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- The 2025 ELCA Churchwide Assembly opened July 28 at the Phoenix Convention Center, meeting through Aug. 2. Photo: Cetera Jacobs/ELCA
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- Deborah Hutterer, bishop of the Grand Canyon Synod, offers a greeting from the assembly’s host synod. Photo: Cetera Jacobs/ELCA
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- Tracey Beasley, chair of the ELCA Church Council’s committee on public repentance for patriarchy and sexism, speaks about the assembly’s Friday evening prayer service that will include a litany of confession. Photo: Cetera Jacobs/ELCA
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- Diana Haywood, former North Carolina Synod vice president, demonstrates use of a voting device. Photo: Cetera Jacobs/ELCA
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- Elizabeth Eaton, ELCA presiding bishop, delivers a sermon on the eucharist as an act of resistance in a time of division. Photo: Janine Truppay/ELCA
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- Albert Starr (left), an ELCA pastor, and Imran Siddiqui, ELCA vice president, lead worship at the opening service. Photo: Cetera Jacobs/ELCA
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- Phyllis Solgere, Southeastern Synod vice president, serves as a communion minister during opening worship. Photo: Janine Truppay/ELCA
The 2025 ELCA Churchwide Assembly officially opened July 28 at the Phoenix Convention Center, meeting through Aug. 2. Day one consisted of a worship service of Holy Communion and the first plenary session.
The assembly, the primary decision-making body of the church, convened under the theme “For the Life of the World,” and will this week elect a new presiding bishop and secretary.
The worship service opened with an acknowledgment that the assembly was gathering on the original and ancestral homelands of the Hohokam, O’odham and Piipaash peoples, giving thanks for their presence on the land.
Prior to communion, Elizabeth Eaton, ELCA presiding bishop, delivered a sermon on the eucharist as an act of resistance in a time of increasing division. “The world wants to divide us, but the eucharist brings us together,” she said. “In the eucharist, we are ‘re-membered,’ and in God, nothing is lost.”
During the first plenary session, voting members cast a first ballot for ELCA presiding bishop. There were 667 legal ballots cast; 501 were needed for election. There was no election.
The plenary also included a recognition of past officers of the church; a report from the assembly Nominating Committee; and a greeting from Deborah Hutterer, bishop of the assembly’s host synod, the Grand Canyon Synod.
Plenary one concluded with a presentation about the assembly’s Friday evening prayer service that will include a litany of confession and repentance for patriarchy and sexism.
After the 2019 Churchwide Assembly voted to establish a process for public repentance of these sins, the ELCA Church Council formed an ad hoc committee to direct and advise this work. “Together we will confess how this church as a body, and how we as individuals, have hurt people through patriarchy and sexism,” said Tracey Beasley, committee chair.
“We will also repent, which means we will call on the Holy Spirit to work in us to change how we live and act as a church and as individuals.”
