GENEVA (RNS/ENI) The Lutheran World Federation has elected a 48-year-old Chilean pastor as general secretary of the global church group that includes more than 68 million Protestants worldwide, including nearly five million in the U.S.

The Rev. Martin Junge becomes the first representative from Latin America to hold the highest position in the secretariat at the LWF. The election was announced on Monday (Oct. 26) following a closed session of the LWF’s main governing body taking place near Geneva.

Junge is to succeed the Rev. Ishmael Noko, a Zimbabwean theologian who became general secretary of the Lutheran grouping in 1994, and was re-elected for a second term in 2004. Junge will take up his post following the next LWF assembly in Stuttgart, Germany, in July 2010.

Noko had announced at the council meeting in 2008 that he would end his service in his post at the end of October 2010.

The council has 48 members elected by the assembly and meets every 12 to 18 months. The Rev. Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is president of the LWF.

The Finnish Lutheran weekly newspaper Kotimaa earlier in October reported dissatisfaction among some church members who said that the lack of transparency in the process was not appropriate.

Junge has been based since 2000 at the LWF’s Geneva headquarters, where he is area secretary for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Department of Mission and Development. He was previously president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chile. He studied theology at the Georg Augusta University in Germany, and was ordained in 1989 in Chile.

The LWF is made up of 140 churches from 79 nations with a total membership of 68.5 million people.