One of the themes I will try to develop in this haphazard series on Women and ministry is that “minstry” can’t be limited to ordination and serving as a senior pastor in a local church. In fact, I want to expand our sense of ministry and to do this we can consider the example of Phyllis Tickle. |inline
A nice convergence: our series on Women in Ministry and on Scriptures and Scripture converge in the chapter by Pamela Cochran on “Scripture, Feminism, and Sexuality.” |inline
One of the challenges women face in ministry today is the accusation of the feminization of the church. There are a variety of platforms on which this accusation is hurled, but each of the platforms works against women in ministry. |inline
Ruth Tucker is a former colleague of mine from my days at Trinity and she is the co-author of the very influential Daughters of the Church (with Walt Liefeld). Ruth is an excellent teacher, writer about women’s issues, a columnist, and an observer of religious trends (and sectarian movements). A few years ago I heard she was teaching at Calvin Theological Seminary. No longer. |inline
For a long time I’ve wanted to do a series on women in ministry, but not only is a blog not the ideal place for such a series, many of us get so riled up that conversation slips all too quickly into accusation. Our last post about Women in Ministry, however, proved to me that bloggers can engage in a conversation without losing their sanctification. So, I’ve got an invitation: |inline
I’m asking for your cooperation today. First a question about women in ministry and then some guidelines for participation. The question: Why is it that, in denominations that have chosen to ordain women, ordained women are not being appointed or called to churches of 350 or more members? Now the guidelines: |inline
A student of mine, sitting near me in a lobby between classes, began chatting with her friend about choosing a church in the area. A comment of hers interests me. She said she had gone to a local church, but observed that there were no women in leadership, and that she wanted to be involved in a church that supported women in ministry. |inline
By Kelly Edmiston
Women Preachers and News Anchors
I’ll never forget my first job as a Youth Pastor in 2006. I had just graduated from college with a social work degree and I moved to Cairo, Egypt as a youth ministry intern at the largest English-speaking Evangelical Church in the Middle East, at the time. After six months in the role, my boss asked me come on staff and I committed to stay for two more years. We developed a youth program with small groups, weekly programs, special events and the whole nine yards. It was awesome. I came alive during those years. I found myself, in the best and healthiest sense of the sentiment. I was affirmed in my gifts and I received what I now believe to be a “call” to vocational ministry. Over the course of three years I grew as a communicator. I preached in youth group settings every couple of weeks. I led prayers, announcements, communion and baptisms for the larger church almost every week. I will never forget the day that my lead pastor sat me down and told me all of the ways that he believed I was gifted. He told me that I brought energy and passion to public communication. And then he said to me, “Kelly, you should be a preacher.”
By the end of my three years there, I decided that while I didn’t want to be a preacher, I was ok being a Youth Pastor who sometimes was invited to preach. There was one thing that I knew for certain, I wanted to spend my life, using all of my gifts, for the sake of the local church. I figured there were lots of ways that I could use my energy and passion and public communication skills but the church was what I cared the most about and what I believed the most in.
Fast forward to many years later. I was a guest speaker at a youth retreat in the U. S. After the last talk was over, a prominent leader of that church pulled me aside and began to tell me many of the same things that the Lead Pastor in Cairo had told me. He told me that I brought great energy and passion to the task of communication. He gave me specific encouragement about the way I presented my talks over the course of the weekend. Then he paused and said, “Kelly, you should be a news anchor.” He went on, “Seriously, you are just so good, so articulate and expressive…” My heart felt like it dropped to the bottom of my stomach. “A news anchor?” I clarified. And inside I began to scream, “I don’t want to be a news anchor!” I want to be a youth pastor who is sometimes invited to preach.
Here was the message I received from him, a prominent leader in the church, “Your kind is not welcome here.” The message I received that day was one that women in patriarchal environments hear over and over again. “You are too talented to be here where these skills won’t ever be fully utilized. But if you will re-direct your course to a secular, non-church context, I am sure that you will find great success.” But here is what the patriarchal church doesn’t understand about women in ministry. We don’t want to be in a secular job. This is why we have pursued a career in ministry. We took this job because we want to use all of our gifts and talents and abilities for the building up of the Body of Christ, the local church. We, women ministers everywhere, believe so deeply in the mission of the church and her potential to impact the world for good that we have endured the funny looks, the inappropriate comments and the confused critique of those who believe that we should remain silent and become news anchors instead of pastors.
Suggestions like these are hurtful and harmful, not only to the women who receive them, but also to the church. I know countless women who have left vocational ministry for secular jobs or to be stay-at-home moms because the fight was too great. And the church is losing. Our pulpits are losing. Our youth ministries and children ministries and connections ministries are losing. The more we tell women that “your kind is not welcome here” the more we lose. It’s time to wake up. It is time to start cultivating church cultures where talented and gifted women are encouraged to be pastors, preachers and prophets. It is time for her gifts to be seen as blessings to the church, not liabilities. It is time for women to step in to all that God has gifted and called her to do for the community of faith that she so deeply loves.
