Kimberly Van Driel, pastor of First English Lutheran Church, 241 N. Main St., spent the last two weeks conferring with fellow Lutheran pastors from across the world.

It was part of a two-week seminar for pastors conducted by the Lutheran World Federation’s Wittenberg Center. In a pre-COVID time, the pastors would have converged on the German town where Martin Luther taught and in which he famously nailed his 95 Theses that sparked the Reformation.

The Lutheran World Federation represents 148 church groups around the world.

Van Driel said she had to be content with conducting two-hour Zoom meetings daily from March 7 through March 19.

It made for some confusing beginnings. “These are people from all over the world. People were Zooming in at all different local times. They were saying ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon,’” she said.

After each meeting’s opening, there was a Zoom presentation of that day’s topic, Van Driel said, followed by a discussion. After a break, the Zoom session broke into small group discussions followed by a wrap-up and team prayer.

Van Driel was one of only three American pastors chosen for the seminar, “Church, Ministry in the New Testament and Lutheran Theology.”

Bishop Kurt Kusserow, head of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Perrysville, suggested Van Driel for a spot in the seminar.

“There was a request for nominations. The bishop thought I would be interested,” she said. Van Driel has been pastor at First English for seven years.

Bishop Kusserow said, “I nominated her (because) I thought of her as someone who represents the Evangelical Lutheran Church rather fully.

“Our church ordains women, not every church around the world does so,” he said. “She’s in an ecumenical marriage. Her husband is Presbyterian. That’s a reflection of our church and its life in the world. We fully relate to other churches.”

Van Driel is someone he considers a “positive reflection of our church,” said Kusserow, who presides over 150 Lutheran churches in a 10-county area of Western Pennsylvania.

“A theologian and a Bible scholar recorded lectures and readings that we received in January so we could prepare for the seminar,” Van Driel said. “You had to sign on in front that you were willing to do the work.”

The seminar itself ran from 10 a.m. to noon the first week and from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. after the time change. There were 15 pastors taking part in Van Driel’s Zoom session.

The seminar’s topics, she said, touched on “what it means to be a church and be in ministry, and in some sense the questions are very basic but people from all over the world are engaging in them.”

“Where are there common struggles and what do different contexts in which we see them bring different questions?” Van Driel asked.

And there were many different contexts. Van Driel’s session included Lutheran pastors not only from Western Europe but Africa, and Central and South America.

“The strongest churches right now are in Africa; they’re growing,” she said. “It’s interesting to realize churches in the global south are growing.

“The younger churches in the Lutheran World Foundation are stronger in many respects. The seminar made clear the global inequities in access to resources,” she said.

At the end of the week, the Zoom session turned into a summing up and a fellowship among the participants across the world.

Bishop Kusserow said the Lutheran church is expanding across much of Central and South America, Asia and Africa.

“People don’t realize there are more Lutherans in Madagascar than the United States. There are more Lutherans in Tanzania than in the United States,” he said.

He credits Lutheran growth to a “Gospel of grace in which our faith celebrates that God knows us and loves us.”

“The global context has been so amazing,” Van Driel said. “The Gospel is meant for all people, but seeing it in a local context, it’s easy to forget the church is in Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

“This sheds light on the common challenges we face. Common challenges like struggling to train and raise pastors, struggling to help our people understand the Gospel of Jesus Crucified and Risen,” she said.

People must understand that the way of Jesus is solidarity with those who suffer and hope for a new kind of life that isn’t on the world’s terms, she said.

“I would just say I’ve been delighted to get to know people,” said Van Driel of her unique experience.