maggi dawn

Female bishops

The Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand, recently announced that Bishop Matthews will be their new Bishop.  The Anglican Church of Australia announced her first female bishop last month.

Meantime, the good old Church of England continues in seemingly endless chicken-licken style discussion. In my more bleak moments it makes me think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Fresh Expressions? A Missional church? All around us there are people hungry and thirsty for the story we have to tell, yet all they can hear is our endless circumventions of an argument that is out of date. 

Will we ever see women in the Episcopate? Probably. A while from now. And then another round of hissy fits and arguments. Now, I have no personal career/ministry agenda in this: do not mistake me for someone who would want to be a Bishop. My gifts and inclinations clearly lie elsewhere. And in any case by the time the discussions are over I shall be on the verge of retirement. But I still feel deeply sorry that the Church I belong to continues to maintain levels of its organisation as a boys' club, wastes the talents of women who would be brilliant Bishops, and by inference misrepresents the gospel to the world around us. 

Bishop Alan is on fine form this morning on the subject. Go read.

thin is not chic

thank god for that. even France says so.

Retouching beauty

I came across this demo of retouching the other day - go to the site and click on the image to get a complete course in how an ordinarily pretty girl is turned into an impossible, unattainable icon...

au revoir, Madeleine L'Engle

I have wept a few tears today for someone I never met. Ever since I was a child, I have returned to Madeleine L'Engle's books over and over again.

A Wrinkle in Time was my first. I read Circle of Quiet for the third time this summer in France.

I learned from Ms L'Engle how to hold faith together with imagination, obedience and respect together with a healthy degree of rebellion, and that life is to  be lived right now, not as a down-payment for the hereafter.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Rest in Peace, Madeleine. Thank you, thank you for all you have given to your readers. Obits in the NY Times. and Episocopal Life

Women and church: Canon Lucy Winkett

Canon Lucy Winkett was on top form at Greenbelt, speaking about four ways (martyr, virgin, mystic, wife) in which women have shaped the Christian tradition despite only being allowed to do so within severe constraiants. I'm delighted to find that her current talks at St Pauls are expanding on these themes, and the first are now on St Paul's Cathedral website:  Your faith has made you well,  talks by Lucy Winkett.

women bishops

Archbishop Barry Morgan has his say

Love the questions, live the questions

In the midst of uncertainty and unresolved questions, Jen Lemen recommends Rilke, and the kindness of one lit candle beside a freshly drawn bath. Candlelit baths is a haven I discovered this winter when the light fitting in my bathroom broke and it was a week before I managed to get it fixed. Now the light is fixed but the candles remain. So do the unresolved questions, for which Rilke is indeed a guide for the soul:

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —from the letters of Ranier Maria Rilke

hat tip to my lovely friend Jen

size zero

one of the things I have been thinking about over the last week or so is the connection between Lent and giving up food and our cultural obsession with body-consciousness. Lent is completely subverted if it's taken as an opportunity to lose weight for fashion or image reasons. Lent is supposed to simplify and free you from self-obsession and focus you on GOd. But dieting for fashion consciousness focuses you on yourself, not in a healthy way, but in a way that pressurises you to become something you think someone else thinks you should be.

Last week someone said on the Radio that Size Zero was a very strange concept. What Size Zero says, the commentator pointed out, is that the idea of disappearing altogether is something to celebrate. The disappearance of women, the disallowance of them to take up space in the world, is made to seem virtuous by the label Size Zero. It's a sick idea. And anyone who is using Lent to feed the idea that they should be disappearing is certainly not hearing the liberation of the Christian Gospel, which is supposed to save us holistically, body and soul. Emphatically it does not denigrate the body in favour of the soul, although the way some people interpret the gospel you'd be forgiven for thinking so.

Maybe, if you are a person who has got caught up in the obsession with body size and regular dieting and weight control, the smartest thing you could do for Lent is not give up chocolate or cake or dairy or whatever, but give up dieting. 

Leaving Church

I promised myself that I would blog more of the books I read - so easy just to put them down and read the next one.  Over the summer I've read a pile of books, some for work, some for review, and some just for me! One that I read purely for my own interest was Leaving Church: a memoir of faith - I think I saw it pre-viewed on Prodigal Kiwis blog and ordered it right away. This is the book I quoted from in my Greenbelt talk back in August.

Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor's own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life  of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.

