“Sister, carry on!”

WICAS meeting of bishops and women in church leadership

(LWI) – “We owe great respect and a debt of gratitude to the women who were the first to move into leading positions.” This was the unanimous opinion of women bishops and church leaders about those who had trodden this path two or three decades ago. The latter include, for example, Maria Jepsen from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Northern Germany, who in 1992 was the first woman in the world to be elected a bishop in a Lutheran church - 25 years ago.

One event of the Reformation Summer 2017 in Wittenberg, was a meeting of woman bishops and church leaders. It was hosted recently by WICAS, the Women in Church and Society Program of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the German National Committee of the LWF on the initiative of Bishop Ilse Junkermann of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany. From 10 to 14 August women from Germany, Greenland, Indonesia, Latvia, Norway, Suriname and Zimbabwe took the opportunity to share experiences from their respective contexts on the opportunities and difficulties for women in positions of church leadership and to offer each other advice and support.

Independent of their country of origin, women who are church leaders often find themselves confronting substantial reservations. The first women in the top positions of their churches have it the hardest, especially as they have no female role models. Progressively it gets easier and easier, says Ann-Helen Fjeldstad Jusnes, bishop from Norway: “Today it is not unusual for a woman to be a bishop. But forty years ago we women had to fight even to be ordained.”