Two women have been announced as the first pastors to be ordained by the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand (LCANZ). This follows last year’s LCANZ Convention of General Synod’the’s decision to remove of a paragraph from the church’s teaching that prevented woemnfrom being ordained.
Maria Rudolph and Sue Westhorp will join four men in being ordained by the church in the next few weeks.
Maria Rudolph has been assigned to serve St John’s Lutheran Church Perth alongside Western Australia District Bishop Peter Hage. She will be ordained as a General Ministry Pastor (GMP) on Palm Sunday, 13 April, at Concordia College Chapel Highgate in South Australia. Born and raised in East Germany, Maria became a Christian in 2006 as a young backpacker after being befriended by Lutherans in Adelaide. When she is ordained, she and her husband, Pastor Michael Rudolph, who serves at Duncraig in suburban Perth, will become the first pastor couple in the LCANZ.
Sue Westhorp will serve St Paul’s Lutheran Church Box Hill in Victoria alongside Pastor Neville Otto. She has most recently been serving as a pastoral associate in Child, Youth and Family Ministry at St Paul’s.
Both women have a Bachelor of Theology from Australian Lutheran College (ALC) – Westhorp got her B.Th degree back in 2004 and has been a registered lay worker in the LCA since 2001.
Details from a Lutheran church report.
Conservative pushback
The International Lutheran Council (ILC), a conservative body has removed LCANZ and the Japan Lutheran church from its server status. “The International Lutheran Council has previously expressed our dismay to both the LCANZ and the JLC over their decisions to depart from the clear teaching of Scripture and the doctrinal standards of the ILC by approving the ordination of women,” noted Rev. Dr. Klaus Detlev Schulz, General Secretary of the ILC. “Since then, we have several times expressed our desire for respectful dialogue on this matter and encouraged the churches in question to return to the teaching of Scripture on ordination. But the churches have made clear they have no intention of doing so.”
In the ILC the conservative The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, which though much older, represents evangelicals in the Us much like the Presbyterian Church of America and the Anglican Church in North America do along side their larger progressive counterparts. LCANZ continues as a member of the Lutheran World Fellowship which is on the progressive side of things, but no longer the ILC..
Autralian Lutherans opposed to women’s ordination have formed the Lutheran Mission Australia (LM-A), with the aim of forming an alternate Lutheran church, with a seminary. Pastor Matt Anker from Adelaide is the president of LM-A. He previously served as Assistant to the Bishop – International Mission in the LCANZ.
“At this stage, we only have a handful of congregations and yeah, people are driving for up to two hours to come, but the congregations have been opening in different parts of the country almost every week through December and into the new year,” Anker told the Lutheran Coffee Hour podcast. “So we are looking forward to continuing to reduce that time travel a bit so that they can be local communities of faith that are sharing the good news.”
“We’ve received lots of requests to plant new congregations in particularly places where Lutherans haven’t been particularly well-known before, which is really interesting… The reality is at the moment, we have more pastors applying to join us than we have places for them to serve.”
According to Anker, the LCANZ v LM-A situation is fluid: “There are a number of congregations in the LCA that are in the process of considering leaving the LCA. And so if some of them make that decision, then that changes.”
The LM-A has now been accepted as a member of the ILC.