One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with - loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as priveleges.  Taylor puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called for, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won't accept your humanity if you are.  Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".

The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" - it's not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side.  One of the reasons I like the book so much is that - unlike so much other rhetoric among Church leavers that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution - she offers considered insight into the tensions of faith communities and their leaders, and shows how sometimes those communities disallow our calling first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn't claim to have left the Church because she didn't believe in it any more, nor because she didin't believe in what she had done thus far, and she doesn't hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she relates the complex reasons why a clear shift in role and direction became desirable for her, and what she learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It's refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.

I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this - priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities - if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as communities of truly interdependent people? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the path that Barbara Brown Taylor has found essential.

ain't I a woman?

I get asked pretty often to comment on the place of women in the church.  It's not an issue that I pursue from an academic point of view, although I've read loads of the relevant literature and wrote a few papers on it back in the early 90's.  An older, wiser woman once said to me that there were two choices with this stuff - you could either talk about the place of women, and make that your project, or you could choose another project and just bash down the resistance and take your place in the world, but you can't do both. To be good enough, she said, (in the Church especially) to make any impact you have to be at least as good as the best of the men. And the likelihood is you'll be raising kids and running a home at the same time. SO that doesn't leave any spare time for being a part-time expert on feminism. Instead of commenting on feminism, therefore, I'm going to let one of the great heroes of the women's movement say it, in her famous words from a century-and-a half ago. I've posted this once before - back in 2003 I think - but these are words that bear another visit.

Sojourner Truth gave her famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. (The women's rights movement grew in large part out of the anti-slavery movement.) No formal record of the speech exists, but Frances Gage, an abolitionist and president of the Convention, recounted Truth's words. There is debate about the accuracy of this account because Gage did not record the account until 1863 and her record differs somewhat from newspaper accounts of 1851. However it is Gage's report that endures and it is clear that, whatever the exact words, "Ain't I a Woman?" made a great impact at the Convention and has become a classic expression of women's rights.

The Classic Report
Several ministers attended the second day of the Woman's Rights Convention, and were not shy in voicing their opinion of man's superiority over women. One claimed "superior intellect", one spoke of the "manhood of Christ," and still another referred to the "sin of our first mother." Suddenly, Sojourner Truth rose from her seat in the corner of the church.

"For God's sake, Mrs.Gage, don't let her speak!" half a dozen women whispered loudly, fearing that their cause would be mixed up with Abolition. Sojourner walked to the podium and slowly took off her sunbonnet. Her six-foot frame towered over the audience. She began to speak in her deep, resonant voice: "Well, children, where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter, I think between the Negroes of the South and the women of the North - all talking about rights - the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this talking about?"

Sojourner pointed to one of the ministers. "That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me any best place. And ain't I a woman?"

Sojourner raised herself to her full height. "Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman?"

"I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?"

The women in the audience began to cheer wildly.

She pointed to another minister. "He talks about this thing in the head. What's that they call it?"

"Intellect," whispered a woman nearby.

"That's it, honey. What's intellect got to do with women's rights or black folks' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?"

"That little man in black there! He says women can't have as much rights as men. ‘Cause Christ wasn't a woman. She stood with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. "Where did your Christ come from?"

"Where did your Christ come from?", she thundered again. "From God and a Woman! Man had nothing to do with him!"

The entire church now roared with deafening applause.

"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side up again. And now that they are asking to do it the men better let them."

research on women in UK emerging church/alt worship

There's some research happening. They need women who are now, or were recently, involved in Emergeing/Emergent/Alt.worship groups in the UK, and who have e-mail access, to sign up and answer a few questionnaires.  Go and sign up, if you qualify, and spread the word. The link is on Jonny's blog here: research on women in emerging church/alt worship.

where are the women bloggers?

see this Link: BlogHer's Blogrolls | BlogHer  for women bloggers, and even a conference for womenbloggers! Jen Lemen's late lamented blog may even be returning to the blogworld inspired by this conference - see here...

