News Archives

Archives agency offers voice of pioneer clergywoman

Maud Keister Jensen

A page dedicated to Maud Keister Jensen, online at http://www.gcah.org/Jensen.htm, focuses on the thoughts of Jensen, a longtime missionary to Korea, about the ordination.

Women were ordained in the Methodist tradition as early as the late 1800s but did not receive full clergy rights until the General Conference vote on May 4, 1956. Today, the denomination has more than 9,700 clergywomen.

Providing the audio file was a way to personalize the 50th anniversary celebration of that vote, according to L. Dale Patterson, archivist and records administrator for Archives and History. “We wanted to get her words out there to people,” he said.

The Jensen page also demonstrates the “big impact” the Internet and computer technology have had on Archives and History. Older historical items, in particular, have become more accessible through e-mail and the Internet.

“We’re still trying to figure out all the ways we can make use of it,” added Patterson, who has been involved in archives work for more than 20 years.

In the past five years, he has been impressed “by the growing numbers of high school students from around the country” who have chosen church history as a topic for research papers and who seek information from Archives and History via the Internet.

The Jensen page evolved from an interview conducted at the commission’s headquarters in Madison, N.J., in 1984. “Her son was a professor, since retired, here at Drew University, and she was living in the area,” Patterson explained.

Photo courtesy of Commission on Archives and History The 1956 General Conference, meeting in Minneapolis, granted full clergy rights to ordained women.

On 11 hours of cassette tapes, Jensen shared information about different aspects of her life — her childhood, her 40 years of service in Korea, and her ordination. He noted that Jensen, who died in 1998, was “extremely, extremely proud” of her work in Korea, even through difficult times. Her husband, the Rev. A. Kristian Jensen, was captured behind enemy lines during the Korean War and was held for several years before being released.

Converting sections of the cassette tapes about her thoughts on ordination to an MP3 file was a first for Archives and History, Patterson said. The commission also has a printed, bound transcript of the entire 11 hours of interviews, and a small portion can be downloaded from the Web page.

Jensen received her elder’s orders in 1952, and on the tapes she remembered it as a great moment.

“I asked three very good friends, elders, to put their hands on my head: one who had given me my first license to preach, one minister in whose house I had lived while I was a student at Bucknell, and another who had been a good friend of my mother,” she said.

Full clergy rights

While she found “satisfaction in the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition,” Jensen did not think of herself as a pioneer for women’s rights. Her 1952 ordination was considered a local ordination because clergy membership in the annual conference was still restricted to men, and she acknowledged that “it did not mark equality of the sexes in the church. ? I was well aware of the struggle others were making to gain this result, with strong leadership by Dr. Georgia Harkness.”

When the 1956 General Conference did permit ordained women to belong to an annual conference on the same level as men, Jensen was accepted by the Central Pennsylvania Conference. “So, on May 18, 1956, I had the honor of becoming the first woman in American Methodism to receive full clergy rights — that is, to become a member of an annual conference with voting rights and the right to regular appointment by the bishop.”

At the time, Jensen and her husband were in Korea, where her ordination was fully recognized by the Korean Methodist Church. The Korean church began accepting clergywomen after 1930, when it became independent.

“I learned of my acceptance through an article in the military paper, Stars and Stripes, before hearing through church channels,” she recalled.

“I had to be grateful for the personal honor, and it seemed only right that at long last the equality of men and women in the ministry should be recognized in this way.”

?Mind of the church’

The Archives and History Web site also has a downloadable file on the debates over women’s ordination on the floor of the 1956 General Conference. Patterson said he was surprised to learn that such a major decision had been “driven by petitions” and that the committee report was rewritten on the conference floor.

“It really speaks to what, I think, was the mind of the church at that point,” he said.

The United Methodist Church has mandated 2006 as a yearlong celebration of the contributions, struggles, gifts and graces of women clergy. A variety of activities are planned for the 63 annual (regional) conference sessions in the United States this spring and summer, preceding national celebrations at the Aug. 13-17 United Methodist Clergywomen’s Consultation in Chicago.

*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in New York.

News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.