The leader of the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination warned members that withholding financial support to protest a recent vote to accept gay clergy would be “devastating” to the church, the Associated Press is reporting.

e 4.7 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted last month to allow gay men and women in committed relationships to serve as clergy. The vote at a churchwide assembly has provoked a backlash among some ELCA members, with the conservative group Lutheran CORE urging supporters to direct funding away from the national church.

In a letter to church leaders this week, the AP is reporting, Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson warned that withholding would damage the mission of the Chicago-based denomination.

"Although these actions are promoted as a way to signal opposition to churchwide assembly actions or even to punish the voting members who made them, the result will be wounds that we inflict on ourselves, our shared life, and our mission in Christ," he wrote.

The Rev. Mark Chavez, director of Lutheran CORE, told the AP that the gay clergy vote was the devastating event — "a departure from God's clear word." He called Hanson's letter "an attempt to shift the responsibility of this devastation and crisis within the ELCA away from the people who presided over it and are responsible for it."

Lutheran CORE says 1,200 people have registered for a conference this weekend, which organizers say will start the process of forming an "alternative church fellowship" for traditionalists within the ELCA.