Rev. Ilona Fritz recently became the first woman to be chosen as president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. She was appointed during the church's May 31-June 1 synod. Fritz, pastor of a congregation in the capital, Amsterdam, succeeds Rev. Sietze van Kammen, who resigned for personal reasons. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands has been a Lutheran World Federation (LWF) member church since 1947.
According to LWF, of the 34 pastors currently in the church, 16 are women. About one in four pastors are of foreign origin, mainly from Germany and Scandinavia. With about 15,000 members, the Lutheran church is the smallest of the three Uniting Protestant Churches in the Netherlands (UPCN) members, involved in a merger. The process began in 1969 with the Netherlands Reformed Church (NHK) and the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (GKN). The Lutherans joined in 1986. Currently the two Reformed churches together with the smaller Lutheran church, form the country's largest Protestant body, the Uniting Protestant Churches, representing some 2.7 million Christians.
In other actions, the synod members unanimously expressed concern about efforts within the NHK to push for the removal of blessings of life partnerships other than traditional marriages from the UPCN's draft constitution. (http://www.lutheranworld.org/)