The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America installed its first transgender bishop, Megan Rohrer, in a service held in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral on Saturday, September 11 (Megan had been elected bishop on May 8th).
The ELCA, with about 3.3 million members, is the liberal or “progressive” branch of Lutheranism in the United States. The presiding bishop of the ELCA is a woman, Rev. Elizabeth Eaton. The conservative branch of Lutheranism is the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (LCMS). The LCMS does not ordain female pastors
The Rev. Megan Rohrer, a biological female who claims to identify as male (or at least as non-binary), will lead one of the church's 65 synods, the Sierra Pacific Synod, overseeing nearly 200 congregations in Northern California and northern Nevada.
Reverend Rohrer’s preferred pronoun is the non-gendered plural “they.” She doesn’t say how many they are, whether they are legion or just a couple.
Rohrer was born in 1980 in Sioux Falls South Dakota. In 1998, according to Wikipedia, “they” graduated from high school and enrolled at Augustana University to study religion. In college “they” came out as homosexual and became president of the Gay-Straight Alliance at “their” school. “They” graduated from Augustana in 2001. In 2002, “they” moved to the San Francisco Bay area to pursue graduate studies in theology, where “they” came out as transgender.
Rohrer is “married” to another biological female, Laurel Rohrer, and the couple have two children.
Rohrer was ordained in 2006, becoming the first openly transgender person to be ordained by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Rohrer became one of seven LGBTQ pastors accepted by the ELCA when it decided to hire pastors living openly in same-sex relationships.
"I step into this role because a diverse community of Lutherans in Northern California and Nevada prayerfully and thoughtfully voted to do a historic thing," Rohrer said in a statement. "My installation will celebrate all that is possible when we trust God to shepherd us forward."
Rohrer has written several children’s books as well as three titles for adults, including “Queerly Lutheran,” “Holy Night: Prayers and Meditations for People of the Night,” and “Manifest: Transitional Wisdom on Male Privilege.”
Before you laugh too loud, consider that this is where the liberal wing of Adventism would take our church. This is what will inevitably result from the ordination of women to spiritual headship roles—and the overwhelming majority of church administrators and clergy in developed-world Adventist divisions favor female ordination.
Interesting article by Tyler O’Neill here.
“Haven’t you read the Scriptures?” Jesus replied. “They record that from the beginning
‘God made them male and female.’” Mat. 19:4 NLT