This week in Christian history: Lutheran Church votes to ordain women, Thomas Cranmer born

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Twitter

Lutheran Church in America allows for female ordination – June 29, 1970

The 1970 ordination of Elizabeth Platz, the first woman to be ordained in the Lutheran Church in North America.
The 1970 ordination of Elizabeth Platz, the first woman to be ordained in the Lutheran Church in North America. | YouTube/Metro D.C. Synod, ELCA

This week marks the anniversary of when the Lutheran Church in America, the predecessor of the modern Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, voted to allow for female ordination.

The vote happened at the LCA Fifth Biennial Convention and involved changing their bylaws on ordination from using the term “man” to the gender neutral “person.”

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ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, the first woman to head the denomination, remarked in a 2015 statement celebrating the anniversary of the vote that even when a child she “felt called to service in the church.”

“In the face of sometimes vehement opposition, I questioned it. My ordination was not a feminist statement but a response to an irresistible call from God to serve,” stated Eaton at the time.

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