women clergy – Inspiring Change LLC

Called to Generosity

Not long ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

Helen died over a decade ago, but seeing her handwriting and lying under the crocheted blanket she made me brings her presence back to me. What I remember most about her, though, is that she lived a generous Christianity. As she understood our faith, to be a Jesus follower meant to be someone who both rested in the love of God and embodied that love wherever she could. As I prepared her recipe, I felt her spirit, how she welcomed me, a newly ordained pastor, into her life and the life of her family, and what a quiet witness to the love of Jesus she was.

What is the essence, the core, of being a Christian? Who is that preacher Jesus, whose life so changed the course of the western world, and to whom so many confess loyalty? The New Testament gospels tell four different versions of the story of the historical Jesus, written to different audiences and in different decades following his first century death and resurrection. Each has at its core the religious message that the creator God loves the world and yearns to have all human persons know that love and forgiveness. Each tells of young rabbi Jesus seeking people out on the edges of Jewish culture for conversation, healing, teaching and friendship.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

Jesus was also a prophet to his religion, speaking words of criticism and anger at those who labeled themselves of God and used it to cloak their own grasping for security, power and ambition. It was this same group of religious men who demanded the Roman occupiers to put Jesus to death as a threat to Jewish life and to the supreme power of Rome. In three short years his preaching, healing and growing band of followers became so threatening to the entrenched powers of the empire, he was crucified in order to be silenced.

So little has changed in the human condition: as the centuries pass, the principalities, powers, and empires simply put on different clothes. Today in America, a large portion of those who claim Jesus as their spiritual guide or savior use that label to cloak and mask all kinds of abuses of human power. Using scripture as a weapon, and under the guise of the Christian church, they promote a malignant individualism, a poisonous masculinity, unbridled greed, deep racism, love of warfare and military-style weapons, a biblical gender and sexual hierarchy that enforces their disdain for women and anyone who questions this worldview. They have aligned themselves with political power, winning elections and writing laws in every corner of the country. Does this sound like Christian discipleship to you?

Your neighbor is not just the family that lives on the other side of your interior wall or property line. Not just your difficult brother-in-law or your classmate. Your neighbor, teaches Jesus, is also the one you have trouble seeing. The one you want to walk by, the one you can’t quite understand.

June is Pride month. A month that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity across the human experience. It is a hard won, bitter battle for those who don’t feel they fully fit into the heterosexual or male/female either/or that we have baked into our culture. To finally be freer to be themselves, to live their life without fear of shame, fear of even death. LGBTQIA people are your neighbors. They are among those we are called by Jesus to see, to understand, to support, and to love.

Christians are always called to decide: to align with the principalities and powers that promise a return to old values, old beliefs, security and belonging; or to know what power is for and to live as best we can with compassion and curiosity. To live with concern for the natural world, for the life of all our neighbors, for well-being of the weak, the left out, and the vulnerable.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Written for and published in the Savage (MN) Pacer newspaper, June 25, 2022.

Why Call Yourself a Christian

A couple of weeks ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Racism & Me

How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.

We value learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term “racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.

This is not a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color” as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true bigotry was on display.

When I spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.

I take my education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy; whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college admissions while wondering if it does any good.

Until I became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the pew.

It has taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.

It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13^th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.

(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)

Gendered: “girl culture 2”

One of my colleagues was raised by her father. While he was in the military, she experienced many different global cultures, and was raised around men. She mentioned to me that while she understood what I was talking about in my first Gendered post, she wasn’t raised in that way. She was raised by a man and that experience made her emotional and communication patterns different than most American women. More masculine, we could say. Makes complete sense.

What she then said was that her more unique direct and simple speaking style has often brought her the experience of rejection and judgment by women, even close friends, who were socialized to be constantly circumspect, people pleasing and perfectionistic in all relational matters.

She has been called “angry,” “too direct,” and other unpleasant words of judgment by women. She has experienced looks of surprise and body language of distancing and distain while talking in professional meetings, therapy settings and social outings. I have encouraged her to write a personal response to my post so I can add it here.

I, too, have been cautioned against speaking my mind even by my Midwestern-Lutheran-socialized-by-awfully-nice-people-30-years-together spouse. We have even disagreed on something as simple as whether we ought to say our opinion to family members or even more horrifying, friends. Socially, he will almost always choose the grin and bear it or simply ignore it route. Me? I’d rather find a nice enough way to speak my mind. I spend enormous amounts of time in my mind trying to suss out the right way to say what I am thinking so I don’t lose connection to those around me. (I’ve been doing that as I write, edit and re-edit this post.) Even with all that internal sifting, no doubt some have and will call me a bitch behind my back.