Don't go anywhere without a woman

I just read over again some of Rachelle's post from earlier this year, where she tried to envision how women might realistically be made equals in the church. Not just ideologically, but in practice. Nine ideas that could transform the leadership structures of the Emerging/Emergent Church (yes, I know the Emergent rhetoric about not believing in leadership structures). Rachelle's post is stirring stuff. I like this one in particular:

7) Don’t go anywhere without a woman. Make sure they get invited to the pub, the hooka outing, the cigar fest — whatever. Invite them with you to talk to your publisher. Everytime you write an article, recommend a female pracitioner/writer to the magazine editor. Make sure every conference gig you get has women speakers — hell, make it part of your speaking contract. Make sure the sole woman on your planning team isn’t the secretary/administrator. And if you see women getting run over by predominately male voices in anything you are at, stop the conversation and kick open the door.

Link: Be Careful What you Wish for… -:- urban abbess.

mennochick

Mennochick reports that of 179 blogs listed at emergingchurchblogs.info, only 11 are written by women. Better still, she gives links to a few of them. (blush blush, including mine!) Mennochick's own blog, and her links to a few others, are really worth a look. Lynne, Dan and Rachelle I already knew about; The Hard Soap Gals are a new one to me, and v. interesting. Link: mennochick.

my heart is not raised up too high...

My heart is not raised up too high,
my eyes don't search beyond the sky,
I do not seek what can't be known,
nor fret myself over mysteries.

But I have calmed and soothed my soul
like a child at rest in its mother's arms;
like this child sleeping by my side,
my soul in God knows peace and calm.

All you who love and trust your God,
in this God shall you put your hope;
for there you will find unfailing love
from this time forth and forevermore.

Words and music by Maggi Dawn (c) 2006 Kingsway's Thankyou Music 

A prayer for women

This is a prayer from W.A.T.C.H.  It goes on to pray that women will not go on being excluded from the Episcopate...

Creator God -

made in your image

may women stand tall and speak up,

shedding their history of holding back.

Word incarnate -

as prophets and priests

may women speak truths about their lives,

with gentleness and persistence.

Untamed Spirit -

released from being ‘good’,

may women discover you

in all their caring and daring.

Rachelle on women in Emerging Church, Emergent Church

Rachelle is a woman in the USA who leads a kind of independent church in a not very churchy style. I'd love to visit if she wasn't so far from here. She wrote a couple of posts lately about the place of women in ministry in the Emerging/Emergent church, and her points are worth a read if you're interested in all things Emerging. The post is here, and followed by a post of links here.

women bishops (v)

Paul (who was there!) adds some helpful detail here. Anyone for Synod?

women bishops (iii)

I can't believe it. And by a massive positive vote in all three houses. Maybe there is a God in Heaven after all. I was beginning to wonder.  But I bet she's smiling tonight.

blood boil

here's a story...  grrrr

all her own work

nice little piece by Steve Parrish in the Guardian about women in ministry - read it here

IT'S OFFICIAL: THERE IS NO ISSUE OVER WOMEN IN MINISTRY

I'm amused to read on one of my favourite blogs, Jen Lemen, that sources say there isn't a problem with women in ministry! Women, apparently, are outnumbering men in ministry by as much as 7 to 1 - indeed, the truth is that there are not enough men in ministry. I rejoice over this news. Obviously the world has undergone a change in the last few weeks of which I am entirely unaware. :)

But joking apart, Jen's passionate post put me in mind of a recent experience - one among many stories I could tell about the obvious fact that we still have a long way to go before the ministry of women is accepted to the extent that it is unremarkable.

A couple of weekends ago I took up an invitation to speak about 100 miles from home to a small study group that meets every couple of months to consider difficult theological problems. The subject to which I was asked to speak was Romantic insights into postmodern hermeneutics - a topic that drew both on my PhD research, and on a chapter I wrote in a recently published book. (Incidentally, I never speak or write in a professional capacity about the ministry of women: I'm far too busy getting on with it.) As I approached the venue I was enormously encouraged to see that a whole carnival had been organised to welcome me, complete with sandwich boards, banners, balloons, fliers, even promotional CD's. I had no idea I was this important! But as I entered the carnival zone I realised this was not a welcoming party at all, but a party protesting against the ministry of women, and in particular against me having the audacity to "teach men".

My usual policy with this kind of time-wasting activity is to treat it with as much grace as I can muster. Of course, when one ANTICIPATES a protest (as I do nearly every time I celebrate the Eucharist, for instance), one prays in advance to be able to respond in grace. But on this occasion, speaking by invitation to a little study group of 12 men and 2 women, not at a 'public event', it hadn't occurred to me that there would be any kind of a protest, and my prayers and thoughts were occupied with other things. I'm happy to say, however, that years of practice in digging into grace seem to have become habit forming, as I felt nothing other than enormously sorry for these well meaning people, and so comfortable and confident in what I was doing that a response of grace was no effort whatsoever.

