Gaylerd Falde; Retired Head of Lutheran Unit

Bishop Gaylerd L. Falde, leader of the Lutheran Church in the western United States for more than three decades, has died after an 18-month battle with bone cancer. He was 71.

Falde died Tuesday at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, where he had been a patient since Saturday, his son-in-law, Steve Smith, said Wednesday.

Retired in 1983, Falde had served as president of the California District of the Evangelical Lutheran Church from 1951 until 1961, when it merged into the American Lutheran Church. He then was elected bishop, or president, of that denomination’s six-state South Pacific District and retained the office for 22 years.

Smith said Falde had helped build the district from about 30 congregations in the late 1940s to 317, with 147,000 members, at the time of his retirement.

During his tenure, Falde championed greater leadership roles for women in the church, contending that assigning women “to a lesser position in the church cannot, in my judgment, be substantiated by Scripture.”

Born May 1, 1918, in Canton, S.D., the veteran churchman was educated at St. Olaf College and Luther Seminary in Minnesota. He served parishes in Jewell, Iowa, and Hawthorne before taking over the church’s district management.

As president of the California Lutheran Education Foundation, he also served on boards of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, and Pacific Theological Seminary in Berkeley.

Internationally respected, Falde was named the American Lutheran Church’s delegate to the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India, in 1961 and to the Lutheran World Federation Conclave in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1977.

Falde is survived by his wife, Joan, of Studio City, a son and three daughters.

Services will be at 11 a.m. Saturday in Emmanuel Lutheran Church, North Hollywood. The family has requested that memorial donations be made to the Chapel Fund at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.