She's about to be ordained at age 80

Louisa Groce, left, with another 80-year-old:  Dr. Ella Pearson Mitchell, a 1998 Preaching with Power lecturer.

Louisa Groce doesn’t want anyone to know she is the oldest candidate to ever have been approved for ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"That’s incidental," the 80-year-old Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia student says. "Anything I’m able to accomplish is all due to the glory of God. The fact that I have the energy I have and get around the way I do – God gets all the credit for that.

"To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t feel old at all," she says. "I’m ready to go wherever I’m assigned and do whatever work the Lord gives me to do. I believe in looking ahead and not behind. I hope to become a great preacher someday.

"I don't deserve attention like this."

Sorry, Louisa, this is too good a story, too remarkable a witness. The world needs this kind of good news.

Slim, wiry and exuding energy, Louisa Groce could take some satisfaction in looking behind. She’s successfully raised five daughters and was a single mom during many of the most influential parenting years. Today, the daughters hold jobs like Deputy Director of the Social Security Administration, CEO of a New Jersey hospital and student services coordinator of the International School of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast of Africa.

As a Philadelphia Public Schools educator from 1946 to 1976, she frequently worked with hard-to-teach children -- in special education with children having developmental delays (a teaching colleague was Lolita Bluford, mother of America's first African American astronaut). Later, she instructed high schoolers who'd run amok in the justice system and couldn't be placed in the usual schools. She'd give the children her home telephone number in case they needed someone to talk to. She saw that they took class trips to New York and Washington -- even China. For the latter adventure, she did the fund-raising herself in a matter of months. She was successful, if at times a bit crazy in her approaches, she says.

"I found these children needed someone who would be loyal to them," Groce says. "I would tell them that even though they might think of themselves at the bottom of the ladder they are worth something. I respected them and let them know they are loved. I told them that they needed to strive for excellence and respect themselves."

On more than one occasion, she took them into her home on an emergency basis. After two young women fought each other and a blouse was torn, she took them both to a department store to shop together for a new one. A male student once began to attack her after she tried to coax him away from riding a cart in a school hallway. He stopped the assault after she offered to find help for the young man if he wanted it. Her last 10 pre-retirement years were spent at Antioch College, focusing on "teaching others to teach" in the area of special education.

After "retiring," Groce continued her intense involvement in the Church, where she had taught Sunday school, served on a call committee and the church council. For a time she served as a lay associate with the Camden (NJ) Lutheran Parish. Later she served as an Associate in Ministry at Emanuel Lutheran Church in South Philadelphia. She played a role in invigorating church attendance and ran a campaign to pay for new building downspouts at the church. "I always worked alongside people at Emanuel," she says. "I always told them I would do anything at all, including scrub toilets, but I wouldn't do it by myself."

Groce decided to come to Seminary in the midst of her church assignments "because I'd never really had any formal education on the Bible, and I wanted to know more." She says her call to the ordained ministry "wasn't a lightning bolt kind of thing. Being involved in the church was something I always wanted to do."

She drives to the Seminary from her Willingboro, NJ, home each day and has been a vital part of the community. This spring she went on a Johns Island, SC, globalization trip, an immersion program in which seminarians repair homes together. Louisa helped paint a house. She resisted having her story told in a local newspaper even though her companions reminded her that her energies are "a witness to the love of Christ." In a Lenten sermon at the Seminary, Dean Philip Krey spoke of Louisa's profound witness, also noting that as Groce anticipates a call this spring "she is older than Abraham when he left for the promised land."

Louisa Groce credits a Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod pastor, Paul Trumpoldt, with influencing her in her younger years, but it was Bishop Roy Riley of the New Jersey Synod who surprised her in the Spring of 1996, when he heard she was attending Seminary.

"Would you consider ordination?" she recalls his asking.

"Bishop Riley," she responded, "Do you know how old I am?" He indicated the age didn't matter.

"I have to admit, I'm a little afraid about whether I'll be good enough to handle a call," says the woman who once successfully taught challenged, frequently unwanted children. "But I'll go wherever I'm needed, even if it is a hole in the wall.

"Just be sure of one thing if you write about me," Louisa Groce says. "None of this is my doing. God makes everything I do possible. It's all due to the glory of God. Make sure God gets all the credit in the headline."