Women in Ministry

“I am a little surprised that I was surprised.”

This past year I’ve had the privilege of meeting weekly with a young female seminary student who feels called to be a pastor. It was a good year with her and I came away thankful for young women who seriously consider investing their lives and their livelihood in providing leadership to a faith community. It is a call not taken lightly.

During the year this young woman spoke occasionally for meeting for worship at a faith community who was without a full-time pastor. After her graduation she became a pastoral candidate at this meeting. While the meeting seemed happy with her preaching on an occasional basis, things changed as they dealt with the reality of a woman as pastor. It became obvious her presence could split the meeting. My friend is quite reluctant to invest herself in a position that would have her trying to provide leadership after people leave because of her presence or trying to provide leadership to people who were clearly not in favor of her presence there. As of now, she is looking elsewhere and I am sad.

As this young woman reflected on her situation, she wrote the above quote. She came from a faith tradition that did not allow for women in leadership and her presence in seminary suggested she did not take her call to ministry lightly. She told me she felt seminary was a bubble and now as she entered the real world she should have been prepared for this opposition to women in ministry. Her next comment after being surprised that she was surprised was: “but they are Quakers!” That made me really sad. Women in ministry should not be an issue for the Society of Friends.

I like history. Not because I like to live in the past, but because knowing the history of a place and of people gives me an understanding of the present. In my first years in Winchester I read everything I could about our monthly meeting, about this county and about the Quakers in this area. I fell in love with the first pastors of this meeting, a young couple with no children who spent the Civil War working in camps in Mississippi with freed slaves. They then went to India as missionaries with London Yearly Meeting and finally ended up back home in Randolph County at age 40. They were given a house to live in here in Winchester and asked to start a Friends meeting in the city. I now live in their home. They gave the house to the meeting in 1898 when our present meetinghouse was built. They spent their lives and energy helping the oppressed, spreading the gospel and nurturing this faith community and I want to keep their memory alive.

In 1882, before paid pastors were common among the Religious Society of Friends, this couple was two of seventeen recorded ministers in this county. Seven were women and ten were men. A few years later in Richmond, Indiana at a gathering of Orthodox-Gurneyite Yearly Meetings the Richmond Declaration was adopted. Many of our Evangelical and Friends United Meeting Yearly Meetings embrace this declaration. In a small 1987 book about the 1887 Conference, Mark Minear wrote:

“One hundred years ago some Friends were concerned that the ministry of women would be diminished if the paid pastoral system was adopted in a society that was oriented around males as the wage-earners of the day. They were prophetic. At the turn of the century more than one-third of the pastors, recorded ministers, and missionaries in the yearly meetings of the Five Years Meeting were women. The number of women today is a small fraction of what it was.”

He then goes on to ask: “What are we doing to nurture the pastoral ministry of women today?”

I am sad this question even needed to be asked. It suggests we’ve abandoned our heritage of equality and our tradition of women accepted and released for ministry. This issue touches many other concerns: professional ministry vs. released ministry, the recording process itself, true gender equality in Yearly Meeting leadership structures, leadership and authority in monthly meetings, and faith communities as places where nurture and encouragement of universal ministry is second nature.

I wish everyone lived in my world. I am blessed to be a part of a monthly meeting where for the whole of its existence has welcomed and encouraged the ministry of women. I am privileged to be in a marriage with shared values and goals. Ron and I choose to live on one salary. With that decision I am released to walk with him in a lifestyle of shared ministry. I like my world and I am sorry my young friend encountered the other one. Because I am treated as an equal in my marriage and in ministry and because I am not recorded as a minister in the Yearly Meeting, it gives me an opportunity to be a gadfly in the world she encountered.

Did I mention that I like history? I like it because knowing from where I came helps me know where I am going. It gives me hope, vision and motivation to work for a world where my friend is encouraged and welcomed for ministry in every monthly meeting in the Society of Friends.