Jenan Taylor
29 November 2024
A women’s ordination advocate in the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand says the Church needs to be safer for women ministers in the wake of its recent decision to endorse their ordination.
Theologian, associate professor Dr Tanya Wittwer believes a major cultural shift and trauma-informed processes are needed to ensure support, respect, compassion and care for women in ministry in the church’s structures and decision making.
She said until now women felt unable to lift their voices amid a culture of polarisation and negativity towards those who wanted women to be ordained.
The LCANZ general synod resolved to support a proposal to remove from its doctrinal theses a paragraph which prohibited women from entering pastoral ministry on the basis of the teaching of Scripture in early October.
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The Church has tried to introduce women’s ordination five times since 2000, but Dr Wittwer said its members had been formally discussing it since about 1985.
She said the struggle to get women’s ordination endorsed centred around disagreement about the interpretation of two Scriptural verses in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy.
She said despite the Church’s advisory body on theology and doctrine concluding in 1999 that there was no scriptural reason to prohibit the ordination of women, a minority continued to stand against it.
Dr Wittwer believed the decision to accept the women’s ordination proposal came about now because synod delegates were asked to allow women to be ordained, rather than to embrace their ordained ministry.
She said the Church was embarking on a journey towards accepting diversity in how Scripture was interpreted, and diversity of practice.
According to a LCANZ report, two widely held views persisted within the Church – that only men could be ordained, and that both men and women could be ordained.
The LCANZ wanted to find a way to operate as one church with two different ordination practices, which would enable women’s ordination, and allow the continuity of men-only ordinations in LCA communities.
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Dr Wittwer said the decision to approve women’s ordinations drew both relief and grief among proponents, and optimism that women would be able to be heard and be more visible.
There was a sense of celebration among younger women who felt called to or were studying towards ordination, because they could now see a future for themselves.
But she said the relief for long-time advocates was tinged with grief for the women who had not lived to see it happen, and for those who were now too old to respond to that call.
“Back in the 1990s, when we were heading towards the first vote in the year 2000 there was a solid group of women who were studying together, and there was the sense of this will be happening soon,” Dr Wittwer said.
“Many of those women are now of an age where they feel it’s not something that they can do moving forward.”
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Dr Wittwer said many women who had felt called to ordination had left the LCANZ in the last 20 years. Some headed overseas, and some went to the Anglican and Uniting Churches instead to be ordained.
“There are a lot of women who were nurtured by the Lutheran church, and probably still consider themselves thoroughly Lutheran in their theology, who are already serving in other churches, and I would not anticipate they would return to the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand,” she said.
She said proponents would continue to advocate for a trauma-informed and safe environment for those women who were hoping to be ordained, including in their congregations and at pastors’ conferences.
Dr Wittwer said they were working out the conditions that would best support the positive reception of women in ministry, and were drawing on how the Church overseas, and other denominations in Australia, transitioned to women in ministry.
The leader of the LCANZ Bishop Paul Smith was contacted for comment.
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