women ministers

In Support of Women in Church Leadership: A Conversation with Male Allies

June 15, 2022

Rev. Dr. Abraham Smith, Professor of New Testament, Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University

Rev. Dr. Sid Hall, Pastor Emeritus, Trinity Church of Austin

Dr. Christopher Hutson, Professor of Bible, Missions, & Ministry at Abilene Christian University

Moderated by Rev. Sheila Sholes-Ross

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Hello! I am Sheila Sholes-Ross, co-chair of Equity for Women in the Church, Inc., and I co-chair this endeavor with Rev. Dr. Jann Aldredge-Clanton. Today we have board members from our Equity board whom we view as allies as women in ministry. Before I give a brief overview of why we are here, let me tell you what Equity for Women in the Church is. It’s an ecumenical movement to facilitate equal representation of clergywomen as pastors of multicultural churches in order to transform church and society. Within Equity for Women in the Church, Inc. we have a subcommittee called Equity Male Allies Team which is chaired by our team leader Rev. Dr. Andrea Chambers. With Rev. Dr. Sid Hall, Rev. Dr. Christy Woodbury-Moore, and myself, we are a part of the team Allies on Behalf of Women in Ministry.

I’ll give you a brief introduction and then I’ll allow our male allies to tell a little about themselves. Jann Aldredge-Clanton and I thought it would be important to have male allies within this entity, which is a 501(c)(3) that was birthed from within the Alliance of Baptists. Male allies are important, not because we think that men have to tell women clergy that they’re okay, but because we can find support in the males who support women in ministry. And with that, I want to go around, starting with Dr. Christopher Hutson, and allow our speakers to introduce themselves before we go into the questions.

DR. HUTSON: Hi, I’m Professor of Bible, Missions, & Ministry at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. This is an issue that’s been important to me for the last 35 years. When I was in seminary, I was introduced to the question of women in ministry for the first time and met women who clearly had spiritual gifts and knowledge and ability and skill. I started working in churches—I come from the Churches of Christ, which historically have been pretty traditionally patriarchal. In the last couple of decades, there’s been a small but growing trend toward an ecumenical outlook. My own congregation, only in 2019, became the first congregation in Abilene to ordain women elders, which is to say we finally stopped raising the stained glass ceiling and removed it altogether. That’s been a long process. For 35 years or so, I’ve been talking and writing and leading workshops in churches and finally beginning to see a little payoff.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Thank you for participating in this dialogue. Next I go to Rev. Dr. Abe Smith.

REV. DR. SMITH: Thank you. I am a professor of New Testament, like Chris, but I teach at Perkins School of Theology which is a part of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I’ve had a long interest in helping to create venues in which women have been respected in ministry. I think in 1989, someone from the production team of the University of Alabama television station interviewed me for a project called Women of the Cloth. I talked about the Bible and the ways in which the Bible can be used to support women in ministry. Fast forward to 2017, I was asked to produce a Bible study for Equity for Women in the Church as part of its Calling in the Key of She empowerment program. Later in 2018, I was asked to become a board member. One of my students, Rev. Dr. Andrea Chambers, is also a board member, a rising star and one whose intellectual skills, social graces, and Christian witness since her seminary days at Perkins have always impressed me. I was not able at the time to convince her to do doctoral work in New Testament, but I wanted to be part of a group that could find other ways to encourage all women, but especially young African-American women, to excel in leadership roles in the church.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Thank you, Abe. And last but not least is a member of the Male Allies Team, Rev. Dr. Sid Hall.

REV. DR. HALL: Thanks, Sheila, it’s so great to be here with you, and with Chris and Abe as well. I am recently retired. I was a United Methodist and United Church of Christ minister for 42 years, and a good bit of that time was in Austin, Texas, where I was Lead Minister of Trinity Church of Austin, a congregation that is affiliated with both the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ. Both of those denominations are very strong in their advocacy for women’s ordination. I grew up in traditions that had that idea already. However, what we know is that just because it’s on the books doesn’t mean that there’s equity. Appointments for women in the United Methodist Church are often difficult, sometimes because they’re raising children and they have demands on them that way. But there are all sorts of excuses why women, even though they’re appointed, don’t “find a church” and often are not able to rise up in the system and have positions at some of the larger, more well-known churches. The system itself is still very patriarchal. I was very fortunate in seminary to be introduced to writers like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, and others that opened my eyes to the fact that we’re not only dealing with things like inclusive language and gender inclusion in that way, but also confronting patriarchal metaphors and systems themselves. We’re considering how to reach a place where we are thinking and talking and acting in the church on a level playing field instead of in a system that’s top-down. That has been a passion in my ministry, how do I do that as a male without mansplaining—

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: And being condescending, yes!

REV. DR. HALL: Yes, without mansplaining the feminine! An ally role is an ongoing journey of knowing how to do that with integrity.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS. Thank you, Sid.

Let me tell you my story. I was in seminary in Durham, North Carolina, and I went to a citywide revival. My mentor pastor called me up to the pulpit, and when I went to sit down in the chancel next to the altar, I was about to sit next to a prominent male preacher, not my mentor. When I was about to sit down, he placed his handkerchief in the seat. I didn’t know what to do other than to move to another seat. I was embarrassed. All the citywide revival folks saw it. To this day, I feel I should have addressed it. If I had the experience and the courage I have now, I would have either sat on his handkerchief or picked it up and thrown it into his face.

I want you all, male allies, to jump in at any time with comments relating to these questions. I think Chris Hutson spoke to this first question: Why are we still having these conversations in 2022? We know that scripture is still being used to oppress marginalized women and girls, preventing them from being called to senior clergy positions. How can we begin to interpret these texts differently? We all know the Timothy scripture. Give us an example of scripture that is traditionally used to subjugate women, but around which you have found freedom in how you teach and preach the text. Name the scripture, and how you preach against the scripture.

DR. HUTSON: Before we start naming scriptures, I’d like to address the very first part of the question, which is why we’re still having these conversations in 2022. I’m always taken aback when I meet new folks who haven’t heard any of the issues before, but every time I give a talk, someone is always hearing these ideas for the first time. So why is that? Clergy and scholars have been writing and publishing and preaching these things for decades, so why is the message not filtering down? I think it might be helpful to read a book like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s publication Jesus and John Wayne. You can see there are networks of churches that are actively engaged in promoting, not just a complementarian view of the relationship between men and women, but aggressively promoting a strong patriarchalism that’s pretty misogynistic. Many folks grow up in, or are influenced by, these points of view through social media and television. In some ways, the conversation is going backward. So it’s not surprising that there are a lot of folks who are hearing these issues being expressed for the first time.

