Evangelical Lutheran Church elects first transgender bishop

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has elected a transgender bishop — the first of the major Christian faiths in the US to do so.

The Rev. Megan Rohrer, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in San Francisco, who has appeared on TV’s “Queer Eye,” was elected to serve as bishop of the Sierra Pacific synod, the ECLA announced.

“I am humbled and honored, and aware that this call is bigger than me,” Rohrer, 41, telling Religion News Service (RNS) it was “an honor to be called to serve.”

“During this time when some imagine trans people at their worst, Lutherans have once again declared that transgender people are beautiful children of God,” Rohrer said.

“Thank you to everyone who has been praying for me and my family as I accept this call.”

Rohrer, whose appointment is for six years, had already made ECLA history twice before, as the first transgender person to be ordained in 2006 and then the first to serve as a pastor when called to Grace Lutheran in 2014.

The new bishop, who uses the pronouns they and them, on Tuesday addressed Christians who may be confused by the historic appointment.

“God’s call extends to more people than you’d expect, in more places than you’d expect and more often than you’d expect,” Rohrer tweeted, with the hashtag #iamLutheran.

Raised in South Dakota, Rohrer has recounted being expelled from a church youth group in Sioux Falls after coming out as a lesbian.

Then in college at the Lutheran Augustana University, fellow students “would sing hymns when I walked by, to try to get rid of my gay demons,” Rohrer told KALW in 2014. “And I would just sing harmony. I didn’t know what to do.”

A campus pastor at Augustana, however, encouraged Rohrer to consider ministry, and in 2002 they moved to San Francisco to attend Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and later transferred to the LGBTQ-friendly Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

Now a community chaplain coordinator for the San Francisco Police Department, Rohrer is known for advocating for LGBTQ rights in street activism.

“We need to all be as loud and as angry as the people who want to declare that there are types of people that God can’t love,” they told Cosmopolitan in 2017.

Rohrer’s profile was raised last year with an appearance in “Queer Eye,” lending support to an openly gay pastor in Philadelphia. 

The Sierra Pacific Synod encompasses 180 congregations in Northern California and northern Nevada, with more than 36,000 individual members and about 13,000 worshippers attending on Sundays.