mu­nion ser­vices. I came to the real­iza­tion as a pas­tor of a church that edu­ca­tion needed to be done because I felt that every weekly liturgy needs to have com­mu­nion at the heart of expe­ri­enc­ing the pres­ence of Christ.

The prepa­ra­tions lead­ing up to the Joint Dec­la­ra­tion on the Doc­trine of Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion were some of the most excit­ing read­ing and pre­sen­ta­tions that I have ever been involved in. I was invited to a Catholic sem­i­nary to share per­spec­tives on the JDDJ. Loved it! I really loved doing the prepara­tory work. What was most excit­ing was the question-and-answer time, because I also real­ized that many peo­ple sit­ting in that Catholic sem­i­nary class really did not know what Luther­ans believe about jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, about the­ol­ogy, our Con­fes­sions, our view on the real pres­ence in the sacrament.

I also would con­fess that one time I used to define my Lutheran faith in how we were dif­fer­ent from Catholics, Reformed, Methodists and oth­ers, and that is cer­tainly not how I do it today. It is so won­der­ful to have a com­mon affir­ma­tion of faith even while we address differences.

What’s the next big thing you hope to see between Luther­ans and Catholics?

I’d love to see a Joint Dec­la­ra­tion on the holy eucharist and bap­tism. Fol­low­ing that I’d love to see the day in which we could com­mune together. But we have to lay the foun­da­tion first.

What would you rec­om­mend to the Lutheran and Catholic peo­ple of God out there who want to make a difference?

I think we need to know what we believe. We also need to be in dia­logue on the local parish level, and the local judi­ca­tory synod/diocese level. For all the advance­ments and deci­sions we have nation­ally and inter­na­tion­ally, it doesn’t always fil­ter down to the local level. Spir­i­tual ecu­menism, which is some­thing the Catholic church lifts up, is some­thing we can all lift up through our mutual shar­ing. We could sit down together with Luther’s Small Cat­e­chism and Car­di­nal Kasper’s Hand­book of Spir­i­tual Ecu­menism. It would be very inter­est­ing for peo­ple to know what we believe in terms of the Ten Com­mand­ments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacra­ments. When peo­ple go to church together, they often com­ment that the Lutheran liturgy is very much like the Catholic liturgy. What we need to do is have peo­ple sit down and say, Lutheran and Catholic the­ol­ogy have many sim­i­lar­i­ties too! We can build on those strong points that we hold in com­mon even as we make advances in under­stand­ing the differences.