by Brian Adkins
Janet Wittenmyer’s office sits on the first floor of Trinity Lutheran Church. One wall is composed entirely of bookshelves. It is carpeted and cozy. As she sits at her paper-covered desk, she ponders the differences between the church she left in Chicago and the one here. “I come to Willard, and in my mind, small towns are the safe places in America. I was shocked by the high percentage of drug addiction, which led to crime. My house – someone attempted to break in, so I had to get a security system, which I never had in Chicago.”
Trinity is situated across the street from the public library in downtown Willard, Ohio, population 6,044 as of a July 2018 estimate. The Norwalk Reflector reported in 2017 that nearly half of people seeking medical treatment in Huron county admitted to a substance addiction. The number of overdoses in the county is significantly higher than other counties in Ohio, which itself is among the worst for opioid addiction in the country.
“The low-income housing, all the poor people that live in this community – really poor – the illegal situation, ICE coming here, people being arrested. Moving from a huge city – I wasn’t expecting it. The things I would see in a big city are all here. And the people in this church were living in a bubble about how this community has drastically changed.” Since beginning her ministry at TLC, she has noticed other ways in which the church is behind.
“About a month ago, I was asked to do a gay marriage.” While Pastor Janet was more than willing to perform the ceremony, it was not that simple. Since the couple wanted to have the wedding at Trinity, church members needed to be conferred with.
“I had to go to the council and bring this up. They wanted the Bishop to come in, and he wants them to do the studies that they didn’t do twenty years ago.”
The studies were undertaken in 2001 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the closest thing to a governing body for more than 4 million Lutherans in the United States. The purpose of the studies was to provide the academic and scriptural framework for ELCA member churches to decide their stance on same-gender relationships, including marriage.
In 2009, after years of deliberation and study, the organization clarified its stances on both gay marriage and the ordination of ministers in the church in a policy document known as a social statement. The document, titled Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, the ELCA recognizes the “conscience-bound belief” of many of its members, that
the neighbor and community are best served when same-gender relationships are lived out with lifelong and monogamous commitments that are held to the same rigorous standards, sexual ethics, and status as heterosexual marriage.
This monumental event caused a rift during which many church members left and didn’t come back. “Twenty years worth of studies, and a lot of churches didn’t do them. So when the decision happened, which was voted in at the national church – by more laypeople than clergy – all these churches left, which was very upsetting to me.” Saddened to watch ministers, some of whom she knew from seminary, leave the church, she was also troubled theologically; “I felt when that decision happened that it was the right decision, that it was a gospel decision in terms of including people that should’ve always been included.”
When the Bishop recommended that the church finally work through the studies to come to its decision, it was too late. “In the meantime, this couple stopped calling me, which is heartbreaking. I would have done their service in a nanosecond, but I still have to respect the people.” Respect, however, didn’t mean compromising her personal values. “Would I respect them telling me I couldn’t do a gay marriage? No. That’s not who I am.”
Janet knew she wanted to be a minister from a relatively young age. “I was in church one Sunday and I just felt really excited about my faith. I actually liked my pastor, and I thought ‘I wanna do what he’s doing. I wanna be up front. I feel like I have something to say.’” Being a girl, her dream was not supported by the male authority figures in her life. “My father was against it, my pastor was against it, so I didn’t receive any encouragement at home.” Nevertheless, her desire to preach was undiminished. “I never wavered from age 12 on.”
After attending Valparaiso University and discovering that there were “all different kinds of Lutherans”, Wittenmyer attended Seminary in Exile in St. Louis. Also known as Seminex, the organization would eventually merge with other progressive Lutheran churches to form the ELCA in 1988, after a split with the fundamentalist Missouri Synod in which young Janet grew up. That ideological polarization has only become more pronounced. “The Missouri Synod is still very conservative. It’s run by men. Women are not allowed to be ordained. And it’s even more conservative because all the moderates left in the split, which were my professors.”
The split has led to vastly different perspectives on scripture. Some evangelical ministers live up to the stereotype of bible-thumping fundamentalists, but this isn’t Pastor Janet. “The Missouri Synod is literal. They believe everything in the bible is literally true. What I learned at seminary is that the Bible did not just drop out of heaven all together. It was put together in shards. People wrote it over centuries, with many different authors. I am not a literalist.”
Janet knows that many of her congregation would disagree with her. “A lot of people in the church believe it exactly. There were never really Adam and Eve as real people. Jonah and the big fish. Who ever lived in the belly of a fish, except Pinocchio? So, people in the church are really at the level of Sunday School faith.”
Theologian James Fowler’s book Stages of Faith describes a progression through increasingly sophisticated stages of religious belief. In both Stage 1: Intuitive-Projective Faith, and Stage 2: Mythic-literal Faith, children believe what religious authority figures tell them. It is not until Stage 3: (Synthetic-conventional Faith), that people are able to think abstractly about their beliefs, as well as consider other peoples’ perspectives, including disagreements about their own beliefs. According to Fowler, very few people ever reach stage 6. According to Pastor Janet, most people in the church never make it past stage 2.
“In order to get to a universalizing faith, you have to struggle with a lot of things. How you were taught to believe in all those stories literally, and if you don’t believe in it literally, how can you still believe in God? So that requires a lot of wrestling and struggling with the scriptures.”
She doesn’t claim that to have reached stage 6. “The only god I can believe in is a God that loves everyone, a God that would save everyone. Is my theology still developing? Yes. So I guess I don’t fit perfectly into…”
She smiles as her sentence trails off. “I guess I’m kind of a heretic. But wasn’t Martin Luther a heretic?”
Though many of her parishioners might differ with her scripturally, she doesn’t think that that difference interferes with her calling to serve them.
“Everything in my theology starts with grace, that God loves us unconditionally, that God desires a relationship with each and every one of us.”
“I believe that my job is to teach other people that we do have a loving God who loves us just as we are now.”