The second part of your question is really important, the scriptures that we need to explicate more fully. I have a scripture to comment on, but let me give my colleagues a chance to name their scripture.

REV. DR. HALL: Let me chime in. I read a book called The Forgotten Creed by Stephen Patterson, and it uses the formula that Paul mentions in Galatians and Romans. This formula was part of an early baptismal ritual and liturgy, and it may be the very first creed of the church. It was probably not original with Paul, the scholar says, but it was certainly well-known and used by Paul. It said, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free”—and then, interestingly, something I’d never noticed before—"no male and female”—not “nor.” Patterson goes into great detail explicating what that might mean. The idea was that in the early church, when you took on the mantle of Christ and went down into the water and came back up again, you were taking on a flattening of the world. And the radicalism of that was profound. We’ve lost the sense of that: “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free”—that’s the whole oppressive Roman economic system. To be a Christian was to take your life in your own hands and to speak from a radical sense of inclusion. For me, that scripture is very powerful.

DR. HUTSON: I agree, that’s a powerful scripture. You’re quoting Galatians 3:28. There’s an important takeaway point from that passage. We’re talking about the allusion in the third clause that you emphasized, “in Christ there is no male and female,” that’s a clear allusion to Genesis 1, which makes that distinction. Paul’s larger theological argument is that in Christ there’s a new creation, as he says in Second Corinthians. We’re no longer guided by the old creation, the world is re-created in Christ. We’re getting back to that original order, so we’re undoing some things. You can see a similar argument in First Corinthians 11, in Christ the Lord the new creation is different from the old creation, again an allusion to the creation narrative in Genesis. But in Christ, that old creation narrative is no longer normative. In Christ, the difference between men and women is taken away.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Chris, I’m not sure I understood what you were saying about how many people don’t realize the problem with a lack of women’s leadership in churches in the twenty-first century.

DR. HUTSON: Well, it’s always been the case. I grew up with people who didn’t understand the problem, and I’ve met with people throughout my adult life who didn’t understand the problem, and there are still people now who don’t understand the problem. So it’s like talking about racism in this country, another form of an oppressive power structure. There are forces that provide disinformation and actively campaign against understanding. So it’s not surprising that generation after generation, there are people who are unaware of the complexities of the problem or how to think about it. I like the term that Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza coined, kyriarchy, from kyrios or “lord,” which has to do with domination. Really all forms of domination are related to each other. The way I like to put it is, if you slice and dice so that some are more equal than others, then you’ve misunderstood the heart of Christianity. But it’s a common pathology of humans that we like to arrange our world with the understanding that some are more equal than others, and we tend to see ourselves in a more equal category, whichever group we’re in. And we have applied that in terms of ethnicity, nationality, gender, economic power, all of those things, they’re all related. Folks who like the status quo tend to campaign heavily to maintain their own power.

REV. DR. SMITH: As for a scripture that has been used to subjugate women, First Corinthians 14:33b-36 comes to mind, particularly verses 34 and 35: “Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” My own position on this passage is that it is an interpolation. It goes against the grain of Paul’s egalitarian ethos found elsewhere in his letters. In all of Paul’s other undisputed letters, he does not place limitations on women and their roles in the churches. In the case of Euodia and Syntyche that’s in Philippians, Paul claims that these women struggled alongside him in the gospel. Phoebe, a deacon, likely delivered one of Paul’s letters to a church he did not establish, the one at Rome. Junia, a woman, was an apostle. Chloe was the name of a woman, and some of her people brought the report to Paul about the Corinthians’ factionalism. In Corinthians itself, Paul elsewhere does not say women should not speak there; after all, women are praying and prophesying there. So perhaps what we see in First Corinthians 14:34-35 is an interpolation designed to bring Paul into line with later writings attributed to Paul. That’s what I would say about the scripture.

On your first question, when you were talking about how these conversations are still going on in 2022, I would say neither poverty nor patriarchalism is inevitable. The oppression of women and girls is a choice. It’s a choice to say, “The office of pastor is limited to men.” It’s a choice to mishandle allegations of sexual abuse. It’s a choice to use scripture as the basis for denying women leadership roles, particularly senior leadership roles, in the church. We’re still having these conversations because of a lack of moral or political will, and because there is a degree of socialized male shaming that often accompanies misogynist practices. But if enough of us in our churches would rise up against such marginalization, I think we could see some changes.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: I agree with that. You have offered a tool that can be used to dismantle doctrinal and theological pieces that are harmful. If male pastors would stand up—and not even pastors, any man—if they would stand up and not be afraid that their colleagues or friends would disengage from them, I believe more would stand up.

DR. HUTSON: I like the sequence in which this conversation has developed, because I think it’s useful that Sid started with a positive statement from scripture of what we’re for, from Galatians 3:28. I like that Abe went straight to one of the strongest, let’s call them “clobber” passages—I think there are two of those in particular in the New Testament. These two verses from First Corinthians 14 are so often quoted without any regard to literary, theological, or social context. Abe, I appreciate your trying to address that passage. The other passage that I would lift up that’s taken as a “clobber” passage would be First Timothy 2:11-12: “Let a woman learn in quietness in full submission, for I do not permit a woman to teach or presume authority over a man, but to be in quietness.” In the same way, those two verses are so often taken out of context and quoted and hammered over and over.

If anybody is a King of the Hill fan, the animated series on Fox television, the situation is kind of like when Hank Hill’s Laotian neighbor moved in next door, and he went to meet him. And Hank was a little confused, and he was trying to place and put his neighbor in a box, and he said, “So, are you Chinese or Japanese?” And the neighbor explained, “Well, I’m Laotian.” And Hank just had a blank look, and the neighbor said, “I’m from Laos. It’s the name of a country.” Blank look. And so Hank let the neighbor explain for several minutes about what it means to be Laotian, nothing registered. And then Hank’s follow-up question was, “So, are you Chinese or Japanese?”

