Women in ministry confront barriers, envision future
Women in ministry confront barriers, envision future
March 31, 2004
By Holly E. Nye*
UMNS photo by Holly Nye
More than a dozen religious leaders spoke at the Women and the Word event.
More
than a dozen women religious leaders spoke at the 20th annual Women and
the Word event, 'Celebrating the Past, Honoring the Present,
Envisioning the Future,' sponsored by the Anna Howard Shaw Center at
Boston University School of Theology, March 24-25. They were, from left
(seated): Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, the Rev. Susan Davies, Lorraine
Brugh, the Rev. Rosemary Brown; (standing) the Rev. Heather Murray
Elkins, Bishop Susan Hassinger, Mary Hunt, the Rev. Yong Ja Kim, the
Rev. Hea Sun Kim, the Rev. June Goudey, the Rev. Unzu Lee, Bishop Susan
Morrison, the Rev. Aida Irizarry Fernandez and the Rev. Lynne Westfield.
Not pictured is the Rev. Valerie Haven. UMNS photo by Holly Nye, photo
number 04142, Accompanies UMNS #142. 3/31/04
BOSTON
(UMNS) - More than a century after Anna Howard Shaw became the first
woman ordained in the former Methodist Protestant Church, women are
still confronting barriers in ministry.
Fifteen
women religious leaders discussed those barriers and other aspects of
being in ministry at the 20th anniversary of Women and the Word. The
Anna Howard Shaw Center at United Methodist-related Boston University
School of Theology presents the symposium to celebrate women's preaching
and leadership. More than 80 people attended this year's event, held
March 24-25 with the theme, "Celebrating the Past, Honoring the Present,
Envisioning the Future."
The
speakers included pastors, teachers, community leaders and two bishops.
They led panels on four themes, focusing on the past, present and
future as well as on the power of women to effect change. In the
process, they acknowledged their cultural contexts, faith stories and
institutional struggles.
Shaw
herself was no stranger to struggle. Ordained in 1880 by the New York
Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, she was the first woman
to have that distinction in a Methodist denomination that would later
become part of the United Methodist Church. Earlier, she had been denied
ordination in the Methodist Episcopal Church - another forerunner of
the United Methodist Church - though that denomination had licensed her
to preach in 1871.
Several Women and the Word panelists described cultural and institutional barriers they had encountered in ministry.
The
Rev. Yong Ja Kim, pastor of Rainbow United Methodist Church in
Portland, Maine, is the first Korean-American woman to serve a
predominantly Korean congregation in her annual (regional) conference.
After being refused ordination in the Korean Methodist Church, Kim came
to New England to pursue her call to ministry.
Her
journey has taken her, she said, from a European-male theology to
feminist-liberation understandings, a movement she likened to "crossing a
Red Sea that I could not return across."
"Jesus
crossed boundaries all the time, in his multicultural world," Lee
pointed out. The United States, she asserted, now faces a test in
learning to live as a multicultural society.
UMNS photo by Holly Nye
The Rev. Hee An Choi, director of the Anna Howard Shaw Center
The
Rev. Hee An Choi, director of the Anna Howard Shaw Center at Boston
University School of Theology, welcomes participants to the 20th annual
Women and the Word event, held March 24-25 on the campus of Boston
University. , photo number 04-143, Accompanies UMNS #142, 3/31/04
Unzu
Lee, a Korean-American Presbyterian clergywoman and author, spoke of
confronting the Western emphasis on speech, while honoring her Asian
cultural understandings of silence. Silence, she said, is not an absence
of speech, but can be seen as a bowl, as a person "filling up before
speaking." Silence can be an act of resistance, she said, so long as it
is a chosen, rather than enforced, silence.
Lee
noted a proverb that has been used to silence women: "A crowing hen
will come to no good end." Turning the proverb in a new direction, Lee
quipped that "when women crow, we had better lay eggs." To lay eggs, she
reflected, is to "enflesh the words, incarnate the Word."
Virginia
Ramey Mollenkott, a professor of English and author on topics of
religion and society, also recounted a story of the silencing of women.
She recalled that a teacher in her Presbyterian high school said that
"when women do theology, the result is always heresy." In this and other
ways, she said, "girls were shamed and silenced ... I remember the
shame I felt."
She
also reflected that in one sense the teacher's remark is true: "If
andro(male)-centric theology is the norm, then we do introduce heresy."
Amid
a guilt-centered, suffering-centered theology, she said, Christians are
entrusted with the ministry of reconciling the world to God, as
outlined in II Corinthians 5:16-20. "Since God is a loving God," she
said, "we have to remove the barriers to good life" that afflict many.
She
encouraged women to take the lead in breaking barriers among different
religions, leading to mutual understanding of "the universal,
trans-religious experience of faith." She also urged the breaking of
gender-role stereotypes, "the assumed and exaggerated differences
between male and female." Much of the controversy over same-gender
marriage, she said, stems from the challenge such couples pose to
traditional gender roles.
While
celebrating the past and present work of women in ministry, the Women
and the Word event also raised the question of how transformation must
continue. The Rev. Lynne Westfield, assistant professor of religious
education at Drew University in Madison, N.J., mused about "chasing the
'how' questions: How do you get power to change? How do you get power?
How do you change?"
One
strategy for change, she said, involves working with parables, stories
from women's actual lives that reflect an incarnational theology. She
offered as a parable the story of her own mother, who invited her
children's white teachers to the family home.
"She
refused to let white people name her reality. She refused to let white
people come into our neighborhood without breaking bread. ... She
invited the soldiers of Pharaoh into our home." Her story, Westfield
said, reflected an act of transformational power. Her mother knew the
power of the table for reconciliation - even if her guests did not yet
know.
"We have got to learn to tap into these stories," Westfield said.
Bishop
Susan Morrison, who presides over the Albany (N.Y.) Area of the United
Methodist Church, offered a challenge for a new attitude in the face of
change.
"The
church has a compulsion toward a conserving role" as the culture around
it changes, Morrison said. The church takes a defensive posture of
"sulking judgmentalism," she said. Faced with this response from what
she called "a distant church," many opt out of church life.
"Why
aren't we excited and positive?" Morrison asked. "Can we dance with
delight at new melodies that God may be sending our way?"
She
questioned whether the church could move "from an institutional stance
to being a new community, where people feel at home, with no
exceptions." In the process, she suggested, Christians might move from
debate to conversation and learn from others, rather than simply learn
about others.
*Nye
is the communications director for the United Methodist Church's Troy
Annual Conference. News media can contact Linda Bloom at
(646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.