Caroline Mendis never expected to spend the Christmas season receiving care at a rehabilitation center for a leg injury. But that did not stop her from planning a Christmas Eve service for her fellow residents. “I thought, we’re going to be stuck here on Christmas Eve, so let’s do something!” she said with a smile. While I was doing my internship at First Lutheran Church in downtown Pittsburgh last year, I was fortunate to have Pastor Mendis serving on my Internship Committee, and I was not at all surprised to find her doing what comes so naturally to her: serving others. This year our synod celebrates the 50th anniversary of Pastor Mendis’ ordination, making her our synod’s longest-serving ordained female pastor. “I love liturgy,” she said, “and creating a worship experience for people. But it’s also the sense of community that I love!” A gifted preacher and teacher, Pastor Mendis enjoys being with people, hearing their stories, and helping them feel connected with the Church.

Pastor Caroline Mendis grew up in Swissvale, and, as a child, she attended Bethany Lutheran Church in Braddock, where her grandfather served as a pastor before she was born. Early on, she found a strong female role model in her maternal grandmother, who frequently traveled to Lutheran congregations in the region, educating them about the work of the Women’s Missionary Society. She remembers her grandmother as “poised and confident, as she stood up in front of people and talked about the work of the Church.”

When Pastor Mendis graduated from Thiel College and entered Gettysburg Seminary in 1970, she did not necessarily expect to be ordained. “Many of my family members had been involved in the life of the church in one way or another, and I wanted to be a part of that and to see what came of it.” There were no female pastors at any Lutheran churches in America when she enrolled in her first class, New Testament Greek. While she was studying the difference between the aorist imperative and the present imperative, Elizabeth Platz was making history by becoming the first woman ordained by the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) on November 22, 1970. Exactly one month later, Barbara Andrews became the second Lutheran woman ordained and the first woman ordained in the American Lutheran Church (ALC). While in seminary, Pastor Mendis felt God calling her to the ministry of word and sacrament. “I started to have a greater appreciation for the eucharist, and I started to feel called into a world in which I would be able to serve communion to people, especially people who are shut in at home or not connected with the community as much as they should be. Providing them with the eucharist became important to me.”

But many of the greatest lessons in Pastor Mendis’ ministry she had to learn on her own with the people of the congregations that she served. “I just ended up learning by doing,” she said. Her internship site, St. John’s Lutheran Church on East Swamp Road in Potter County, New York, “was in the middle of nowhere. I was completely alone there. I lived in a little house next door to the church, and there were cows across the road that came and went behind the parsonage. I did have a supervisor, but he was in Rochester, New York. It was an hour’s drive to go up to Rochester once or twice a week for supervision. I was mostly unsupervised.” Pastor Mendis returned to our synod to be ordained but could not find a call here. “They weren’t ready for a female pastor.” Fortunately, the bishop of the New York Synod recognized her gifts and encouraged her to pursue a call in that synod. She received her first call at St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Mayville, New York. “And again, they were my teachers,” she said.

In 1989, Pastor Mendis and her husband Pastor George Mendis (dec. 2016) returned to our synod, as co-pastors of Christ Lutheran Church, Millvale, where they served until their retirement in 2014. “I think the partnership with my husband helped me to fight the isolation. We really worked together as a team, and we had a great 25 years there! I made some mistakes but, you know, that’s how I learned how to do things, through making mistakes and learning from congregations that I served.”

“My experience [in ministry] wasn’t like yours,” Pastor Mendis would often remind me during my internship year. “I never had a sense of being part of a community of women.” When I asked if there are any biblical characters or images that have helped her to remain grounded through the ups and downs of ministry, her thoughts again turned to the Christmas Eve service. “I always wanted to include the first few verses of St. John’s Gospel [in the service] because of the wonderful language about the Word becoming flesh and the mystery of the Incarnation. It’s a very powerful mystery, and it is the mystery of it that keeps me interested in it; it keeps me looking at the Bible stories in different ways and looking for the Christ in each person that I’ve come to know and meet, that interconnectedness that is beyond the natural and the mundane.”

One thing I learned from Pastor Mendis is that having a female pastor helps a lot of women and girls feel more connected to the life of the church. During the meet-and-greet on the weekend of my call vote in early January, a young girl approached me. “She’s really excited to meet you,” I was told. “She’s never met a female pastor.” “Well, I’m glad I’m here!” “Me, too,” she said. And we’re glad you’re here, Pastor Mendis! Your wisdom and perseverance have helped to pave the way for female faith leaders, like me, serving in our synod. Congratulations on 50 years of ordained ministry. And may God bless your continued work of encouraging and equipping new leaders for ministry!

Pastor Mendis: 50 Years of Ministry