By Mark Staples

When Ruth F. Doty received her Master of Divinity degree May 23 from The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, it was a culmination of a 14-year scholarly journey at the seminary.

Doty, a member of Holy Spirit Lutheran Church in Emmaus, Pa., and a resident of Wescosville, blurted to her mother at the age of seven that she wanted to be a pastor. Her brother was already on track to becoming a pastor. So Doty was rather surprised when her mother then told her she couldn’t become one “because they aren’t letting women become pastors in the Lutheran Church.” It was then 1955, more than 15 years before Lutherans began ordaining women.

Doty at her tender age had been reading from her first Bible, a gift to Sunday school children from the American Bible Society, and had studied a provided ABS help entitled “Where in the Bible it says things,” Doty recalls. “I asked my mother where in the Bible does it say a woman can’t be a pastor? She couldn’t give me an answer.”

So Doty went on with her studies at a Christian day elementary school and excelled at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, a school for gifted youth. A vicar from her Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregation took her on a field trip to Union Theological Seminary in New York City and encouraged her to consider studying at Valparaiso University in Indiana. The notion of studying theology wouldn’t leave her alone. So at Valparaiso’s honors college, where she was encouraged to create her own major, she chose a concentration in sociology, psychology and theology. As she completed her Valparaiso studies, a professor suggested she attend the University of Chicago Divinity School, mentioning that now some Lutheran churches were beginning to ordain women.

“But I wasn’t sure I was being called to pastoral ministry at that time,” Doty says. "And I didn’t see myself as one of those persons on the front lines of the first women being ordained.” So Doty began earning a Master of Family Life Education degree at Purdue University. She met and married husband Richard, also a Purdue student, who was studying to be a nuclear physicist. She completed an internship in marriage counseling in connection with the University of Pennsylvania. Later, Ruth and Richard moved to Florence, Ala., where Richard worked as a physicist and Doty served as a marriage and family therapist for a counseling center.

But the call for church involvement still burned within her. She and her husband served as youth advisors for two neighborhood congregations in Alabama. When her husband decided in 1984 to pursue a new career option in Allentown, Pa., Ruth concentrated on being a mom for a while to sons Matthew, now 28 and a physicist on the West Coast, and Jonathan, 25, now a middle school teacher in Maine.

In 1990, Ruth decided to take up her studies again, observing that Muhlenberg College in Allentown was a setting for an LTSP course offering, “An Introduction to Theology.” She took one and sometimes two courses a semester during her degree pursuit, some at Moravian College, some in Philadelphia. The teachers included the Rev. Dr. Timothy Wengert, now the Ministerium of Pennsylvania Professor of Church History; the Rev. Dr. Philip D. W. Krey, now president of the seminary and the Ministerium of New York Professor of Early Church History, and Dr. Faith Rohrbaugh, former LTSP dean who recently retired as president of Saskatoon Seminary in Canada.

She decided fairly early in the process to declare that she was a candidate for the Master of Divinity degree, which could lead to ordination. “But to be honest, I wasn’t sure at that point I was being called to the ordained ministry. But I also made myself answer the question, why not go toward that goal?”

Doty said she had a strong belief in ministry of daily life “and that whatever you do in the church as a lay person is ministry. For some, the call to ordained ministry is a direct, clear process. For me it has been a lengthy one that unfolds gradually.” During her years as a seminarian she continued in her marriage and family therapy practice as time permitted. Other ministry chapters she has engaged in over those years have included serving as a youth advisor, participating in a work camp ministry in Starks, Maine, with the youth of her congregation, Holy Spirit, Emmaus, and doing counseling for troubled pastors and congregations through the Church Renewal Center, a program that once was housed at Allentown’s Good Shepherd Home and Rehabilitation Hospital. “If that center were still running today I might have continued in that ministry,” Doty speculates. But the program closed. Greater clarity about a call to ordained ministry, however, came to her as she took on a fieldwork assignment with Pastor Grace Olson of St. John Lutheran Church, Easton, Pa. And the call became clearer this year as she worked on internship at St. John Lutheran Church, Sinking Spring, Pa., with Pastor Harry Bohn.

During her seminary years she grew to deeply appreciate the quality of the teaching she received in seminary but candidly admits she missed the community support and life that would have been possible at the seminary had she not been commuting so great a distance.

“My husband deserves a lot of credit for all the support he has given me through this lengthy journey of mine,” she says. Once her internship is complete, Doty hopes to become part of a team ministry in a congregation. “I don’t see myself as the sole pastor in a congregation,” she says. Where she could be assigned is likely to become clear during the next year or so, she believes.