Authors

Discussion

From the 1990s onwards, during its revival in Russia, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria was seen by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) as a minority sister church. Some Finnish men were ordained as deacons and pastors in the Ingrian Church to provide competent clergymen and to serve its 15,000 mainly Finnish-speaking members. At the same time, until 2016, around 30,000 Ingrians moved to Finland, and the religious among them integrated into the ELCF.

By the 2020s, the Ingrian Church had become a Russian-speaking church with around 8000 members. The Church has similar values on family and sexual ethical questions to the Russian Orthodox Church in the area of values and maintains close ties with the Missouri Synod in the USA. Unlike the ELCF, the Ingrian Lutheran Church does not accept women priests.

Those ELCF’s missionary organisations that are reluctant to ordain female pastors have maintained contact with the Ingrian Church. In September 2023, five men working for different ELCF missionary organisations were ordained into the Ingrian Lutheran Church on the same day that the ELCF consecrated the new (female) bishop of Mikkeli.

This chapter focuses on the reasoning behind the ordinations and their church political context on both sides of the Finnish–Russian border, as well as developments in the Finnish Lutheran context, in which the small Ingrian Church seems to have greater theological and church political influence than its size would indicate. This does not come from the wish of Ingrians living in Finland but from the actions of the ordained clergy and how they create their own ways of “same-ing” and othering the Ingrian Church for their own theological–political purposes.