Does the Lutheran Church ordain women?

[Love365]

Does the Lutheran Church ordain women?

 

[PloverWing]

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) does: 50 Years of Ordained Women

The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (LCMS) and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) do not: Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod - Wikipedia , Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod - Wikipedia .

 

[Daniel9v9]

Confessional or orthodox Lutherans do not ordain women. Liberal or liberal-adjacent Lutherans do.

 

[JM]

Confessional or orthodox Lutherans do not ordain women. Liberal or liberal-adjacent Lutherans do.

What Daniel wrote.

 

[RileyG]

The North American Lutheran Church ordains women. (but they have conservative views regarding homosexuality).

 

[pelargir]

What's the deal with DCEs? They can be female and seem to do a lot of things pastors do (with the exception of preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments... although at our LCMS church they help distribute communion). It feels like a slippery slope.

 

[JM]

What's the deal with DCEs? They can be female and seem to do a lot of things pastors do (with the exception of preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments... although at our LCMS church they help distribute communion). It feels like a slippery slope.

I agree. Women shouldn't even be allowed to read the Scriptures in a worship service.

 

[Love365]

Are any women conservative enough to be a priest?

 

[PloverWing]

Are any women conservative enough to be a priest?

I don't understand the question.

If you mean "Are there any female priests/pastors who believe that women should not be priests/pastors?", then there are probably no people in this category.

If you mean "Are there any female priests/pastors who fully affirm the teachings of their church?", then I expect that that is true of almost all ELCA priests/pastors, male and female alike.

If you mean "Are there any Lutheran pastors who affirm Catholic theology so thoroughly that they would make good Catholic priests?", then I'd expect that group of people to be very small. Lutherans and Catholics agree on many things, but they also have significant disagreements.

What do you mean by "conservative"?

 

[JM]

I don't understand the question.

If you mean "Are there any female priests/pastors who believe that women should not be priests/pastors?", then there are probably no people in this category.

If you mean "Are there any female priests/pastors who fully affirm the teachings of their church?", then I expect that that is true of almost all ELCA priests/pastors, male and female alike.​

If you mean "Are there any Lutheran pastors who affirm Catholic theology so thoroughly that they would make good Catholic priests?", then I'd expect that group of people to be very small. Lutherans and Catholics agree on many things, but they also have significant disagreements.

What do you mean by "conservative"?

I placed in bold and red the issue. Those denominations that ordain women are not upholding Lutheran convictions about scripture or the confessions.

The idea of ordaining women is a liberal one...so no, no woman is conservative enough to be ordained because if they were, they would not be ordained.

It's a rhetorical question.

Yours in the Lord,

jm

 

[Love365]

Children are the next generation of Christians.

To get children back in church,
you need young women to bring their children to church.

To get young women back in church,
you need women priests.

 

[Paidiske]

If you mean "Are there any female priests/pastors who believe that women should not be priests/pastors?", then there are probably no people in this category.

Bizarrely, I have met one. She had been ordained alongside her husband and always saw her role as basically being his assistant, but she didn't see herself as having authority in ministry in her own right. When he reached retirement age before she did, she left congregational ministry.

 

[JM]

Children are the next generation of Christians.

To get children back in church,
you need young women to bring their children to church.

To get young women back in church,
you need women priests.

The logic doesn't follow. To get more women into church you need to smash gender roles by having women Priests? Disregarding the Bible is supposed to bring blessings?

 

[Love365]

The logic doesn't follow. To get more women into church you need to smash gender roles by having women Priests? Disregarding the Bible is supposed to bring blessings?

Women were allowed to have the same jobs as men.
Between the 1920s and the 1970s.

Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

Jesus was anointed by Mary of Bethany.

 

[JM]

Women were allowed to have the same jobs as men.
Between the 1920s and the 1970s.

Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

Jesus was anointed by Mary of Bethany.

Being a Pastor is not a "job" but calling by God, ordained by God.

 

[The Liturgist]

Bizarrely, I have met one. She had been ordained alongside her husband and always saw her role as basically being his assistant, but she didn't see herself as having authority in ministry in her own right. When he reached retirement age before she did, she left congregational ministry.

I know of a husband and wife team in the UMC who have a similiar idea. I suspect it is not uncommon in the US, and it can be attributed to an interpretation of the presbyter and presbytera concept one finds in the various Eastern churches.

 

[chevyontheriver]

I know of a husband and wife team in the UMC who have a similiar idea. I suspect it is not uncommon in the US, and it can be attributed to an interpretation of the presbyter and presbytera concept one finds in the various Eastern churches.

