bishops, though the number is still low. The first female bishop, April Ulring Larson, was elected in the La Crosse area synod in 1992. In 2018, the ELCA elected its first African-American female bishops: Patricia Davenport in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Viviane Thomas-Breitfeld in South-Central Wisconsin. In 2013, Elizabeth Eaton became the first woman to be elected presiding bishop of the ELCA. The most recent ELCA hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, includes alternate gender-neutral invocations and benedictions in all settings. All of the psalms and many of the hymns and parts of the liturgy have been altered to remove masculine pronouns referring to God. In 2000, the Cooperative Clergy Study Project surveyed 681 ELCA pastors and found that 95 percent of ELCA clergy thought that all clergy positions should be open to women, while 2 percent disagreed. Ordination of LGBT clergy and blessings of same-sex marriages On August 21, 2009, the ELCA's Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis voted to allow congregations to call and ordain gays and lesbians in committed monogamous relationships to serve as clergy. By a vote of 559 to 451, delegates approved a resolution declaring that the church would find a way for people in "publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships" to serve as official ministers. Congregations that do not wish to call these persons to ordained ministry are not required by these policy changes to do so. In reaction, Lutheran CORE, which opposed the decision, stated that it would "initiate a process that we hope will lead to a reconfiguration of North American Lutheranism." In February 2010, Lutheran CORE announced that it would secede from the ELCA and form a new denomination to be named the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). , 37 percent of ELCA pastors were found to support same-sex marriage. The ELCA, in removing sexual orientation as a bar for candidacy in the professional ministry, joined most of its Lutheran sister churches in Europe, including in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Austria. The ELCA is also among a growing number of Christian churches in the United States to make this move. In contrast, the board of one of the ELCA's partner churches, October 2009, the Evangelical Mekane Yesus Fellowship in North America, voted to declare disunity with the ELCA. A press release stated that the board was no longer "in good conscience" "able to commune and partner with ELCA Church that has willfully disobeyed the