Territorial Bloggings

Well, once again Valparaiso University is in the news. And, once again, it’s not for anything that I would say is good.

VU to hire first female pastor

Within the past 6 months, VU has made waves in the Lutheran world, first for the hiring of a new President, and now for this hiring of a female pastor.

The hiring of the President was news because it was the first time since Lutheran folk bought VU in 1925 that the President was neither LCMS nor a pastor. New President Mark Heckler is an ELCA layman. While VU was/is not officially an LCMS entity, it has long been known to have strong LCMS ties, and was known/believed to be within LCMS circles to be the university where LCMS laity could go if they didn’t want to be a church worker (in which case they’d go to one of the Concordias). As a cradle LCMSer, and graduate of LCMS elementary & high schools, I can attest to this belief. In recent years, however, these ties have become increasingly loose, and the hiring of President Heckler only served to make that looseness almost impossible to ignore.

This latest announcement, though, takes things to a whole ‘nother level. While ELCA pastorettes (I’ll behave & not use my preferred term…) have preached in the Chapel of the Resurrection, the “official” pastors called to minister to VU have always been LCMS pastors - i.e., male. This has now, to state the obvious, changed. And it might actually start to get noticed by the rank and file pewsitters in the LCMS who have long believed that what was true in the increasingly distant past was still true today. It ain’t true, and it’ll be interesting to see how these folks react when they hear this latest news.

As usual, when issues like this come up, there’s some interesting discussion going on over at the ALPB Forum. And this issue is no exception…

While it’s possible that the whole Issues, Etc. wildfire will keep this latest VU thing from blowing up as big as it otherwise might have, I think it’ll be interesting nonetheless to see just how it plays out within the court of LCMS public opinion.

-ghp