Outgoing Presiding Bishop Alex Malasusa waves with Bishop Elect Frederick Shoo after the latter’s election to serve as head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania.
TANZANIA – On August 16, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT) elected a new Presiding Bishop at its 19th Church Assembly at Makumira University near Arusha. Rev. Dr. Frederick Onael Shoo was elected to a four-year term as head of the ELCT.
Prior to his election, Bishop Elect Shoo served as bishop of the ELCT’s Northern Diocese. He earned the moniker “the tree bishop” due to his work planting trees to help preserve the shrinking glaciers of Kilimanjaro. PBS featured this work in a 2012 report. Bishop Shoo was first ordained for pastoral ministry in 1986.
Bishop Shoo succeeds Bishop Alex Gehaz Malalusa, who has retired after completing two four-year terms as head of the ELCT.
The ELCT is the world’s second largest Lutheran church body, with a growing membership of more than 6.5 million members as of 2014. The church body is affiliated with the Lutheran World Federation. A number of the ELCT’s bishops have in recent years also developed friendly relations with The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), a member church of the International Lutheran Council.
One such area of cooperation has been the ELCT’s Bishop Emmanuel Makala Training Center in northern Tanzania. The Center has been a joint venture of the ELCT’s South-East of Lake Victoria Diocese and the LCMS, with the LCMS providing financial support for the training program as well as providing theological professors. That partnership culminated in March with the first graduating class of the Center, as 21 new pastoral candidates were ordained and seven deaconesses commissioned for service in the ELCT.
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