I must admit that it is a little embarrassing to be speaking in a service at First United Methodist Church on Women’s Sunday. It’s not that men aren’t welcome on this day. It’s just that this is a day that traditionally has been a time to hear from the women of the church.
I am grateful that one of the speakers this morning was my wife, Louann. I am equally grateful for the presentations from Janet Krech and Mary Ann Michaels and for the many women who created and coordinated some wonderful worship experiences.
There was a note in today’s bulletin explaining that 2016 is the 60th anniversary of ordination with full connection for women in the Methodist Church. Let me quote briefly from the bulletin: “Earned titled careers with the United Methodist Church were available for women before 1956; however, neither ordination nor membership in a Methodist Conference accompanied their vows, titles, or positions. Women were marginalized with no voice, vote, or influence in any Methodist Conference. The change required a positive vote of a United Methodist General Conference, which took more than 150 years.”
The positive vote occurred in 1956, a year before I started kindergarten. I need to remember that I was born into a Methodist Church that did not grant women equality.
Many things have been made better since that change in 1956. Our congregation has recorded a proud history of women serving as clergy, including this evening. The appointment of Rev. Karen Oliveto as the new bishop of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference means we have had two women bishops in a row. And they were not the first!
But the church did not grant equality to my mother, Dorothy Ida Kauffmann.
As a high school student in St. Louis, she was drawn to a local congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. A girlfriend, Mickey, invited her to worship at the church in their neighborhood. Mickey got her in the door, but it was basketball that kept her there. She played in a church league twice a week and a third night at the YWCA.
In her words, she made a decision to follow Jesus while at a Methodist summer camp.
Her mother and father had little connection to Christianity. In fact, my mother’s choice to ask God to help guide her life put her in conflict with her parents. Her pastor’s wife, Myra Joyce, helped her deal with the situation.
At a young age, my mother was falling in love with God. She described this phenomenon in the Spiritual Legacy that she wrote a few years before her death.
“I made new friends and I especially liked one of the adult leaders at the Y who was an ordained clergy woman in the Disciples of Christ Church. She served as a pastor in a small church before working at the Y as a counselor. That’s when the Lord gave me a push to become a minister in our denomination.”
She was 19 and the year was 1939. Her autobiography continues:
“I talked with our pastor in his home about my ambition. His wife, Myra, overheard our conversation and came out of the kitchen laughing. ‘Women don’t become ministers in the Methodist Church,’ she said. ‘We know of one woman who is serving a small rural church and she is not very effective. People just don’t accept women as preachers.”
Mom’s ambition had been silenced. But she was not one to waver. Before the evening was out, she and Rev. Joyce and Myra – who she said was the greatest spiritual influence on her life – had hatched a plan. My mother would become a religious educator. She would attend Central College, a small Methodist liberal arts college in Missouri, and then Scarritt College in Nashville – another Methodist institution -- for graduate studies. And that’s exactly what she did.
My mother persevered and I am grateful for it. She helped form a generation of children and youth in the United Methodist Church.
Moving forward to today, there are those who are still pressing for full equality in the church. One of them is the religion scholar and author Diana Butler Bass. Her journey has taken her from the evangelical church to the United Methodist Church to the Episcopal Church. Just last week, she was asked to comment for publication on what the consequences of the presidential election will mean to her. There’s a political context for her response in that she hopes for the election of the first woman president. But what she hopes for the church as a result is relevant for us. Here is what she wrote:
“I hope that we will finally get beyond the idea of ‘Christian women leaders’ being some special subset of Christian community. Women are the majority of Christians around the world — we are the heartbeat of living faith. The media spends too much time covering male leaders — and then a small subset of authoritarian conservative men — as if they are the voice of the church. They are not. Women are. All the women. The women who preach, the women who write theology, the women who pray, the women who serve, those who hold the hand of the dying. Those who care for children, those who feed the hungry, those who embrace the poor and visit prisoners. Those who weep and mourn for the pain they’ve suffered. Those who find that God’s love is more beautiful and trustworthy than those who abused them. That’s the church — a church that knows no facile forgiveness or partisan spin. But the church that understands grace, peacemaking, and mercy. And that church is rarely heard in public because it is too busy living its faith. Women are the high priests of that church.”
Bass’s characterization of the church as being woman powered is on target. I believe we should be grateful that this is true. But I am also grateful that it is finally being recognized as the truth.
David W. Reid
Director, Adult Faith Formation
Director, Northern Colorado Faith Library