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!