I grew up in a non-Christian household in Germany and first came to Australia as a backpacker in 2005. After travelling around for 6 months, I arrived in Adelaide on a warm Friday morning in December and wandered the streets of the CBD until the beauty of Bethlehem Lutheran Church led me to step inside and look at the interior. After striking up a conversation with some friendly Christians inside, I was invited to attend Sunday worship – the first service I ever attended. Two days later, as I sat in an unfamiliar wooden pew and heard unfamiliar words spoken about God, I was overcome by tears and intense emotion that I can only describe as the power of the Holy Spirit. A hole I hadn’t even realised I had inside was filled and what I hadn’t even been looking for, I had suddenly found. God found me in a powerful way that morning and all I wanted to do was find out more. A few weeks later, I realised that I was longing to be baptised. The pastor gave me my first ever Bible and I started devouring it. I couldn’t stop. God worked in me an intense paradigm shift and my outlook on the world and the people around me changed. Such is the power of the Good News. I quickly engaged in the life of the congregation, started visiting people, attending Bible study, having long discussions about the Bible until late into the night. It was then that God made it very clear to me that I should be a pastor and serve His people, teaching and spreading the Good News, ministering to the flock and serving the Church. I was baptised at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Adelaide. 

Soon after, my year of backpacking around Australia came to an end, I returned to Germany and enthusiastically enrolled in the pastoral stream at the theological faculty of the University of Leipzig, my hometown. I attended worship at my local Lutheran church every week and became very engaged in many of their activities. But this was a challenging and trying time for me. The Christians I met there were by far not as friendly as I had experienced in Australia, the church not welcoming and very reluctant to teach a living faith according to the way of Jesus. When I started my university classes, I realised that academic and intellectual concepts of theology dominated over spiritual and practical approaches. I was a young Christian with a very new faith and needed a nurturing environment to gain strong standing in my own faith, so I made the decision to return to Adelaide and study a Bachelor of Theology degree at Australian Lutheran College (ALC). 

It was then that I realised that there was no female ordination in the Lutheran Church of Australia. What was more, there was actually no full time ministry role in a congregation that a female could enter into upon completing theological studies at ALC. At the time, it concerned me little because I thought God had planned a future for me in Germany, where, much like in most Lutheran Churches around the world, female ordination has been the case for a number of decades. I didn’t realise at the time that simply my presence at ALC as a female was making a statement for some and seemed like rocking the boat. I was simply there to learn more about the Word and ministry to serve God in growing the Kingdom.

In my second year of study, I met my wonderful husband and we got married at the beginning of my third year, his second year in the school of pastoral theology. Admittedly, I realised then that it seemed much easier to be accepted as an individual as the wife of a pastoral student than as a theological student in my own right. I was told by many well-meaning people that my theological studies were going to be such an asset to my husband’s ministry and little effort was given to imagine why I had ever enrolled in theological study or that I might intend to minister the Word of God to people in my own right.  

We had three beautiful children and moved from Adelaide to the place my husband was placed as a graduate pastor (Newcastle, NSW), and then took a call to Perth (WA). I spent 7 and a half intentional years home full time with my young children, supporting my husband’s ministry and the life of our congregation in the ways I could. I came to a realisation that God intended for me to remain in Australia instead of returning to Germany. That was a painful realisation because I saw no future for myself as a pastor in the LCA, the denomination I love because it is the Church that has nurtured me into a living relationship with Jesus. That relationship means everything to me. I started to experience intense pain with Synod after Synod that slightly missed the two thirds majority to embrace the ordination of women into our Church.

But God will not leave it alone. I keep on hearing the call from God that I shall serve him as a pastor. And as much as I try and seek other paths and look towards other denominations, God makes it very clear that I need to serve within the LCA, as painful as that is for me. Painful, but above all, joyful! Because I’m full of joy! I’m full of joy for the Gospel, the most precious News anyone could ever receive. It has transformed my life from the inside out and I long to proclaim the Good News without ceasing, in my private life and in public worship and wherever there is opportunity. God longs for His Kingdom to grow and to expand, for more and more people to return back to Him. I know this is also the longing of our LCA. That’s why my joy is constantly mixed with pain, because I hear pastors proclaim the Good News so vividly, talking about how we are all made in the image of our loving God and made to live our lives in response to the grace we have received in Jesus Christ’s redeeming death. Yes! How is it then that women like me who are yearning to do just that, to proclaim the Good News and minister to God’s people, get told by some of those very same pastors that they cannot and that they need to stop being so passionate about the Gospel or channel their passion in a more quiet way that’s not up front? God wants all to share in His Kingdom’s work. In all the different capacities we have, in the different ways we are gifted, in the different ways we are called. Only then do the passionate sermons we hear from pulpits in the LCA actually make any sense, when we can be as bold as Jesus who embraced all people to serve in God’s Kingdom. May we step out boldly in the power of the Holy Spirit to continue on this journey of the LCA together, to proclaim Christ boldly together as men and women. There are only winners in this journey together, as we can all fully embrace our callings and work together so more people get to hear the Good News and are nurtured in their faith.