A lot of times the conversations we have, we talk long and hard about literary context and theological context, and what the meaning of the gospel is, and people come back to these verses in First Corinthians 14 and First Timothy 2, and they just quote those again as if we’ve said nothing. These are the two passages in the New Testament on which everything hangs, really, and everything else is made to conform. We’re trying to understand an ancient culture. The scriptures were written by ancient people. So it’s like we’re trying to see clearly something that was written a long time ago by people far away, in another language and in a culture that doesn’t exist anymore, and we’re looking through a telescope to see something far away, and we’re looking through the wrong end of that telescope, which makes things seem even smaller and farther away. We focus in on those two little passages, out of context, and see such a narrow range. What we need to do is take a wide angle lens and see the broad scope of what the Bible says about men and women. There are so many positive statements and examples of women whom God calls and uses throughout scripture, the ways they participate and lift up the church, so that these two passages in First Corinthians 14 and First Timothy 2, they’re really the anomalies in the New Testament. We need to learn to explain them as such.

REV. DR. HALL: John Dominic Crossan talks about this in his recent writing on Paul, about the interpolation that Abe quoted from First Corinthians that was probably added much later and inserted as Paul’s word, and the pastoral epistles that Chris was talking about—Ephesians, Colossians—that are not authentic Paul, with their very patriarchal framework on slavery and male and female and husband and wife. One of the things that Crossan points out is the boldness of this first creed that Paul mentions in Corinthians and Romans. Within a generation or two, people were using Paul’s name and naming themselves as being in the line of Paul, but interpreting things very differently and backing out of the radical equality that we see in Paul’s letters. Crossan asks, what happened in the early church that made the church afraid and caused people to back away from this message?

I like this question because in real life today, pastors in their churches get pressure from church members to not speak prophetically, to not act boldly. That fear of stepping forward and continuing that radical inclusiveness is a very real thing for pastors. From a pastoral care standpoint, I’m always wondering what we can do to help them be courageous and true when they feel those pressures. Leaders in the early church backed out of that radical position, and we’re still doing it.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Sid, I’m coming from a different perspective. I’m a senior pastor in a church that is about 95% Caucasian/white. Now that I’m into my ninth year as pastor, I’m speaking more boldly, I’m becoming more courageous. When we’re thinking about how to help male clergy become allies—maybe when male clergy get more tenure, it will help them to be more courageous. No one wants to be voted out. But I’m at the stage in this position where, if I’m voted out because I’m speaking more boldly, so be it. I can’t lie, nine years ago, I walked on eggshells about the race piece. Not so much about the woman piece. They called a woman, an African-American woman. I’m only the thirtieth pastor, and the church has been around since the 1700s. I’m the first female and the first African-American. In order to encourage people, I think they need to be told, “Just stand up, in spite of _______.” That’s what I’m doing now, I’m standing up, in spite of, nevertheless.

REV. DR. HALL: You earned their trust by being their pastor.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: But they still get angry.

REV. DR. HALL: But now when they get angry, after you’ve earned their trust, you have more cred in being able to speak prophetically and be bold, I think. I think what you’re describing is being a smart pastor.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: And that can be a tool for the people on the fence, the males who are on the fence.

REV. DR. SMITH: I want to mention two tools that I think can be helpful. The first I call decolonizing the artifacts of power. Here’s the way it works in seminaries. You begin with decolonizing syllabi. If your syllabus is all white, you try to make it more diverse. If your syllabus just mentions males, you decolonize your syllabi so it mentions women as well. That can be applied in churches as well. One of my friends talks about a curriculum transformation. Well, the transformation ought to include works written by women. To make a change, you’ve got to present the change that you want to see. The second tool that I think is helpful is to have a broader definition of violence. I think sometimes when we understand violence, we think about violence as a physical, direct act, and that’s true, that is violence. But there is a sociologist whose name is Johan Galtung who talks about two other kinds of violence. There’s something called structural violence, and that works with policies and programs that deny opportunities for certain groups or collectivities. And then there’s something called cultural violence, which is the use of ideological weapons to support the physical, direct violence and the structural, indirect violence. You can see how this plays out in the case of women in ministry, structural and cultural. With respect to structural, if it’s in your bylaws that women cannot have senior positions, that’s a structural form of violence. The way that some people support that is with the Bible. So that’s the ideological warrant that they use to support the structural violence. We need to think about violence in multiple ways, we need to have a broad definition, because we’re hurting women and girls in multiple ways. Some of those ways are direct and we can see them, but in many ways the effect is indirect. It still hurts, but you can’t point out who’s doing it, who’s the agent behind it. So unless we address violence in this kind of broad-based way, we’re going to continue to perpetuate a system that’s working against women and girls.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Sid and Chris, do you have anything to add?

DR. HUSTON: When you frame the question around tools that way, my instinct is to think about Audre Lorde and her famous dictum from 1979 that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. Well, what are the master’s tools? Is it enough for us to say we need to rethink the kinds of exegetical tools we’re bringing to bear on the text? But I’m not sure that’s it, because the whole system of patriarchal domination of men over women was around long before anybody invented historical, critical, exegetical tools! And those tools are neutral tools with which we excavate the text, and they can be used to bring to the surface details of the text that are very liberating for women, just as much as you can find aspects of the text that are patriarchal. Those are not the master’s tools, though certainly the master is happy to use those tools. What are the tools that the master used to build this house in the first place? Where did patriarchalism come from?

I wonder if the place to start is the common feminist insight: start with the lived experiences of women themselves. Start by taking seriously the woman who says, “I think I have a call from God.” Take that seriously and explore it. Take seriously a woman’s own story of what has happened to her. Don’t dismiss that and sweep it under the rug. One way of thinking about the tools is to create a world that doesn’t privilege men’s stories and experiences as normative and really all that matters. We need to go out of our way to listen to experiences of people who are not in power. In a patriarchal society, that means listening to women and taking them seriously.

There are many intellectual arguments that one can offer from exegesis of the text, from Christian theology and Christian history, that would present a logical case for the equality of the sexes. But in my experience, many people are afraid to act on that knowledge. They’re afraid of what will happen, until they experience for themselves—when you hear a woman praying who has deep spiritual insight, when you hear a woman teaching who has studied deeply and carefully and has something to say, when you hear a woman preach, the experience of the thing takes away some of the fear when it turns out that bolts of lightning do not fall from the sky. In fact, sometimes real insight and blessing arrive. And then we learn to recognize, oh, that when we read in Acts 2, “I will pour out my Spirit on the flesh on all people” and “your menservants and your maidservants will prophesy,” maybe we should take that seriously, that God uses all types of people, and we should be prepared, and we should maybe go out of our way to listen to other voices. And that way, we might find that those kinds of listening tools will be really helpful in constructing a better world.