The day that women become so acceptable and so widely represented that their presence is no longer remarkable, I shall be the first to rejoice. I am busy, happy and fulfilled in my work, both in academic study and pastoral ministry, and being at the same time a mother to a small child leaves me with little spare time and energy to justify my existence, to myself or anyone else. It is, however, my ongoing experience that there is an ongoing and often upleasant protest against women in ministry. As long as this continues, women ministers must continue to dig into God for the grace needed to love those who do not love us, and the courage to continue to obey His call. But I do sometimes dream of the day when this will be a thing of the past.

same-old same-old?

women in ministry: is EMERGING really doing something new? or just same-old same-old?
I found out from the ever-well-informed Jonny Baker that two US cyber-friends, lilly and rob, seem to have started a great buzzing conversation on the observable absence of women in the so-called 'new' forms of church (emerging., emergent, alt, pomo, whatever ). Lilly & Rob both dared to air the observation that there were very few women in leading or speaking positions at 'Mayhem' (a recent conference for emergent types in the US). I wasn't at Mayhem, so can't comment directly on that particular event, but can't help noticing that Lilly and Rob's thoughts have been picked up and blogged on at fluidfaith, chris marshall, and others, and in the extensive comments that followed, quite a few people have been taking a pop at Lilly.

The debate is just as fiery, and contains all the same arguments to and fro, as it has for decades. It's not a very new conversation, this one. I can't help following the conversation with a wry smile :} I've heard this stuff over and over since I hit the shores of grown-up ministry 25 years ago. Despite the opposition of some men (and, it must be said, with the positive and pro-active endorsement of many more enlightened men), and despite the general culture of the church, which is not encouraging for women, I've figured out ways of doing what I do anyway. I'm not a frustrated, sad, hairy-legs caricature of an angry woman. I'm actually a very happy woman (and no hairy legs either). And in philosophical terms, I go for continental diff/erence (e.g. Luce Irigaray), not for US gender-equality. But the fact remains, there's a glass ceiling and we still need to bust through it.

The following are not my views, these are mini-headers for some of the arguments for and against. Please hear relaxed, ironic, this-is-just-how-it-is tone of voice, not angry ranting voice. ;)
Arguments FOR women in ministry:
1. women can be good at absolutely anything (they have as much range & variety of natural gifts as men).
2. women can think and get degrees same as men can. For every clever man, there's a clever woman.
3. women are good communicators
4. keeping them out is a failure of justice
5. jesus included women
6. etc - there's lots more
Arguments AGAINST women in ministry:
1. women have very particular giftings, different from men. They are better at making coffee and looking after children
2. Eve sinned first, not Adam; she then seduced him into sin. He wouldn't have sinned without her, ergo women are inherently more sinful than men. (*no, of course it's not true, but it's one of the arguments levelled against women in ministry)
3. St Paul told them to keep quiet. (*actually, DID he? but that needs a couple of essays to unwrap)
4. "We have no objection to women - it's just that we don't happen to have any good women speakers here. As soon as they show up, we'll let them speak no problem." (no, you wouldn't - you'd want a first-timer to be already as good as Mike Yaconelli)
5. "It's not so-and-so's fault he's a man - he's so good at what he does that if he was a woman sure he'd still be doing it." (get real - he's good at it because he's been practising it for the last 20 years; you've just forgotten how bad his first sermon was)
6. Women are better at emotional stuff; men are better at intellectual stuff.
7. "Of course we aren't against women in ministry - it's just that at THIS STAGE in your life, you should be concentrating on (looking for a husband/procreating/staying home to look after your kids/staying out of the limelight and growing old gracefully). Delete as applicable.
7. etc... there's plenty more.
Undercurrents to these arguments:
1. (some) Men get scared when women are good at things.
2. The Church gets nervous when women break the old fashioned gender types - whatever might happen next?
3. (some) Men like the 'boys club' atmosphere (that's why they leave women out when they "network" - i.e. go for a beer.)
4. (most) Men don't like mopping floors and washing the dishes. But it's better to give it a theological spin.
5. ... etc. There's plenty more.