I honestly don’t know when I started believing female pastors is a good idea. Growing up in a strong old ELCA Congregation (Lobethal) and going to its corresponding Lutheran primary school might have meant that I received messages that female pastors were a bad idea or against God’s will. But to be honest I don’t remember receiving any such messages, perhaps simply because the idea was not controversial at the time. It was simply assumed that pastors were male. My parents, once the subject was open for discussion, were against it (for awhile). But then, they were my parents, a previous generation. Their opposition seemed natural enough.  

When I entered the seminary the subject of female pastors was beginning to arise on my consciousness. Being a very young seminarian, from a sheltered background, my years at seminary coincided with the drive to try on different, and sometimes radical, ideas. The most radical idea was the absolute amazing grace of God expressed in the Gospel. Discovering this, through the often less than elegant expressions of a fellow theology student, was a bit of a ‘scales falling from my eyes’ experience.  

Discovering the radical Gospel had the effect of making me suspicious of, and sometimes angry toward, the male pastors who had preached so much Law to me in my earlier years. In the past these pastors just bored me, and I was a chronic sleeper during sermons. But now I actually lost respect for them because they seemed like closed-minded, rigid, people who didn’t understand the true power of the Christian faith. I guess that such a legalistic pronouncement as “God cannot abide female pastors” was like waving a red flag at me at the time. And I still work this way – get legalistic with me and I’ll go in the opposite direction. Yes, I was judgemental toward these pastors, which I partly attribute to the strong Wendish family on my mother’s side. 

Speaking of my mother, this crankiness toward the male pastors in my life gelled with another theme from my background. My mother would sometimes complain that she didn’t hear enough or receive enough love from her pastors. Partly this was a function of her emotional neediness that no person alone could fill. But she was also on to something. She was not ministered to in a way that was sensitive to her needs or to her gender. Her pastors always fell short. Part of my drive to become a pastor was to be someone who could meet the needs of people like my mother. When I discovered the Gospel I tried to share (inflict?) my enthusiasm on to her. And then I’d get frustrated with myself for my lack of skill at explaining it, and frustrated with her for not getting it. It was “Here’s the medicine you’ve been craving. Just take it!” A female pastor for Mum might have been a bridge too far, but it just might have helped her as well. 

My seminary education also exposed me to the great variety of ways of understanding texts of the Bible. To encounter the idea that Jesus didn’t necessarily say everything he is quoted as saying; or that Paul sometimes got a bit overexcited and lost the plot, all of those themes of the historical critical method were important things to see, and once seen you cannot un-see them. The Gospels, however, are consistently about Jesus’ inclusion of women, and his reversal of concepts of clean/unclean, inside/outside. So when we then go to Paul and find a text that seems to bar women from being pastors, like 1 Corinthians 14:34, and disregard the context, even when it seems opposed to the general direction of Scripture, that just seemed ridiculous to me. We don’t do that with any other scripture, only this one, which surely suggests people bringing their own agenda to the text. Add to that Martin Luther’s feisty approach that if a text does not seem to proclaim the Gospel, one should have a wrestle with it until you find the Gospel in that text, I took the attitude that women pastors must be a good idea. If people are using such dodgy methods to try to prove it is a bad idea, then it must be a great idea!   

Women’s ordination in those earlier days did seem like a radical idea that only a few enlightened souls (like myself!) would adhere to. I think it is amazing that it has become such a mainstream idea that only a quirk of our constitution and a happy marriage of two synods is stopping it from being current practice. Basically we are a church that supports female pastors. We just haven’t quite figured out how to make it happen. 

The debates on women’s ordination have certainly been dispiriting. Especially at pastor’s conferences, the charade of trying to make a case one way or the other from two texts, has been so disappointing. No pastor who has had a reasonably enlightened seminary education, as we all have had, should be arguing a case as if we are fundamentalist biblicists. No Lutheran pastor should be caring that much about what one or two texts in isolation seem to be saying. I look forward to St Stephen’s proposal getting up so at least we don’t have to keep studying those texts ad nauseum.

So I guess in summary, I didn’t have a notable conversion experience in favour of ordaining women. My big conversion was discovering the Gospel after a legalistic upbringing. Allowing female pastors has since then been totally consistent with the Gospel for me. Other factors then have followed in its wake – seeing Jesus’ approach to women; wondering whether my mother would have been a happier person if she’d had a female pastor; the tribal component whereby the people in the church who support women’s ordination are the people I like more than the others, and so forth.

The Church more broadly speaking ordains women.*

I’m glad about that.

*In 2016 the Lutheran World Federation published the results of its survey of international member churches: 86 of 145 responded.  Of these, only 9 DO NOT ordain women: The LCA/NZ is one of them.  The combined membership of churches ordaining women is in the millions: the LCA/NZ currently has a membership just 30,000.”