REV. DR. HALL: That reminds me, Chris, that one of the things I learned in seminary that was very helpful, about being an ally, is the liberation theology idea of hermeneutical suspicion. Who is telling the story? What is the power play? Who is not telling the story? Who is not included? Having the willingness to ask those questions of the Bible and of your own cultural assumptions. I remember getting a text in my preaching class at Perkins with Virgil Howard, and it was a Deuteronomic text and I just thought it was awful. I said to Virgil, “I don’t know how I can preach a sermon on this text you handed me.” And I told him why. He said, “Why don’t you preach against it?” I said, “I can do that?!” And he said, “Of course, you can do anything you want.” And that was taking hermeneutical suspicion right into where it needed to be. That was really a life-changing moment for me, learning to employ that tool over and over around issues of race, gender, et cetera.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: I want to get to a question that’s very important to me, and that you touched on when you introduced yourselves. Why is being a male ally important to you, and how will you bring others? I’m challenging you, because many male clergy are not as astute as you are and will not dig into the scriptures. How are you going to deal with those folks and bring them aboard? Because right now this is the choir. How are you going to bring those non-choir members aboard and increase the population of male allies?

REV. DR. SMITH: Let me begin by saying I have seen suffering on many levels. I’ve been very poor, and I’ve always been Black. Anyone who has faced suffering of any kind in any arena will want to work against suffering in other arenas. If being an anti-racist means that I work to make sure no one else can be comfortable being a racist, then being anti-misogynist means I must work so that no one can be comfortable being a misogynist. As a male ally in biblical scholarship, I try to review the work of women scholars, write letters of recommendation for women scholars to be hired, vote for them to receive prestigious awards and scholarships. I think the same kind of thing can apply in our churches. That’s what we’re going to have to do if we’re going to change the culture, change the dynamics.

What I would say to those who are on the fence is something that comes from the words of a nineteenth-century African-American woman preacher, Julia Foote, who was a preacher in the AME Zion church. She said, “The Bible puts an end to this strife when it says there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus.” We’ve talked about that. She goes on to say, “When Paul said, ‘Help those women who labor with me in the gospel,’ he certainly meant that they did more than to pour tea.” I’m going to draw on her words, the words of a woman, and I’m going to say that to my male allies, there’s a need to broaden our minds and to hear, as Chris said, the experiences of women. And that can move us. Just hearing the experiences, seeing what God is doing in the lives of women, taking a back stance and allowing ourselves to learn, to grow, and to become better people because we’re hearing different voices.

DR. HUTSON: As I said, I came from the Churches of Christ, and they’re pretty conservative and traditional. Over the years, I’ve had some good friends, women friends, who were called to ministry and left the Churches of Christ because they said, “I have no opportunity to preach or to exercise my gifts here, and here’s another denomination that will ordain me, and I can preach, I can pastor a church.” And I have to say, “Well, God bless you, sister, I can clearly see you do have gifts and I’m happy for you to use them elsewhere.” Or, another good friend said, “I’ve worked with this congregation and I’ve been here for ten years, and we’ve made some incremental changes. But the fact is, I have daughters who are beginning to grow up. This is not a good, healthy environment. I need to move to a denomination where they will be validated for their religious experience.” All I can say is, “God bless you, take care of your daughters, raise them in an environment where they will thrive spiritually.”

Now, as for me, I am a man, and I don’t have children, and so if I can stay in a congregation that’s pretty conservative and traditional and work with them, I can do a couple of things. For one thing, I have a prerogative to preach and teach. I’m going to be invited to do that. Through that, I have an opportunity to manage the conversation. I can introduce questions that might not have been introduced, and if questions are brought up from the floor, I can steer how those questions are addressed so that liberationist voices in scripture are not automatically shut down. So that’s an important thing to do.

Some years ago, I was preaching for a congregation in North Carolina, and I was teaching a Sunday School class on First Corinthians. When we got to chapter 14, some people asked about some details, and I told them. Some folks in the congregation got very upset and didn’t want me to teach Sunday School anymore. But I stayed in the congregation, and the effect was that over time, there were women in the congregation who would trust me, and they would come and ask questions, and I would answer them. It helps to be the one who can field the questions whenever there’s a teenager who comes along, or somebody who says, “Nobody’s taking my question seriously.” I want to take those questions seriously. That’s something important that I can do.

Now, in my position in the congregation here in Abilene, for many years I was chair of the adult education committee. I could invite women to come and teach classes, and that included at times seminary students who needed opportunities to practice. They didn’t have churches that would invite them to teach and preach, but I could say, “I’ve got space for you to come and teach a Bible class. You have good material from your seminary training. Come teach a class for us.” When a woman came to our congregation who had a PhD in Christian Education, my instinct was to say, “I think my work here is done. I’m not a Christian Education specialist, but lo, God hath raised one up, and here she is! I would like for her to do this job instead of me.” I think part of being an ally is to work with the opportunities you’re given and to keep pushing the question in whatever way you can.

REV. DR. HALL:  You said, Abe, that you’ve known poverty, and you know what it’s like to be a Black man in America. When I think about being an ally, in almost every case that I can think of, I’ve always been on the side of privilege. I did not grow up in poverty, I grew up with parents who had college degrees, I’m white, I’m male, I’m straight, I had people around me who encouraged me and told me that I could accomplish things. As I’ve met people in my adult life who are on the other side of all of those things, and with my desire to bring change and liberation, one of the things that I’ve had to learn is that it’s not my job to do the liberating. Women liberate themselves. African-Americans liberate themselves. LGBTQ+ people liberate themselves. I’m not there as their fixer. For me, one of the big roles of an ally is learning how my own language, my own behavior, often my own unconscious bias gets in the way of all of the things that I value happening for those other groups. And so for me, the work is as much internal as it is external:  knowing how my words and my actions and even my body language communicate. The things that I can do are to shut up, to be there, to advocate, to stand alongside and allow God’s liberative action to work through those who have been in pain. There’s an image that I just love—and I know this is a little crass—in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when the Native American character takes the bathroom sink and throws it through the window and crashes out. I love that image of liberation, and I recognize that my job is just to get out of the way.

