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- Elizabeth Eaton (left) and Susan Johnson have forged a friendship during their years as bishops. Photos: Courtesy of Kathryn Lohre
On Cleveland’s West Side in the late 1960s, a teenage Elizabeth Eaton sat in her ninth-grade guidance counselor’s class. Mr. Zinzer asked students to write an essay about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Eaton knew instantly—a Lutheran pastor. Unfortunately, Mr. Zinzer informed her, Lutheran churches didn’t ordain women.
Over 1,600 miles away, in London, Ontario, a teenage Susan Johnson had felt called to ministry since she was a child, and that calling had continued to grow during her youth. But the Canadian Lutheran church didn’t ordain women either.
Fast-forward to 1973. During Eaton’s senior year, her father suffered his second heart attack. Grief-stricken, she implored her pastor, John Evans, for answers to questions like: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there pain and suffering in God’s world? He listened patiently and gave her space to process and examine her questions.
Those questions persisted after she enrolled in the College of Wooster (Ohio), then a Presbyterian school whose assistant campus chaplain was a woman. Near the end of Eaton’s senior year, she felt her heart no longer lay in becoming a band director despite her major in music education, and she decided to attend seminary. Her parents didn’t understand why she would choose what they perceived to be a difficult path for a woman, but she applied to several schools anyway and was accepted by Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. “After one year, I realized ministry was my true calling,” she said.
Years later, in 1986, Johnson attended a worship conference in Vancouver that had been organized by her father, a Lutheran pastor. At the time, she was a high school music teacher. “At the conference,” she recalled, “people kept saying, ‘Susan, you’ve missed your calling.’ And I kept saying no, because there were still things I wanted to do as a teacher.”
The following year, she began to hear that message in her own head. “It was like God continued to get loud, and I tried to escape by turning up the radio or distracting myself with other things,” Johnson said. “By the end of that school year, in 1987, I said, ‘OK, if that was what I was supposed to do, then I’ll do it.’”
She worked for one more year as a teacher, paid off her student loans, attended seminary and never looked back.
Careers and friendship
Johnson served as a parish pastor for two years and then as an assistant to the bishop in the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) for 15 more. Her career skyrocketed as she was elected ELCIC vice president in 2001 and then its fourth national bishop in 2007—the first woman in that position.
A few months later, Eaton and Johnson crossed paths at a joint meeting of the ELCA Conference of Bishops and the ELCIC’s synod bishops. Eaton had been installed as bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod earlier that year. “She had such presence,” Eaton said of Johnson.
The two women discovered that they had both majored in music education. Forgetting that the national sport in Canada was hockey, Eaton asked, “Did you like marching band?” Johnson responded, “It was a little difficult to march on ice.”
In 2013, Eaton was elected presiding bishop of the ELCA, the fourth in its history and the first woman in that office. At that time, she was one of only 10 female bishops, roughly 13%. Over the past few years, the Conference of Bishops has been composed of nearly equal numbers of women and men.
“We laugh together. We cry together. We pray together.”
“When Bishop Eaton got elected presiding bishop, it brought us even closer together as colleagues, because it’s a lonely job,” Johnson said. “We laugh together. We cry together. We pray together. Sometimes we call each other late at night to share our joys and sorrows.”
One year, at a conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, the women grew weary of the food being served. “Eventually we said, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’ and we went to find a place to eat,” Johnson remembered. “We ended up at the Sockenschuss.”
“They had schnitzel and wurst,” Eaton said, “and we could have a beer and just relax.”
Their waitress wore a T-shirt that read, “I’m a Socken girl.” The T-shirts weren’t available to purchase, “but we decided we were ‘Socken Sisters,’” Johnson said. “I had purple T-shirts made, showing us drinking large, liter-size mugs of beer on the back, with ‘Socken Sisters’ printed across the front.”
Great minds …
Recently the ELCIC held its triennial national convention in Winnipeg. Eaton was flying there when Johnson, in her final year of office, addressed the convention.
“When I got there, I brought greetings to the assembly, and I ended my 15-minute address with a quote from Martin Luther,” Eaton said. “Some attendees began mouthing the words along with me and were chuckling. Only afterward did I learn that Susan had shared the same quote during her address.”
The women’s shared affinity for music, ministry and mission has forged a lifelong bond, and their combined legacy of leadership can be best described by their favorite Luther quote:
“This life therefore is not righteousness but growth in righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified” (“Defense and Explanation of All the Articles”).