But you would never do that, would you gentle woman reader? Become automatically uncomfortable when a colleague, boss, friend or loved one violated those carefully maintained but invisible gender norms. Provide some emotional feedback? Subtly step back in disapproval? Most of the most painful comments and betrayals of trust I experienced as a female pastor throughout the years were from other women in my social and leadership circles.

While most of us are struggling to wake up to our inherited and unearned privilege of race and economic status in contemporary America, may I be among those who bang the gender drum at the same time. Inherited gender roles are reinforced every day, without reflection, and women are the ones who seem to have the most at stake when other women don’t obey the rules.

Let us wake up and act up. We have been controlled and socialized by rigid expectations about our bodies, our biology, our fertility, our parenting and caretaker roles and yet we have been at the head of the line when it comes to enforcing the rules. If we want freedom and opportunity for all, let us mean all. This freedom to be ourselves, no matter our gender identity, is what I believe feminism is about. Call me a feminist. And then ask me to offer my point of view. I’m quite sure I’ll have one I can share.

Good Pastors, Bad Congregations

Parish ministry : It’s good I left when I did.

I was shaped as a congregational leader in the 1960’s and 70’s: heady days of steady church membership, confident budgets, and familiar ethic traditions holding everyone together. Despite the daily pain of Viet Nam, race riots, assassinations, and a rising violent drug subculture, middle class Americans believed in the power of their institutions. It was this general optimism that brought the votes to ordain women in my Lutheran tradition in 1970, to start new congregations in blossoming suburbs, and to grow the church publishing houses that served tens of thousands of congregations.

By the time I was a few years into ordained ministry, I could see that church culture had started to change; America was changing. The explosion of affordable, personal technology began to change the way we communicate, socialize, learn, do business, and understand the world. We’ve become a worldwide, 7 days a week economy. We have seen the rise of extremist religious groups around the world threaten our allies as well as our own nation, with youth from our own region joining them. At the same time, religious conservatives calling out for us to become a “Christian nation” ignore the almost daily media stories of clergy sex abuse, its cover-up and current lawsuits.

Our culture has not stopped adapting. In a matter of a generation, church seems completely unnecessary to large numbers of people. Congregations have been slow to notice, even as theologians, seminaries and clergy have scrambled to adapt.

Our churches still use models of volunteer, non-profit, church building- and clergy-centric ways of being church, while our children hold in their hands tools that open the whole world to them. Their schools, their sports teams, and the internet, social media, e-publishing, and online gaming, are the communities that connect our children. While my children have been in worship with me their entire childhood, they do not connect with that community ritual the way I do. The prayers, hymns, creeds and sacraments that shaped me are just a small part of the huge flood of words, music, beliefs, actions and symbols their lives encounter every day.

We as members of churches must stop behaving as if these changes will all go away. If we keep electing lay leaders to manage our congregations who have this perspective, that “we just have to keep doing what we have always done,” we will continue to have buildings that are too big for the budget, clergy who get sick or quit from the stress, and lots of meetings where people wring their hands, demanding some shiny new youth program in order to bring in younger families. We need the best, brightest, most faithful lay leaders to join their pastors in helping recreate congregational life. We who care can’t give up.

Those who live, breathe and study the changing church point to the opportunity for us all to grow into what we have always claimed to be: people set free by grace to embody grace in the world. We must somehow take the best of our institutional life – our worship, our education, and our service – and do that well when we are together, and then keep living our faith in our lives. That’s what we need our clergy to be doing; equipping us through worship, conversation, training, teaching and example to live Christian lives. Not sitting in their offices, overwhelmed by the endless phone calls and paperwork of a shrinking intuition. If you have a pastor who is a good teacher and preacher, who loves God and is constantly out in the community meeting with people, trying to grow the church in the world, love them and join them. They know what they are doing.

“Bound Conscience” is Theological Bullshit

SERIOUSLY? I won’t start fights on Facebook. But a post I read has me fuming.

A female pastor claiming that being against women clergy in the church isn’t really sexism, it’s just “bound conscience,” and we have to respect those folks who believe this way. I have been trying to craft a response to her post for an hour and I have just come to this:

I see “bound conscience” as racism, sexism, and homophobia all dressed up in fancy theological clothes. The incarnation of Jesus isn’t just about God’s love for the male, privileged body. It is about God’s redemption of all human flesh – whatever color, race, gender, ability or age. And those who preach this gospel ought to reflect the diversity of this God-loved human race.

Bound conscience?! That is the power of discrimination : it creates self-hatred in those who are hated by the majority. Our blindness to our own condition continues to amaze me.

Here’s my bottom line: It is not OK with me that an ELCA pastor, called to preach and teach, misstates or misunderstands the power of discrimination about gender, race or sexual orientation, when talking about Scripture.