Speaking after her ordination at Lutheran Redeemer Church, in the Old City of Jerusalem, 26-year-old Sally Azar was a little nervous, but confident. She even regained her composure after noting the absence of a beloved relative and mentioning with regret that her teachers from Lebanon, where she had studied theology before going on to Germany, were unable to attend.
She told the packed crowd in the church, steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that she never expected to be the first Palestinian woman to be ordained or to break a glass ceiling for other Arab women in Jordan and Palestine.
Azar is only the fifth woman pastor in the Middle East (the others are in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria) and the first of any denomination in the Holy Land.
“I grew up in this church and I witnessed my dad as a pastor, but the decision to study theology was my own,” she told the audience of locals and international visitors. The Rev. Sani Ibrahim Azar, now the bishop of the Lutheran Evangelical Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, stood beaming beside her at this happy event.
The ordination of a woman in the Arab Lutheran Church completes a push begun under Bishop Munib Younan, the elder Azar’s predecessor, who heralded back in 2006 the transformation of the church in regard to gender. Though the church is small in numbers, the Lutheran Church’s equality policy has already opened doors for women beyond Azar’s ordination. It has meant that, unlike for other Christian families throughout the Middle East, men and women receive an equal share in inheritance and have equality in all personal status issues.
Read the article by Daoud Kuttab in Sight Magazine.