The role of an ally is constant learning. My early work in it was as a Christian ally of Jews. My early scholarly work was on the history of anti-Semitism in the church and how the early church perpetuated that. The Holocaust didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was supported by twenty centuries of anti-Jewish theology. Recognizing that I as a Christian wanted to be an ally of Jews was my first venture in learning that I needed to stand with others unflinchingly, but my job is not the liberation itself.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: An an ally, you are an encourager also. Now, Christopher Hutson was my New Testament professor.

REV. DR. HALL:  How fortunate you were!

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Blessed woman! I was going to Pittsfield, Massachusetts from North Carolina. I’m in the airport, terrified, going to this three-day weekend with the search committee. Chris, you may not remember this. I still have the e-mail. I e-mailed you in the airport. What you did, you encouraged me. “Sheila, you are prepared for this.” I’m paraphrasing. But you encouraged me. In my head, I was saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” [all laughing]

REV. DR. HALL:  But he did!

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: I’m entering my ninth year, so I see an ally as an encourager. I don’t see an ally, as you said, Sid, mansplaining. You cannot liberate me. I must stand up for me. Because even though Chris encouraged me, it took a lot of faith—and in the end, I did believe I could do it—to drive with my husband, close down the business in North Carolina, to move from North Carolina to Pittsfield. There are some geographical pieces too that relate to women in ministry. In the South, I would never be called, usually, as a senior pastor. In the Northeast, even though it’s not perfect, it is a little better.

REV. DR. SMITH: I wanted to turn to what our seminaries and divinity schools can do to address this problem, and what more can local churches do. I’m a firm believer that if you want change, you’ve got to show the change that you want to see. So I would say the first approach is compensatory. In seminaries and divinity schools where patriarchalism has been perpetuated in hiring and promotion practices, schools can begin the work of justice and equity by advocating for gender parity, both in terms of the presence of women as students and in leadership positions in the school, and the positioning of women, with women having real power at those institutions, not just photo opportunities but something real. A second approach beyond the compensatory is one that’s more critical. We’ve spoken about that earlier today, and that’s where we get a chance to look at the dynamics of power, how it operates, how it mutates, how it shapeshifts, so that we are actually addressing the structures of inequity and not simply changing the complexity of an institution for a moment so there’s not going to be any lasting change.

In our churches, it’s going to be a tall order, I’ve got to be honest with you. Let me present three challenges for our churches. I think creating educational venues to deal with these three challenges will help. So that’s what I call the prevailing rhetorical uses and abuses of interpretations of the Bible. Some time needs to be spent in churches just looking at, historically, how people have used the Bible, the prevailing ways in which we’ve used the Bible. The more people see in history how it’s been used, the more openness there is to change. The second thing is, we need to see the prevailing hermeneutical stances toward the Bible. Here I’m talking about captions or language such as biblical inerrancy, biblical authority, biblical infallibility. Some people have these, but don’t know what they are. They don’t know the names, they don’t have the kind of language or the economy of expression to talk about these things, so sometimes we’re talking against each other or like ships in the night, end up passing each other because we don’t really have short language. So I think that helps. Thirdly, I think we need to spend more time talking about the prevailing institutional voices who sanction who can or cannot be ordained, because even beyond the Bible, there are people who are saying, “This is how it’s going to be or this is not how it’s going to be,” and those voices need to be brought into the kind of educational venues that I’m talking about. I think you know about some of this related to the Southern Baptist church, which elected leaders just today.

REV. DR. HALL:  Just today! Rick Warren, of all people, is advocating for women to be ordained and getting pushback.

REV. DR. SMITH: So I think we need more venues where we get a chance to talk about things like that in our churches. I’m not as hopeful with our churches as I am with our seminaries, because at least in seminaries, there is, whether real or feigned, the possibility of talking with a degree of academic freedom. I can say this because I have academic freedom as a professor. We may not have that in our churches. So we need to create more opportunities where we get a chance to see some of those prevailing things that are standing in the way.

REV. SHOLES-ROSS: Abe, I am hopeful regarding the churches, because in the churches there are more women than men. If we can educate the women and get them on board, that would be the starting point.

I want to thank you all. This has been wonderful. I have put you on notice that you are going to bring more male allies with you, and I hope to see more males looking at the Equity for Women in the Church, Inc. website, and I hope that you will tell me or the Board, “Hey, I have this gentleman who is interested in becoming an ally.” He doesn’t have to come on the Board, but maybe he can have a conversation, a dialogue. And I have to tell you about a book coming soon: When God Whispered My Name: Stories of Journeys Told By Baptist Women Called to Ministry, edited by Kathy Manis Findley and Kay Wilson Shurden. I am a part, I submitted a chapter, and Jann Aldredge-Clanton submitted a chapter. That’s how we can get people to listen to our stories. So I’m excited about that. It’s coming out soon by Smyth & Helwys.

Again, I want to thank you for being on the Board and for the dialogue in this conversation. You mean the world to me. But I still challenge: I expect more males to come on board because of you all. Amen!

ALL: Amen!

The Will to Fight

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Post author Dr. Cynthia R. Cole, M.Div., D. Min., is a pastor and an advocate for the disenfranchised. She is the founder of CC’s Ministries, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to meeting the safety and security needs of residents in South Dallas, Texas. She is the Senior Pastor of Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Dallas, where she has served for over a decade. A former law enforcement professional and hospice chaplain, she is deeply committed to cultivating the healing, wholeness, and empowerment necessary for growth in every facet of human life.

The journey to wholeness and healing has been fraught with many roadblocks. These roadblocks have challenged my physical, mental, and emotional health, and I’ve had to muster the strength to deal with both my mother’s abuse from my stepfather and my own abuse from my former husband. Like my mother, I married and bore a daughter at a very young age. After I was forced at gunpoint to leave my abusive marriage, I found employment and studied to receive my high school diploma equivalency from the North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges. I began a career in law enforcement because I wanted to be able to protect myself and my daughter. After twenty-five years of service, I retired from law enforcement in 1999.

Overcoming the varied manifestations of violence that I have had to confront domestically, professionally, and ecclesiastically, requires a will to fight. I liken my life’s path to that of the character Sophia in Alice Walker’s, The Color Purple. One of the famous lines from the book is, “All my life I’ve had to fight.” Yes, I’ve had to fight, but I draw strength from God and from my personal pain in order to empower women to stand against any form of domestic, professional, and ecclesiastical violence. This is the mission of my ministry.

