The U.S.-based Lutheran Church Missouri Synod "has come here with a battlefield attitude to liberalism, including women priests and the role of women in general in church and society," said Aida Predele, a Latvian woman priest.
The Missouri Synod, a renegade wing which has split from the Lutheran World Federation that represents most of the world's 64 million Lutherans, does not allow the ordination of women priests.
It has been increasing its influence in the region, recently signing "altar and pulpit fellowship" agreements with the Lutheran churches in Latvia and Lithuania.
The Lutheran Church has relatively few followers in Catholic-dominated Lithuania. But is the leading faith in Latvia, where a quarter of the country's 2.4 million people are active members.
The few women priests remaining in the Baltic states are worried about their future and their church.
"I don't know what will happen to me - I can't become a man. The Missouri Synod is against women priests, but one can't interpret scripture just as one wants," said Sarmite Fisher, another Latvian woman priest.
The number of women priests in Latvia has fallen from nine in 1991 to four today as the current conservative archbishop has refused to ordain women.
Since 1993 some 20 women have left Latvia in order to become ordained abroad.
Lutheran churches in Western Europe are now threatening to cut help for Latvia and Lithuania, including the restoration of church buildings suffering years of neglect, said Fisher.
The women voiced their concerns following the recent visit of Gerald Kieschnick, president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, who traveled through Latvia, Lithuania and Russia in January.
He sought to dispel accusations that his church had taken advantage of the cultural and spiritual confusion that accompanied the collapse of communism to propagate a rigidly conservative form of religion.
"Where a church says we need pastors and have no seminaries and asks for help then of course we help," he said while visiting the rural Lithuanian town of Taurage.
But the dean of Latvia University's theology faculty, Juris Calitis, warned that a "defensive, closed off" form of religion should not be the outcome of the battle for hearts and minds currently being waged in the region.
"The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has shown a visible, determined interest in having its presence and vision of Christianity become the norm in previously Iron Curtain countries," said Calitis.
"The feeling was the Baltic states and Belarus were stepping stones to the real plum, Russia, but now it is showing more interest in these countries in their own right."
Lithuanian Archbishop Jonas Kalvinas defended the new agreement, saying conservative values had ensured the survival of Lutheranism in Lithuania through decades of Soviet repression.
"At first after Lithuania's independence, we restored churches, but now we understand our first task is to restore spiritual life. It's more difficult than in Soviet times, with TV, magazines and newspapers spreading pornography and other bad things," said Kalvinas.
Meanwhile Latvia's Archbi-shop Janis Vanags has recently courted controversy by saying he will contribute an essay to an anti-homosexuality essay contest that has attracted the attention of the Latvian state's human rights bureau.
"Now homosexuals are recognized as a minority, so in principle after them pedophiles may also be recognized as a minority," Vanags was quoted as saying in the daily Rigas Balss.
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