There are two branches of the Lutheran Church in America -- the Evangelical, and the smaller Missouri Synod, which has about 2.3 million members. The Missouri Synod is conservative; it does not believe it's a good idea to participate in joint worship with other religions. They are concerned that joint appearances might give the impression they agree that we are all in this together.

The Reverend Rob Morris, the new pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) in Newtown, participated in the interfaith prayer service that was attended by Gov. Dannel Malloy and President Barack Obama. Criticism within Morris' church mounted until the president of the Missouri Synod called on Mr. Morris to apologize. By participating, said the leader of the Missouri Synod, Mr. Morris might have been seen as suggesting that differences between religions are not important.

Mr. Morris apologized. The leader of the Synod accepted the apology, saying it was not Morris' intention to give the impression that other faiths are equally valid. "There is sometimes a real tension between wanting to bear witness to Christ and at the same time avoiding situations which may give the impression that our differences with respect to who God is, who Jesus is, how he deals with us and how we get to Heaven, really don't matter in the end," he wrote.

To me, pronouncements by those who have an inner track on the ultimate truth were eerily familiar.

My grandfather, my mother's father, the Rev. Eberhard Holm, was a longtime Evangelical Lutheran pastor. His own father and grandfather were also Lutheran pastors back in Germany. Rev. Holm eventually taught at the Waterloo, Ontario seminary and then for years was treasurer of the Evangelical Synod of Canada. He wrote his sermons and treasury reports on the same desk where I am writing this.

When my mother, her sister Johanna and her brother Reimer all moved from Canada to Detroit, Aunt Jo and Uncle Reimer stuck with their father's Evangelical branch of Lutheranism, while my mother jumped to the Missouri Synod. The differences the two synods had with each other were not important to her; she simply found a church in a good location, she liked the pastor and so she joined.

Back in Canada her father, my Opa, was not happy. In his view, she might as well have become a Catholic. She had already married a Catholic, her children were being raised Catholic, so she wasn't doing much right. But she would always be a rock-solid Lutheran; she wouldn't think of anything else.

Actually, it seemed to me (I was getting quite an education at age five about disputes between religions and within religions) that she seldom thought of anything but church.

Once a month she received a magazine called THE LUTHERAN, from which she read to me aloud, getting more and more excited as she went along. It seemed to me that its writers were pretty much anti-everything.

My father always came home from work precisely at 5:30, and walked into the house in his fire marshal's uniform and hat, beaming and peaceful, and my mother would be lying in wait for him.

"Do you know what you've been up to in South America?"

"Who, me?" my father would ask.

"Your church! They're doing it again!"

My father was informed by Catholic authorities, as were we all, that it was a serious sin (somewhere between venial and mortal) to attend services at any non-Catholic church. I remember my father telling my mother, "I'll go, but I won't sing."

As a boy I asked nuns, priests, my mother even, that if we all believed in the same God, what difference did it make what we wore, or said or sang on Sunday morning?

I never got a decent answer from anybody.
