You hate to see anyone go down the wrong path in their life, but you hate it more when it's within your family. You don't really think the tragedy is worse than when a stranger goes wrong; just the same, it feels worse.

If (say) a woman you don't know goes into prostitution, you're sorry. If your sister does, you're heartbroken.

It's the same with a church. I'm a Lutheran, so I was especially saddened when the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) decided last week that its clergy are free to practice homosexuality within "committed relationships." Though many delegates to the ELCA convention objected — citing all those familiar Bible verses on the subject — the spirit that ruled the day was summed up in a sentence from the Associated Press report:

Tim Mumm, a gay man and an assembly delegate from Whitewater, Wis., said the Scripture that guides opponents of the more liberal policy was written by mortals, at a much earlier time, and doesn't reflect what many Christians now believe.

Well, this is just painful. I'm not an ELCA Lutheran; I'm a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). But we share a name and a theological heritage. If there's one thing that's most central to that heritage, it's Martin Luther's conviction that we should be guided by sola scriptura (Scripture alone) — not "what many Christians now believe." So I have the same reaction as LCMS pastor Joshua Scheer, who feels like the victim of "identity theft." I want to tell everybody who doesn't already know: Don't blame us! This isn't how Lutherans do things! I know some ELCA members who feel the same way.

How do we do things? Scheer shows how in critiquing ELCA's call for its members "to welcome, care for, and support" same-gender couples. Au contraire, he writes: The Word of God tells us "to lovingly call our neighbors out of sinful behavior and apply the forgiveness of God to enable them to do so."

What if the prophet Nathan had told David that it was all right for him to have Bathsheba in a loving, committed relationship? Instead, God sent Nathan to rebuke the King and took away the son that was the product of David and Bathsheba's sin. What did our Lord Himself tell the woman caught in adultery? "Go and sin no more." He did not seek to "welcome, care for, and support" the woman in her sin. Instead He lovingly called her out of it.

This approach is pretty clearly scriptural. So, Scheer wonders, "How has it gotten to the point that when I tell others that I am a Lutheran ... I have to qualify it as not being the type that supports homosexuality?"

Good question, and not just for Lutherans. The answer is a case study in how many Christian churches — and Christians — can go off track.

The deeper problem here isn't homosexuality. ELCA has been walking down the wrong path for years now; this was just the latest step. Where they really went wrong was when they lost sight of the Bible.

I won't walk you through the history of Lutheranism in America: It's long and involved enough for professors to teach classes. (I know: I've taken one.) But here's the most important part.

In the 20th century, a movement called Historical Criticism — which had already rolled through much of Europe — surged through the seminaries of numerous American church bodies. Basically, it was the view that Mumm voiced above: The Bible was written by men and it's full of mistakes. Yes, the critics said, the Bible contains the Word of God, but it's mixed in with all sorts of human errors. It must be interpreted in the light of modern, enlightened thought.

Where the movement took hold — in the seminaries of the "mainline" church bodies — it generally never let go. But there were a few cases where it was beaten back. The biggest (numerically) was the Southern Baptist Convention; the second biggest was the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In the 1970s "Battle for the Bible," both churches fought off the spirit of the age and took back their seminaries for the principle that God's Word is, in fact, God's Word.

Alas, several other Lutheran bodies didn't do the same, and in the late '80s they merged into ELCA. Lutherans in general aren't a radical bunch, and many of the individual churches stayed solid on the Scriptures. But many others didn't. ELCA officials dealt with the issue by not dealing with the issue: They simply let each church go its own way, each teaching more or less what it chose. In the recurring phrase of the book of Judges, "everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

And all the while, the poison of Historical Criticism kept working its way through the system, which kept turning out pastors who believed things that were alien to the people in the pews. Which brings us to where things stand today.

To some of those people, the church's new stance on homosexuality comes as a shock. Hopefully, though, it'll come as a belated wake-up call. How have things gotten to this point in a church body? Because the church let go of God's Word. And without that anchor, all the church can do is drift along with the culture.

The same goes for every Christian. You can find professed believers modifying the faith all the time, saying things like "I don't believe in a God who'd send people to Hell." The operative words are "I" and "a," as if there's more than one God and I get to pick which one to follow. If I think that, I'm actually playing God myself. And I should know where that started.

It's so tempting to indulge in a type of spiritual, chronological snobbery. We'd like to look back (and down) on those ancient believers in their ancient societies, to pat ourselves on the back for the progress "we" have made since then, and to create a more modern and (if we do say so ourselves) nicer brand of Christianity. But we're kidding ourselves. Worse, we're flattering ourselves.

When we start cutting out parts of the Bible we don't like, we're not being modern, enlightened Christians. We're not being Christians at all. Nor are we being loving. The only way to do that is to pass along the gift of the Word God gave. All of the Word.