My pertinent question after reading through the material posted on the LCA by OWL is that there appears to be a significant omission in all the pro’s and cons of this contentious issue. I’m wondering if you can enlighten me why none of the papers presented even discusses marriage, God’s created order, gender roles the distinct difference between male and female, authority in marriage which is imagery of the Jesus bridegroom/church as the bride etc.
I would have thought these discussions would have had a white-paper discussing these. In this day of humanistic secularisation of everything I believe ordination of women is more about women seeing church as the last frontier to bring up to speed with our culture and nothing to do with God’s created order.
Could you please enlighten me why there is total silence and omission of gender/marriage etc in these discussions. I actually see this as pivotal for this entire debate. We do not need feminisation of the church we need strong leadership from men in marriage and in the church. The public office should represent this strong masculine leadership. I believe this is theologically sound and doctrinally sound and I am just gobsmacked that this has been overlooked. Could someone please flesh out this and inject it into this discussion.
I would go to the point of saying that the conversation has not even hit the heart of the matter. Ordination of women is indeed a doctrinal matter and with marriage under attack in our culture it is time we see the relationship of bridegroom/bride of the church under attack. Furthermore with gender fluidity the most deadly cancer pervading our culture we are on the brink of losing our saltiness.We must remain resoundingly counterculture and start drawing lines; there are only two genders Male and Female who are complementary to each other and there is authority structures placed by God. We need to be true to scripture else we have allowed culture dictate to scripture. There is more to this than meets the eye. Ordination of women is the tip of the iceberg to the real discussion point which is gender. These are all tied in together. I would be interested to see what those who support ordination of women say about gender, marriage, same-sex marriage and homosexuality. A lot more of “join the dots” needs to happen in the LCA.
I look forward to receiving a response and I here now formally table my concerns into this conversation and want it to be publicly recorded and raised.
© 2024 Lutheran Church of Australia 
Comments 1
Lea, you are absolutely correct. Proponents of same-sex marriage in the LCA have made it clear post Synod 2015 that they did not want to raise the same-sex issue before that Synod as they believed it would hinder the possibility of achieving a positive outcome on the question of the ordination of women. How right they were – because they KNOW the issues are so inextricably entwined as has been pointed out many times, but always dismissed as sacremongering. This therefore exposes the evil that is being perpetrated by the pursuance of these issues.
As has been stated elsewhere, all this amounts to disobedience towards God. It needs to be called what it is. We must be prepared to bear the wrath of the world (and sadly, many in the church) as we set ourselves to remain faithful to God and his Word.