| She's Elizabeth Platz, and she has just become the first female Lutheran pastor in
North America. Beth Platz had served for five years as lay Lutheran chaplain at the
University of Maryland (UM) when, in the summer of 1970, the Lutheran Church in America
approved the ordination of women. That November, in the university chapel, this graduate
of Gettysburg Seminary became the first woman ordained by an American Lutheran church
body. This fall, she will begin her 32nd year at the University of Maryland and her 27th
anniversary as its Lutheran campus pastor . One month after Platz's ordination, the
American Lutheran Church, which also approved ordination for women in 1970, made Barbara
Andrews the second ordained Lutheran woman in the U.S.. The wheelchair bound Andrews died
in 1978, during a tragic fire in her Detroit, Michigan, apartment.
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