I'm wondering if that isn't related to the Catholic approach of always mentioning a permanent deacon and his wife as a team although only the man is ordained. They go through the formation and classes together. Of course the permanent deaconate had been suppressed for a long time before being reintroduced after Vatican II so it doesn't have continual historical witness.

 

[The Liturgist]

I'm wondering if that isn't related to the Catholic approach of always mentioning a permanent deacon and his wife as a team although only the man is ordained. They go through the formation and classes together. Of course the permanent deaconate had been suppressed for a long time before being reintroduced after Vatican II so it doesn't have continual historical witness.

What about in the Greek Catholic churches? I was under the impression they had deacons more or less continually.

 

[chevyontheriver]

What about in the Greek Catholic churches? I was under the impression they had deacons more or less continually.

I think that is correct. My experience of deacons is in the Latin Rite only. How they are trained, how they are formed, how they practice. That was only renewed after Vatican II. Probably only renewable because it had been preserved in the other rites.

 

[The Liturgist]

I think that is correct. My experience of deacons is in the Latin Rite only. How they are trained, how they are formed, how they practice. That was only renewed after Vatican II. Probably only renewable because it had been preserved in the other rites.

Indeed, although I would argue that most of the reforms post Vatican II were not actually called for by Sacrosanctum Concilium. The revitalization of the permanent diaconate was one of the more successful moves.

One thing that was desired by Vatican II but sadly not realized after the council was a revitalization of the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours; a commendable effort was made to revamp this office to increase its use, but it did not work, I would argue, in most parishes, since there remains a superabundance of masses and a scarcity of the Hours. Where they are celebrated one is most likely to encounter Vespers in conjunction with various devotional services.

Now our Lutheran friends, like the Anglicans, actually did revitalize the Divine Office and the public celebration thereof, so that the number and range of services is comparable in some parishes to what one might find in a Byzantine Rite Catholic or Eastern Orthodox parish.

The problem is that in the Roman Rite and the Maronite Rite liturgy, which suffered severe Latinization both before and after Vatican II* have had a tendency where, outside of cathedrals, monasteries and some churches operated by friars or canons regular, the Divine Office has become a devotion mainly used by priests due to their obligation to recite it daily along with serving a mass, daily. This is reflected in the book historically referred to by Syriac Orthodox and Maronite Catholics as the Shimo, a Syriac Aramaic word which indicates that it contains “Canonical Prayer” or “Common Prayer” becoming known in the Maronite Church in Arabic as the Fard, meaning Duty.

Conversely, what were private devotions such as the Rosary and the Novena became liturgized as public services. This compounded the problem, according to the late Jesuit liturgical scholar, much beloved among Orthodox and liturgical Protestants Fr. Robert Taft, SJ, in his splendid book The Liturgy of the Hours, East and West. He also wrote another very good book, A Short History of the Byzantine Rite.

He, along with the Lutheran liturgiologist Dr. Maxwell E. Johnson**, who is still with us, and the Anglican Benedictine scholar Dom Gregory Dix, is one of my three favorite Western liturgical scholars.

I greatly like, and I would note we are in the Lutheran forum, the way the Lutheran Service Book of 2006 implements the Divine Office as my friend @MarkRohfrietsch and hopefully @JM are aware (I have only recently gotten to know @JM, and so I am not sure if he is aware of the extent to which I admire LCMS/LCC liturgics.

Actually the one aspect of the Lutheran Service Book which I had regarded as containing an error, specifically, an advisory rubric on how to chant the Litany of Peace, I recently realized was actually correct insofar as it reflected how it is chanted in Greek and translated that into English.

*ironically, it actually suffered after the council, whereas most of the other Eastern Catholic churches experienced a liturgical renaissance, because for various reasons the Maronites adopted sweeping changes such as the implementation of the three year lectionary, and at the same time the ornate, highly poetic, flowery prayers which characterize the traditional West Syriac rites, including the pre-conciliar Maronite liturgy and the liturgies of the Syriac Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic derivatives of the Syriac Catholic and Malankara Catholic churches were removed, and a new aesthetic of “simplicity” was imposed on a liturgical tradition which historically had the second highest number of anaphorae (eucharistic prayers) of any (45 in total, compared to 86 in the Syriac Orthodox); now there are only six, and the most unique and interesting Maronite anaphora, that of St. Peter Sharar, which is the only anaphora of the East Syriac type to have been used outside of the Assyrian Church of the East and its Roman Catholic counterparts the Chaldean Catholic and Syro Malabar Catholic churches has been disused ever since despite a great desire by many priests and bishops to restore it to use.

** The works by Dr. Johnson and his colleague Dr. Paul Bradshaw are consistently excellent.