When I first embraced the call to preach, God showed me clearly that there was a need for a healing ministry for women. This healing ministry would focus on repairing broken family relationships, abuse, and neglect. I was inspired to bring together twenty-five chosen women for a healing, deliverance, and empowerment conference. The initial gathering of women evolved into what was eventually called “The Christmas Delight.” I presented it as an annual event the first weekend of December in 2001. Over the years since, I have received many letters from women who have attended, sharing with me testimonies of how God spoke into their lives through this ministry event. This year, December 16, 2017, we are extending the invitation to include men out of a desire to establish communal wholeness.

As a second means for answering the call to promote healing, I established a non-profit organization in 2004, CC’s Ministries. The mission of CC’s Ministries is to meet the needs of residents living in South Dallas who are disenfranchised and impoverished. I purchased a home in Southern Dallas County with the short-term objective of converting it into a safe house for abused women and children. In pursuing this work, I have discovered that the community also benefits from other basic needs such as food, clothing, and counseling. Since 2004, CC’s Ministries has provided these services to countless families in South Dallas and abroad.

I have chosen to take my life experiences and channel them into meaningful, liberating ministry. I believe firmly in women taking authority and operating in their own agency as empowered persons capable of any task set before them, especially ministry. Again, I have come to these conclusions from my own struggles in leadership. On November 17, 2007, my commitment to fight violence through loving ministry was tested as I was assigned to a congregation, following a retired pastor who had served the local congregation for thirty-three years. The retired minister remained with the congregation as an active member until his death in 2013.

When I first arrived, members of the congregation appeared to be excited to hear a new voice and to experience a new style of preaching. However, conflict soon arose. My authority as pastor was undermined by the antics of the former pastor who was directing members from behind the scenes. He discouraged members from receiving communion from me, suggesting that they would be taking it to their “damnation.” God blessed the ministry despite his efforts to sabotage it. Fourteen new members joined in the first month. These new members needed to be baptized, but the ministerial staff at the church refused to assist me in baptizing them. One of the ministerial staff members blatantly stated that no woman has the authority to speak, lead, or guide a man. Despite his sentiments and without his assistance, I baptized all fourteen new members over the months to follow.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but ministry is not my first experience in a male-oriented field. As previously stated, I worked in law enforcement, and as a result, I was well aware of how women are treated differently from their male colleagues. The difference between my expectations in law enforcement and the church is that I expected Christians to act differently than the members of secular society. Nothing could have prepared me for the harsh way I have been treated over the years by people who say they love God and are seeking to be more Christ-like. It is as though I am competing against men who have identified it as their mission to show me that my place is not beside them but rather beneath them. I am also fighting against women who have internalized sexism and patriarchy. They want to convince me that I am wrong for moving out of the submissive female role.

One scriptural passage that has helped me frame my journey is 2 Timothy 4:7 (NIV), which states, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Like the Apostle Paul, who penned these words to Timothy before his impending execution, I am determined to stand for what is right even if I stand alone or am ostracized for it. I cannot say that I have attained perfection, but the will to fight urges me on. I pray that others will also be inspired to oppose any form of discrimination that hinders people from expressing their full selves or achieving their full potential in God the Creator.

Men Speak Out for Equity for Women in the Church

This blog post features male voices speaking out in support of Equity for Women in the Church’s mission.  We asked contributors to respond to this prompt: 

Often advocating for women in ministry is seen as a “women’s issue,” rather than as an urgent justice matter that impacts the whole church and every gender.  Why is the equal representation of clergywomen as pastors important for men, too?  How can men advocate on behalf of women in ministry? 

Each respondent offers his own creative insight and call to wholeness...

Rev. Dr. Marvin McMickle, President, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School:

I should begin by saying that my pastor for the first eight years of my life was The Rev. Mary G. Evans of Cosmopolitan Community Church in Chicago. It was because of her, that I could never join the chorus of those who sought to argue that women could not or should not be in the Christian ministry. This 1930s University of Chicago Divinity School trained woman remains the standard by which I measure all other clergy; male or female.

Just as important for me is Paul’s reference to Phoebe in Romans 16:1-2 where Paul refers to Phoebe, one of his female followers by the term diakonos, the exact same term he uses whenever he refers to Timothy or other male followers of Jesus. Granted, Paul seems to point in a different direction when he speaks about women in I Corinthians 14:33-35 and I Timothy 2:11-12. In those two passage Paul seems to either discourage or disallow women any voice or leadership in the early church. In those instances, Paul seems inclined to embrace the prevailing cultural view regarding the status of women in what were the patriarchal, male-dominated societies of the Greco-Roman world. However, in Galatians 3:28 and again in Romans 16:1-2 Paul shows more openness to the full and equal status of women in the church, no matter what the cultural norms might have been.

As the role and status of women in the world has changed, so must the church change its practices and policies regarding any attempt to prevent women from exercising leadership as preachers, pastors, and teachers in the church. I have personally ordained, hired, or installed over two dozen women into ministry positions. All of them continue to serve with distinction. The legacy of Mary G. Evans continues. Praise the Lord!

Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard, Dallas, TX:

Equal representation of clergywomen as pastors is vital for men as well as women. Let’s consider two perspectives.

First, what if you woke up and discovered more than half your body was paralyzed? The Apostle Paul called the church the “body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12-31), so this is a fair question. More than 50 percent of most congregations, as well as the church universal, are females. When we deny them the opportunity to serve as pastor, we separate the church from its base of strength. We prohibit the body of Christ from exercising its full potential.

 Second, women bring enormous gifts and blessings to the pastorate. Traits often exhibited abundantly by women—empathy and the innate ability to identify with others, intuition, and willingness to listen first and speak later—are essential qualities for successful pastors. From preaching, to pastoral care, to long-range planning, women pastors excel and expand God’s Kingdom.

 How can men advocate on behalf of women ministers?

• Encourage girls to grow up to be all God wants them to be—and mean it.

• Learn and quote Scripture passages that affirm the ministry of women.

• Speak up for women in ministry; put yourself between bullies and women in ministry.

• Encourage women ministers.

• Pray for them.

Rev. Scott Shirley, Pastor, Church in the Cliff, Dallas, TX:

First, it’s biblical – women have held ministerial positions in every era of the biblical narrative. Junia was an apostle; Phoebe was a deacon; Chloe was a head of household and leader in the church at Corinth; Miriam, Deborah, and Anna were prophets; Mary Magdalene was the first to proclaim the resurrection; unnamed women throughout the Bible mourn and grieve alongside those who suffer. Every task set before me as a minister was done by women in the Bible.

