“Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations! Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.” – Revelation 15:3b-4 (NRSVUE)
As this arrives in your inbox, I will be preparing to embark on my travels to Australia. I will be away for three Sundays. The bulk of my time there will be working on behalf of the Lutheran Church of Australia (I will take vacation time the last week). In a recent Adult Forum I went into greater detail about what I would be doing and why I am being asked to go there in this particular moment, but it seems useful to give the basic details here. Part of working globally with the church is to have the ability to share here things that are happening in the wider church.
The Lutheran Church in Australia is a small denomination. It has about 600 congregations with a regularly active membership of about 30,000 people. That’s about 50 active people per congregation, with weekly attendance smaller than that. It has never been a large denomination; it has a few pockets with many congregations and long histories but is never been widespread. It is also a denomination marked by disputes. Within the first decade of Lutheran congregations being founded in Australia – the 1840s – divides among the Lutherans appeared. One of the reasons for the many small congregations is that in some of the small towns in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, where the first Lutherans settled, there are several different Lutheran congregations due to church splits over the years. At one point Australia had eight different Lutheran denominations.
In the late 1960s, all of the strands of Lutheranism in Australia merged into one church. Unfortunately this did not eliminate all of the divisions. For decades now the issue of women’s ordination has consumed the church. Movements to allow women to be ordained have come to churchwide vote many times, and repeatedly it came in just below the 2/3 vote needed. Finally this past October it passed, with the ordination of women going into effect in December of 2025. Following this passage, there is the largest group of new students entering Australian Lutheran College, the seminary for the church, in quite a few years. In many ways this year marks a reset for the seminary, as many of the former faculty and students have left to start a new breakaway seminary that opposes women’s ordination. I have been asked to teach the first class to this new group of students. Part of the reason for this is to establish a culture of seeking to understand all sides of theological issues and learning how to faithfully engage in theological disagreements while retaining church fellowship. I will likely teach this same course again in future years but as an online course so that I don’t need to physically go to Australia, but this year physically being together is needed.
Australia is an extremely secularized country, with few people actively participating in religious activities. The pressure on Christian institutions is great. The seminary has sold its historic campus to move into a smaller office building, as most of its classes are online and the few in-person intensive courses are small enough to use classrooms in congregations. The main areas of growth for the church are from immigrants, particularly from Asia, and within indigenous communities of Australia. To be a vibrant church the Lutheran church needs to learn to effectively embrace its identity as a global church with new influences and new ideas coming from all over the world.