The WELS women staff ministers' list can be found here.
Staff ministry began as a project of Larry Olson (DMin, Fuller Seminary) at Martin Luther College. Fuller ordains women and has a special committee to beat up men who have problems with women being ministers. They must have thumped Larry pretty thoroughly.
Many WELS pastors say, "Larry Olson is no problem. Everyone knows he's a false teacher."
That is why he is teaching at Martin Luther College.
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Bruce Church has left a new comment on your post "WELS Women Ministers":
Hi Dr. Jackson,
How women take over the seminaries and clergy is mostly by feminizing the churches and seminaries. Boys flee feminine environments. Now the Reformed Jewish seminaries are two-thirds female.
Colleges are the same way. They are 60% female and becoming more female all the time. Universities are allowed to have Black clubs and women's clubs, but men's clubs are strictly verboten. More importantly, in the formative years of grade school and junior high school, most of the teachers are women. Boys get the idea that academics is for girls and women.
One could say that families were feminized by the courts and laws, so that women alone could decide whether to have a child or not, and whether the man would live at home or live somewhere else and have a portion of his pay sent to the family by court order. Anyway, men have been running from families, too.
The Reformed are one of the liberal Jewish denominations, and now two-thirds of their seminarians are women:
Study: Non-Orthodox men less connected than women to Judaism
Jun. 18, 2008, by Matthew Wagner, THE JERUSALEM POST
The study, entitled "Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent: Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life" and released by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, found that women have been taking an increasingly more dominant role in Jewish rites. As a result, the phenomenon of "Ima on the bima" (mom on the podium) has become the rule rather than the exception in liberal Jewish settings.
"When it comes to gender equality or gender balance, contemporary American Jewish life is caught between a rock and a hard place," said co-author Daniel Parmer, a Brandeis graduate student. "Boys and men as a group are not attracted to feminized Jewish activities and environments."
In contrast, Orthodox Judaism, which has not integrated women into traditionally male roles such as rabbinical ordination and leading prayers, has managed to maintain the masculine connection to religious devotion.
In their conclusion, Fishman and Parmer suggested that the increasingly dominant role played by women in Jewish activities might be turning boys and men off. The authors suggested that initiatives more geared toward Jewish men and boys could help strengthen the frayed masculine Judaic connection.
"Excellent coed and single sex programs and activities may be particularly important in the middle school and teen years, when boys in liberal Jewish settings often grow most impatient with female religious and educational leadership," they went on. "Ironically the women's movement - responding to great gaps in Jewish life - has often created successful materials and programming for female teens, while teenage boys have often been left behind."
Fishman and Parmer noted in their introduction to the study, which was based on 300 interviews, that outside the Orthodox world men are becoming less and less engaged in every aspect of Jewish life, from the home to the synagogue to communal organizations.
"In Fall 2005, women outnumbered men two to one in the entering rabbinical class in the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). Nationally, girls and women outnumber men in weekly non-Orthodox worship services, in adult education classes, in volunteer leadership positions, and in Jewish cultural events," they said.
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GJ - Yes, Bruce Church is right. Higher education is now 60-40 women, reversing the old ratio. Women are the high achievers in academics (another reversal). Women are easing out men in most leadership positions in higher education, too. Half of my bosses at one school have been women. In religious studies, women are going to have the advantage in hiring at most schools because men held most of the posts before. Society must favor certain quotas in order to maintain social justice, we are told. At Intel in Phoenix, the best student interns and the best computer people are not hired because they do not fit into the 40 diversity categories.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "WELS Women Ministers":
Those female staff minister positions are ridiculous and so are some of the male staff minister positions. I have a difficult time comprehending how they can say these are "Divine Calls".
What is interesting is that the synod yearbook separates male and female teachers (both active and retired) but classifies both male and female "staff ministers" together.
I'm sorry; I just cannot buy into the staff ministry "Calls"...especially the female ones. What a mislabeling...
sorry.... perhaps they should be labeled "pastor wannabee".
no disrespect intended but this really bothers me.
"Minister of Administration"?????
A "Divine Call" to be a "Minister of Administration"??????
Think about it.