Second, roughly half the people in the world are women. How can the Church speak to women if we won’t allow women to speak with authority? How can we even know what to say if we don’t allow women’s voices in the room? How can we deprive ourselves of the wisdom, knowledge, experience, passion, and strength of half the world?

Finally, personally, I cannot count the number of strong, smart, passionate women I have been blessed to know and learn from. The female teachers, mentors, and colleagues that have helped form me in ministry by far outweigh the value of the men. That’s just the truth. To the men who object to having women in ministry, it is certainly your loss. But you must consider the loss to God’s people at your hands and repent.

Rev. Dr. John Ballenger, Pastor, Woodbrook Baptist Church, Baltimore, MD:

“Dad, why did the preacher say I must have misunderstood God?”

“One … two … three ….”

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Counting to ten … slowly.”

“You know the dentist said it’s not good
when you grind your teeth together like that.” 

“I know. Thank you for reminding me.
Here’s the thing: do you remember
how utterly disappointed we were
at all the pictures we took on Cadillac Mountain
facing to the east,
looking out over the ocean and the Cranberry Islands,
and facing to the west,
looking out over the lakes and ponds and sounds and bays?
Do you remember how every picture
totally missed the scale of what we saw?”

“Yes. The pictures seemed so small.
And none of them got—
they all got just a little bit—a little piece of what we saw.”

“Exactly. And when it comes to God,
we all turn God and God’s vision for us and for creation
into a smaller version—a distorted vision.
Like with the pictures, it has to do with our limits.” 

“You mean with us being human beings and God being God?”

“Well there is that.
But I really don’t know how to think about what that means anymore.
So I mean more the limits of our imagination—
of our discipline, and commitment, and our compassion.” 

“The limits that keep us from what you’ve always called living big?”

“Yes! 
And a lot of our limits—a lot of our living small
really boils down to fear—
the fear of what’s different—
the fear of not being in control—
the fear of losing control—of losing power.
I think most of our fear though—is the fear that we’re not special.”

“We’re terrified that we’re smaller than we are,
and then act all big because we’re afraid we’re not
and become smaller than we ever were to begin with.”

“Yes. And then don’t even know to be frustrated with the smallness—
or even acknowledge it.
As if to admit our small, somehow makes God small,
instead of simply affording us the opportunity to say
something about what’s so much bigger.”

“So instead of letting our small sink into big,
we shrink God.”

“All too often, yes.
But one of the best gifts of our God and of our faith,
if we’re open to it,
is the call of God’s big to our small—
the call of beyond and more to what is.
So if God calls you to include
and to love
and to speak out for and with those who aren’t listened to—
if God calls you to preach
good news that’s not easy—
that’s hard and hopeful—
good news that’s big,
then anyone who tells you you’ve misunderstood ….”

“You’re grinding your teeth again.”

“You know, if it’s just them
missing what you have to share,
that’s sad.
But if they are in positions to deny your voice—
to make your big seem small—
when their own small shrinks a vision so much bigger,
that’s infuriating—
still sad,
but even more infuriating. 

Ultimately, of course, small cannot contain big.
It can do a lot of damage trying.
More than just making parts of big real uncomfortable—
small can kill parts of big, but, in the end,
small cannot contain big.”

“That’s Easter, isn’t it?”

“That’s why it’s they who misunderstand.
In the end, it’s all Easter.
And the first one to get that—the first one to preach that—
the first one to preach Easter—”

“Was a woman!”

A Deacon in Heaven

Post author Rev. Dr. Jann Aldredge-Clanton serves as co-chair of Equity for Women in the Church and adjunct professor at Richland College. She is an Alliance of Baptists ordained minister and an award-winning hymn text writer and author of books on inclusive theology and worship. She blogs at www.jannaldredgeclanton.com.



For more than 30 years my mother, Eva Aldredge Henley, advocated for the ordination of women deacons and pastors in her West Texas Baptist church. But that still hasn’t happened. She didn’t live to see this happen—at least not on earth. One of her church friends wrote in the memorial service guest book: “She’s a deacon in heaven!”

For 90+ years Mother prayed, along with Christians around the world, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Our Creator’s will for her was finally done in heaven. But why not on earth as in heaven? Why didn’t the churches she served so faithfully for so many years give her the freedom to become all she’s created to be in the divine image while she was on earth? Far too many churches still deny the divine image in women by denying them the right to be deacons, pastors, or priests.

All her long life Mother was a dedicated Christian and faithful church member. She taught Sunday school for 82 years. The Sunday before she went to heaven, she even taught her class. Her class, “Any and All,” is aptly named because she not only welcomed all to her class but actively sought them out. She invited anyone she saw—from the grocery store cashier to waiters at restaurants. Her class members have been of 5 different races, various ages, genders, and economic backgrounds—many who don’t feel comfortable in other Sunday school classes and churches. She lived Jesus’ words: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

She ministered to a diversity of people also in her role as pastor’s wife in four churches. Like my father, she had a seminary degree and abundant pastoral gifts. Her gregarious personality, dynamic speaking voice, and exceptional leadership skills made her every bit as qualified as my father to pastor a church. But she served churches as an unpaid, untitled outreach worker, events organizer, educator, and development officer. She co-founded a missions organization and led mission trips to eight countries, including 46 mission trips to Ukraine. She raised money for missions around the world. In addition, she ministered to students for 25 years in her position as a high school English teacher.

In spite of her long, faithful service, churches did not consider her “qualified” to be ordained as a deacon or a pastor because she was a woman. They ordained men half her age and younger with far fewer gifts and far fewer years of dedicated service. They counted them worthy and qualified because they were men. But no woman, no matter how gifted or called or how faithfully she served the church, was deemed worthy and qualified—simply because she was female.

Sadly, churches’ discrimination against women is still widespread. This discrimination has consequences. In a Baptist Standard article titled “How Do Evangelicals Enable ‘Locker Room Talk’ about Women?” editor Marv Knox calls out “male-dominated patriarchal” evangelical churches who contribute to “rape culture” by treating “women as objects” instead of as “creatures of infinite worth who bear the image of their Creator.” He writes: “Women are the backbone of the church, but in most congregations, they are not allowed to exercise leadership equal with men. Few allow women to be deacons; fewer still allow them to be pastors. So, no matter how many times they tell their daughters, ‘God made you, and you can be anything God wants you to be,’ they don’t mean it. Girls and women have their limits.”