By Kelly Edmiston
If you could have lunch with one person who would it be? This is an “ice breaker question” that I have often used in youth ministry settings over the last thirteen years. Good “get to know you” questions are hard to come by. And this question helps me understand what my students are interested in. It helps me know what motivates them and interests them. My students will choose to have lunch with Rihanna or Kanye or President Lincoln. I must admit that I have always had a difficult time answering the question. Recently, I have found my answer. One of the most compelling people in all of history is Mary, the Mother of Jesus. She is who I would choose to have lunch with. Obviously there would be some time travel involved. But in “icebreaker questions” that is allowed.
Mary was the God-bearer. God dwelt within her uterus, nursed at her breasts and woke her up all night every night for the first year or two of his life. Mary was the means by which God brought God’s own self into the world.
Mary was an Israelite woman living in a world in which women were considered the property of their husbands and fathers. They were lower than the “second class.” Women were in a class of their own and one that you didn’t want to be in. Mary is included in all of the gospel writers account of the birth of Jesus but we don’t hear the story from her perspective. We hear her song of praise, but we know nothing of her sleepless nights, her heart burn, or her lack of energy to get out of bed in the morning. We don’t know what fear or excitement danced within her the night of Jesus’s birth. We know that she gave of her body, her blood and her life for the sake of the Savior of the world. And we know that she stored all of these moments up in her heart. How do we know it? She must have told the gospel writers who then wrote down what they remembered of her story. Oh how I wish I could hear the story from her perspective, exactly as she experienced it!
“What was it like to be the first God-bearer to live on the planet?” This would be the first question I would ask her over lunch.
The next question I would ask is this, “What was it like to have been the first God-bearer and then to be kept out of the life of God?”
Mary, like all women of that day, would have been relegated to knowing God, corporately, from afar due to the cultural realities. Their place in the synagogue, the Jewish place of worship, was in the outer courts. The outers courts were on the margins of the synagogue. Also in the outer courts were the gentiles, the sinners, the outcasts of the day. God dwelt in the inner part of the synagogue, the place behind the veil where only priests, who were men, could go. The presence of God was symbolized in the menorah and the scrolls in the inner places and women were marginalized to the outside.
I would ask Mary about this. I want to know what it was like to bear God in her own body and then be marginalized from God’s presence.
This part of Mary’s story is paradigmatic for women in the church today.
Elizabeth Johnson points out that despite women’s God given identity as equal and human persons and the rich range of gifts that they bring, “their worth has consistently been subordinated and demeaned in the theories, symbols, rituals and structures of both society and church, most of which they had no part in shaping.”[1]
Today women are still led to believe that they do not have access to God because of cultural realities of the day. They, too, are kept out of the life of God, corporately, as they are denied the ability to name and know God from their own experience. They are not invited to tell their own story from their perspective, exactly as they have experienced it when it comes to matters of faith. Women all too quickly forget that we are the bearers of God and made equally to reflect God to the world, alongside our brothers.
Women are still marginalized in the church and therefore relegated to knowing God as an outsider looking in. But women were silenced and oppressed, because of their gender, long before even Mary was relegated to the court of women. The boundary marker marginalizing Mary from God’s dwelling in the inner courts was a literal veil. It was the veil that tore at the crucifixion of Jesus.
The veil and the synagogue stratification system kept Mary, and all women, on the margins of their religious community. These were boundary markers that told women how far they could go, where they could participate and what value they had before God.
There are still boundary markers around women in the church today. Some boundaries are externally imposed, like the veil and the temple courts and some are internally imposed.
My friend, Dr. Ben Blackwell, pointed out to me that there’s an ancient tradition (2nd Century) in the Infancy Gospel of James, that Mary helped sew the veil that tore at the crucifixion. It can’t be proven, of course, because we don’t know the details of Mary’s story of history. But Blackwell points out that given her relationship to Elizabeth and Zechariah, a priestly family, that she could have had this type of relationship to the temple and therefore the veil story could be true.[2]
Unknowingly, Mary could have contributed to the system that marginalized her. And as women, we still do this today. We unknowingly contribute to a system set on marginalizing us every time we don’t lean in or speak up in our places of work. We construct our own veils when we sit content in the status quo of patriarchy instead of pushing the system to move and change. We are complicit when we remain silent as our good ideas get claimed as their own by the men in power around us. We contribute to the marginalization of women when we attack other women for charging ahead.
This would be my third question to Mary. If the tradition was true, “What was it like when the veil tore in two from top to bottom at the moment Jesus breathed his last breath?”
The torn veil signifies that all of Gods people, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or any other boundary marker, now have access to God. The markers that used to keep women marginalized are no more. Even boundaries that we ourselves have helped create, no longer exist in Christ. Women are given full access, complete equality and inner court privileges when it comes to God’s Kingdom.
At the crucifixion, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is now invited into the most holy place to know God intimately and without restriction. And women everywhere are invited to know, to name and to experience God fully and without boundaries.
So, how do we erect boundaries around women today because of their gender? Let’s embrace the veil that tore in two.
[1] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is, Chapter 5.
