offices were in the Church House, a former townhouse mansion on Madison Avenue in New York City. Its publishing house, Fortress Press, was on Queen Lane in northwest Philadelphia, and produced the church magazine, The Lutheran. Its demographic focus was on the East Coast, centered on Pennsylvania). It also had large numbers in the Midwest and some presence in the Southern Atlantic states. There are notable exceptions, but LCA-background churches tend to emphasize liturgical expression more than the ALC-background churches. Its theological orientation ranged from moderately liberal to neo-orthodox, with tendencies toward conservative Pietism in some rural and small-town congregations. Its theology originated in the Neo-Lutheran movement. The Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches In 1976, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC) was formed by 250 congregations that had left the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) in a schism precipitated by disputes over biblical inerrancy and ecumenism. These were part of the overall Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy that had been roiling American Protestant churches for several decades. In 1969 the LCMS had elected more conservative leadership under President Jacob A.O. Preus, replacing moderate incumbent Oliver Harms. The new leadership opened an investigation at the synod's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, about the faculty's commitment to inerrancy in biblical interpretation. It also opposed ecumenism. As a result, most of the faculty and student body walked out and established a separate institution named "Concordia Seminary-in-Exile" (but usually referred to as "Seminex"). The AELC was formed in 1976. It brought approximately 100,000 members into the ELCA. Its ethnic heritage was primarily from German immigrants of the mid-19th century, who came to the US following the revolutions in various principalities. Many were abolitionists and Unionists during the American Civil War. By the 1980s, the AELC theology generally resembled that of the LCA. Organization The ELCA is headed by a presiding bishop, who is elected by the Churchwide Assembly for a six-year term (it was a four-year term until 1995). To date, four people have been elected to the position of presiding bishop of the ELCA. Herbert W. Chilstrom served as the first presiding bishop from 1987 to 1995. He was followed by H. George Anderson (1995–2001), who had previously been the president of Luther College. The third presiding bishop was Mark Hanson, who is the past president of the Lutheran World Federation, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Hanson began his tenure as bishop of the Church in