US: First openly transgender pastor in Evangelical Lutheran Church

Reverend Megan Rohrer was elected in May to serve as the bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod — one of the church’s 65 synods — and will oversee nearly 200 congregations in Northern California and northern Nevada.

In San Francisco, the Grace Cathedral hosted the ceremony of installation.

A ‘historic’ move

“I step into this role because a diverse community of Lutherans in Northern California and Nevada prayerfully and thoughtfully voted to do a historic thing,” Rohrer, who uses the pronouns “they” and “he,” said in a statement.

“My installation will celebrate all that is possible when we trust God to shepherd us forward.”

“My call is… to be up to the same messy, loving things I was up to before,” Rohrer told churchgoers.

“But mostly, if you’ll let me, and I think you will, my hope is to love you and beyond that, to love what you love.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which has approximately 3.3 million members, is the US’s largest Christian congregation.

Megan Rohrer: Who are you?

Rohrer (41 years old) was ordained in 2006. They served as a pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in San Francisco in 2014 and as the chaplain coordinator for the city’s police department.

Rohrer is married with two children and was accepted as one of seven LGBTQ pastors by the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2010. This church allowed for pastors to be ordained in homosexual relationships.

After studying religion at Augustana University, South Dakota, they moved to California to complete master’s and doctoral studies at the Pacific School of Religion.

Rohrer received national attention when they talked about their experience as a young LGBTQ Christian on the reality TV series “Queer Eye“.

Transgender individuals are slower to be accepted as leaders in churches than gay pastors in US mainline Protestant Churches.

Rohrer’s election is a first in the Lutheran denomination and other major Christian denominations in the US.