ELCA Deaconess Community Presents Annual Grants, Tithe
CHICAGO (ELCA) -- The Deaconess Community of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) awarded $250,000 in grants to 13 domestic and international nonprofit programs in an effort to expand the church's outreach to those in need. It also presented the ELCA with a portion of the community's annual tithe.
The grants were awarded to programs that are committed to "risk taking and innovative service on the frontiers of the church's outreach," according to the community's invitation for grant applications. Programs were chosen for inviting participation, bridging divisions and accompanying others in mission "that affirms the individual gifts of all people."
Grants ranged in size from $10,000 to $32,500. Domestic programs in Alaska, California, District of Columbia, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and international programs in Kenya, Mongolia, Nigeria and South Africa received the grants. Recipient programs serve people who are uninsured, disabled, homeless, politically disenfranchised, elderly, at-risk youth and immigrants.
Deaconess Community Presents Annual Tithe to Churches
Sister Anne Keffer, the community's directing deaconess, and Sister Carolyn Hellerich, Hallettsville, Texas, chair of the community's board, presented the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, with a check for $23,620 on Aug. 7.
The community gives a tithe, or 10 percent of the increase of its assets since the previous year, to the ELCA and ELCIC. The ELCIC will receive a check for $5,905.
The community's unrestricted benevolence gift is a way of saying "thank you" to the ELCA and ELCIC, Keffer said. "We give thanks that Christ has called the Church into being and that we, as a community, are part of this church," she said.
The Deaconess Community consists of 76 women consecrated by the church to a ministry of Word and service. Deaconesses are theologically trained and professionally prepared for their careers in such settings as health care, Christian education and social services. They are called to ministry by congregations and synods of the ELCA and ELCIC.
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GJ - The Lutheran Inner Mission movement in the 19th century spawned a number of conservative efforts which combined evangelism with charitable work: hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, sailors' missions, and industrial schools for training children in vocations. Lutherans and the Reformed had schools to train young, unmarried women to be deaconesses. Training deaconesses was a deliberate attempt to create Protestant nuns who could leave their vocation for marriage, as many of them did. Mennonite service volunteers were another example followed in creating the modern deaconess. A deaconess had a uniform modeled after a nun's habit, though not so Medieval.
The deaconess movement provided Europe and America with young women who taught children and served as nurses. Florence Nightingale was trained in nursing, thanks to the Inner Mission. Her extraordinary service in the Crimean War (and attempts to quash her, even starve her death) made her a world figure, a leader in medical reform.
She spent the winter and spring of 1849-50 in Egypt with family friends; on the journey from Paris she met two St. Vincent de Paul sisters who gave her an introduction to their convent at Alexandria. Nightingale saw that the disciplined and well-organised Sisters made better nurses than women in England. Between 31 July to 13 August 1850, Nightingale made her first visit to the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth. The institute had been founded for the care of the destitute in 1833 and had grown into a training school for women teachers and nurses. Her visit convinced Nightingale of the possibilities of making nursing a vocation for ladies. In 1851 she spent four months at Kaiserswerth, training as a sick nurse. (Victorian Web)
The Lutheran Inner Mission leaders were very suspicious of the Social Gospel Movement, which came along later in the 19th century. The Social Gospel was truly secular and political in nature, spawning such things as the Food and Drug Administration, child labor laws, unions, children's playgrounds in urban areas, urban renewal, farmers' co-ops, and other utopian projects. The Social Gospel was called Social Services at first, so Lutheran Social Services is the ultimate triumph of the secular activist over the conservative evangelist in the Lutheran Church.
There are almost no deaconesses now in ELCA, but they still have some money to give away. The article above suggests the projects are all Social Gospel, on the far Left side of the rainbow coalition.
Here is a history of deaconesses in the United Church of Christ. Mrs. Ichabod once stayed in Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis, where little dolls in deaconess uniforms are featured in a display.
LCMS deaconess history. Loehe, the real founder of the LCMS, was a leader in this area. The UCC deaconess movement doubtless had considerable influence, too, since it was centered in St. Louis.
A few deaconesses are left in the Methodist Church.
Deaconesses and nursing - the book.