[2] Dr. Ben Blackwell pointed this out to me in a online conversation. You can read the Infancy Gospel of James here, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/infancyjames.html. You can also find Ben’s theology book here. https://www.amazon.com/Engaging-Theology-Historical-Practical-Introduction/dp/0310092760/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=ben+blackwell&qid=1573585483&sr=8-1
This is the kind of article we, especially we educators, all need to read carefully and keep near us. Thank you Jill and thanks to CBE for permissions given to post CBE posts like this.
It was my first year of seminary. I looked over the worksheet our spiritual development professor had just handed out. “Place the amount of time you spend on each activity in the blank beside it.” Quickly, I scanned the listed activities. Sermon prep. Check. Studying. Check. Visitation. Well, I didn’t really do that. No check. I kept scanning, then slowly raised my hand.
“Ah, where are the blanks for making dinner? Cleaning the house? Childcare?” Silence. “Shopping?” A couple clear—if immediately checked—snorts rose from the men in class. They had been busily filling out their forms. To ask that question had never occurred to them. Most clearly didn’t want it to occur to them.
“Well, I guess, maybe you could put that under . . .” the professor stalled out. “I’m not sure . . . Maybe we need to get a new form for next year.”
We were guinea pigs, the women that year and I. We knew—after we had applied and been accepted—that our school had just begun admitting women to the MDiv program, the denomination new to the concept of women behind the pulpit. With my well-honed mixture of naiveté and bravado, I’d jumped into seminary assuming fairness and reward for diligence. For the most part, this materialized. Many professors with deep knowledge and compassionate, equality-minded commitment taught me well.
Yet so many small things, like this worksheet, told us another story. Maybe the school welcomed us, but the daily reality of male-oriented assumptions, gender-biased reading material, and demoralizing interactions with students and faculty chipped away at our certainty. It was the accumulation of these small things, not the prejudices writ large, that eroded our souls and hearts bit by bit, making it more burdensome for the women than the men to believe in their holy calling.
The message was clear: yes, women could be ordained. But only after they endured the subtle hazing the men never experienced.
The hazing my fellow female students and I endured in seminary included things like:
Even many years past seminary graduation, I have found that women still endure subtle hazing as a part of ministry life—small experiences that men overlook and women feel grating on their souls.
Mirroring my experience in seminary, the hazing my female colleagues and I have experienced in our ministry work has included things like:
A few months ago, I confronted a male pastor for making jokes about women while giving a message to a large group of pastors. This brother had told a joke about something he (and many others, judging by the laughter) found humorous, but I didn’t find the joke funny. I found it offensive and harmful. In his joke, the pastor held men up as shining examples of truth telling, putting women down as comically inferior. And I watched as his joke tacitly told all the listening pastors that this was OK to do.
He did not mean his words that way. He apologized kindly and sincerely. Yet he hadn’t done the work to listen to women and discover the potential offense himself. He actively supported women in ministry. Yet he still didn’t understand that one can be supportive in theory and harmful in action.
Twenty-five years after entering ministry, I still find myself advocating for women at meetings. Recently, I pointed out that a specific book, required for pastors in the conference, isn’t in line with our denomination’s beliefs on women’s value. No one else had noticed. The group leader took notes, as I’m sure he will next time too. But what I want next time is for him to notice first so that I can just be the pastor—not The Female Pastor.
Women who are called into ministry, you’re not being overly sensitive when you explain your experience. You know the difference between supporting and doing no harm. You intuit it. It’s OK to tell others what you have experienced and what you know to be true about it. It’s OK to advocate for yourselves. In fact, you must.
Give yourself permission to speak up because the men will not see what you see. Even the most supportive, considerate men in ministry will not see and feel what you see and feel. It’s not a character flaw that men don’t see what we see. (It is a character flaw to tell a woman she’s too pregnant to be given the respect of your attention. To his credit, my preaching professor informed that student of this without hesitation.) However, we cannot know what we do not know.
Like marginalized groups struggling to let others feel what it is to live in their skin, women can get exhausted continually reminding their brothers of what they do not see and feel. It’s not our job, and it’s also OK to pull back and require men to do the work themselves. Young women, if you can, I encourage you to speak about your experience tenaciously, kindly, and without apology. If you can’t—if you’re tired of being “that woman” and need to focus on your calling instead of educating those who should educate themselves—that’s fine, too. We all have our seasons of moving in and out of this conversation.
I would love for young women called into ministry to know they don’t have to live with the hazing but can courageously teach the difference between supporting and doing no harm.
If you choose to engage in educating male pastors and leaders, begin with questions. Ask your fellow pastors and your denominational leaders questions like these. Then, keep asking.
Have the daily “little” things made me stronger? I suppose. But how would it look if we didn’t have to be made stronger through this kind of hazing? What if, instead, we were made stronger through the community of ministers working together, respecting one another, taking encouragement and sharpening from both women and men? Could we all be made stronger through mutual respect?
I would love for young women called into ministry not to have to worry about this at all. Until then, I’d like these women to know they can advocate for themselves, and their voice will make all our leaders stronger.
Jesus Creed
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