President Jimmy Carter writes in A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power that “discrimination and violence against women and girls is the world’s most serious violation of human rights,” and he points out the religious basis for this discrimination and violence:

There is a system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms.

A Baptist Sunday school teacher for more than 70 years, Carter gives thorough biblical support for the equality of women:

There is one incontrovertible fact concerning the relationship between Jesus Christ and women: he treated them as equal to men, which was dramatically different from the prevailing custom of the times. The four Gospels were written by men, but they never report any instance of Jesus’ condoning sexual discrimination or the implied subservience or inferiority of women. It is ironic that women are deprived of the right to serve Jesus Christ in positions of leadership as they did during his earthly ministry and for about three centuries in the early Christian churches. It is inevitable that this sustained religious suppression of women as inferior or unqualified has been a major influence in depriving women of equal status within the worldwide secular community.

Churches’ discrimination against women has consequences. Our recent Presidential election is a striking example. The majority of evangelicals and Catholics voted for a man who denigrated and abused women through his words and actions, even bragging about sexually assaulting women. This majority of evangelicals and Catholics didn’t value women enough to find this candidate’s behavior reprehensible enough to keep them from voting for him. Their churches have taught them that women are not really worth that much, not worthy enough to be ordained deacons, pastors, or priests. So it’s little wonder they don’t think a Presidential candidate’s misogynist words and deeds are a big deal. And since their churches have taught them that women are not qualified and worthy to be deacons, pastors, or priests, they don’t believe a woman, no matter how qualified, is worthy to be President either. They have learned well what churches, through words and actions, have taught them about the inferiority of women.

How long, how long will churches contribute to discrimination and violence against women by denying them freedom to fulfill their calling to be deacons, pastors, or priests?

Now more than ever, I feel the urgency of the mission of Equity for Women in the Church. Equity for Women in the Church is an ecumenical movement to facilitate equal representation of clergywomen as pastors of multicultural churches in order to transform church and society. Since the fall of 2013 this ecumenical, multicultural organization has been working towards justice and equality for women and girls. We work to tap all the unused talent and training of culturally diverse women. We advocate and network for women across denominations and cultures so that we have opportunities to fulfill our calling to be deacons, pastors, or priests. We work to change churches so they affirm the divine image in women and girls as making us worthy and qualified to be included as equals in every aspect of ministry. Love demands it. Scripture teaches it. Jesus modeled it.

As a “deacon in heaven,” Mother continues to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—our Creator’s will for women to have equal freedom to become all we’re created to be. I’d like to believe that as Mother now has this freedom in heaven, she may be able to help make it so on earth.

 

Not So Fast...The Double-Edged Sword of a Few Opportunities for Women Pastors

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Post author Rev. Christine A. Smith has served as Senior Pastor, Covenant Baptist Church, Euclid, Ohio, since 2006. She is the author of Beyond the Stained Glass Ceiling:  Equipping and Encouraging Female Pastors (Judson Press, 2013) and creator of Shepastor, a blog for women in ministry. Rev. Smith has been married to Aristide Smith, Jr. for 22 years.  Together they have two sons (Aristide III and Caleb) and one daughter (Aris).

More and more congregations across Protestant denominations appear to be accepting women as licensed and ordained ministers.  Over the past two years, ABC USA saw the hiring of at least 6 women to serve as executive ministers in regions across America.  Recently, the historic Riverside Church in New York called a woman pastor.  Increasing numbers of churches have women serving as associate ministers.

Many seminaries have enrollments comprised of approximately 50% women. We are on our way, so it would appear.  But not so fast…

While it may seem that the struggle for women clergy is over, data proves otherwise. According to a 2015 Duke University study on the number of women serving as senior/solo pastors, the number still lingers at 11%.

In the article, “How Thick is the Stained Glass Ceiling?,” Heather Hahn writes:

Even as U.S. congregations become more ethnically diverse, a new analysis of Duke University’s National Congregations Study shows that women hold only a small minority of those faith communities’ top leadership positions.

Women serve as senior or solo pastoral leaders of just 11 percent of U.S. congregations — indicating essentially no overall increase from when the study was first done in 1998. These women-led communities contain only about 6 percent of the people who attend the nation’s religious services.

Yes, we have seen advancement in the number of women being called to and placed in senior/solo pastor positions, but the advancement is minimal and at a snail’s pace.  The fact that we can name the women indicates their scarcity. 

While the image of women serving in the pulpit is a welcomed picture, it can also be a double-edged sword.   With the advancement of a precious few women to the role of senior/solo pastor, some are developing a perspective that the struggle is over. With the increase of churches licensing and ordaining women, women serving in the role of associate minister is also on the rise.  Congregations who have one, two or more female associate ministers may truly struggle to understand the issue simply because they see women in the pulpit.

The stained glass ceiling, however, remains.  Statistics show that 89% of the time, Protestant churches pass over clergywomen and instead select a man for the top ministerial role.  In light of these daunting factors, what can advocates for women clergy do to change the current trend?  Below are some practical suggestions…

  • Retiring male pastors can help prepare their congregations to be open to God’s best… 3-5 years before their retirement, male pastors who are advocates for women clergy can spend time encouraging their congregations to be open to God’s best for them, regardless of gender.  Through sound biblical teaching, giving women opportunities to serve in prominent leadership roles, and open, honest dialogue, male pastors can plant seeds of receptivity among otherwise resistant lay people.
     
  • Denominational leaders can work with regional executives and elders to conduct workshops, provide resources (books, articles, guest speakers, etc.), and offer educational experiences to local pastoral search committees…  Whether churches have the “call” process or the “appointment” process, providing resources to church leaders that will help them to choose God’s best, regardless of gender, could be very beneficial for all concerned.
     
  • Develop a “Lead Pastor” project for women who feel called to pastor… The United Methodist Church developed a special program designed to pair women clergy called to pastor with women currently serving in the lead pastoral role.  The clergywomen shadowed/interned the lead pastor for a period of time.  This gave the clergywomen exposure and experience in leading larger congregations—a critical factor in creating opportunities for women who are often passed over due to lack of experience. (Read more about this endeavor here.)  Other denominations can develop a similar approach to increase opportunities for women pastors.

The aforementioned suggestions will not answer all of the issues related to the dearth of women pastors.  However, such efforts will advance the work to get beyond the stained glass ceiling!