Clergywomen Find Hard
Path to Bigger Pulpit
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Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
The Rev. Alise D. Barrymore, center, who had to leave
her denomination to be ordained, now serves a nondenominational
church near Chicago. |
By NEELA BANERJEE,
NYTimes on the Web, August 26, 2006
In the 18 years since her ordination,
the Rev. Elaine Puckett has wrestled with whether she should be in the pulpit at
all.
When she left divinity school, Ms. Puckett, a United Methodist, thought that
some day she might lead a large congregation in her hometown, Atlanta.
Instead, she has shuttled between jobs as an associate pastor on someone else’s
staff or as the leader of a small congregation fighting to survive. In
contrast, the men she was ordained with, for the most part, have moved on to run
bigger churches.
“You begin to question your competence,” said Ms. Puckett, 58, an associate
pastor at the large Embry Hills United Methodist Church in Atlanta. “When
you look at the endless cycle of one appointment after another after another
like these, your endurance runs low.”
The trajectory of Ms. Puckett’s career is familiar to many other women in the
Protestant clergy.
Whether they come from theologically liberal denominations or conservative ones,
black churches or white, women in the clergy still bump against what many call
the stained-glass ceiling — longstanding limits, preferences and prejudices
within their denominations that keep them from leading bigger congregations and
having the opportunity to shape the faith of more people.
Women now make up 51 percent of the students in divinity school. But in
the mainline Protestant churches that have been ordaining women for decades,
women account for only a small percentage — about 3 percent, according to one
survey by a professor at Duke University — of pastors who lead large
congregations, those with average Sunday attendance over 350. In
evangelical churches, most of which do not ordain women, some women opt to leave
for other denominations that will accept them as ministers. Women from
historically black churches who want to ascend to the pulpit often start their
own congregations.
This year, women were elected to lead the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist
Church and the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. But such success has not
filtered down to the congregational level, said the Rev. Dr. Catherine
Stonehouse, dean of the school of practical theology at the Asbury Theological
Seminary in Wilmore, Ky.
It is often easier for women in the mainline churches — historic Protestant
denominations like Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal and the United
Church of Christ — to get elected as bishops and as other leaders than to head
large congregations, Dr. Stonehouse said.
People in the pews often do not accept women in the pulpit, clergy members said.
“It’s still difficult for many in this culture to see women as figures of
religious authority,” said the Rev. Cynthia M. Campbell, president of McCormick
Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary in Chicago.
The Rev. Dottie Escobedo-Frank, pastor of Crossroads United Methodist Church in
Phoenix, said that at every church where she has served, people have told her
they were leaving because she is a woman.
At a large church where she was an associate pastor, a colleague told her that
when she was in the pulpit, he could not focus on what she was saying because
she is a woman. A man in the congregation covered his eyes whenever she
preached.
Conflicting interpretations of the Bible underlie debates over women’s authority
and ordination. Opponents of their ordination cite St. Paul’s words in I
Timothy 2:12, in which he says, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority
over men; she is to keep silent.” But proponents point to St. Paul again
in Galatians 3:28, which says, “There is neither male nor female; for you are
all one in Christ Jesus.”
Ms. Escobedo-Frank is familiar with the argument.
“People have written me in almost every church I have been in except the current
one, and said, ‘Timothy says women can’t preach, so how can you?’ ” she said.
In the first decade after ordination, men and women usually hold similar
positions, said Jackson W. Carroll, professor emeritus of religion and society
at Duke University Divinity School and author of “God’s Potters: Pastoral
Leadership and The Shaping of Congregations,” published this year.
In their second decade in ordained ministry, however, 70 percent of men had
moved on to medium-sized and large congregations, Mr. Carroll said, based on a
2001 survey of 870 senior and solo pastors. By comparison, only 37 percent
of women led medium and large larger congregations.
In the mainline Protestant denominations, Mr. Carroll found that women made up
20 percent of lead or solo pastors. But of the pastors at the top of the
pay scale, largely those who lead big congregations, only 3 percent are women.
Of all conservative Protestant congregations, 1 percent are led by women, he
said; of African-American churches, just 3 percent are led by women.
“It’s a combination of age-old customs and democratic myopia: that in the
marketplace of ideas and values, men matter most and that by definition, women
have to take a back seat,” said Dr. Alton B. Pollard III, director of black
church studies and associate professor of religion and culture at the Candler
School of Theology at Emory University.
Several denominations began ordaining women in the 19th century, from the
Quakers and the Christian Connection Church, a forbear of the United Church of
Christ, to the churches of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition. One of the
precursors to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) first ordained women in 1956, the
same year that the United Methodist Church granted full clergy rights to women.
The church bodies that ultimately formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church of
America first ordained women in 1970, and the Episcopal Church officially
ordained them in 1976.
When the Pentecostal movement started in 1906, it did not bar women from
preaching. But over time, congregations have limited women’s leadership.
The country’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention,
does not encourage the ordination of women, although some individual
congregations and other Baptist groups do.
Dr. Kenyn M. Cureton, vice president for convention relations at the Southern
Baptist Convention, said, “The biblical passages that restrict the office of
pastor to men do not negate the inherent worth and equal value of both women and
men before God, but rather focus on the assignment of different roles and
responsibilities to the genders.”
Individual congregations generally have a great deal of say about who will be in
their pulpits. This is especially true of the larger, wealthier
congregations in all denominations, even in the United Methodist Church, in
which bishops appoint ministers to congregations, said Adair T. Lummis, faculty
associate in research at the Institute for Religion Research at Hartford
Seminary in Connecticut.
For the most part, congregations want a young married man with children,
according to research Ms. Lummis conducted in 2001. “The whole demographic
image of a pastor had not changed much since the 1950’s,” she said.
Smaller, poorer congregations will hire a woman, but often, only grudgingly,
clergy members said.
“When we met with the search committee in Louisville, people on it said to me,
‘We really didn’t want a woman, because we know that we’re dying when we get a
woman,’” the Rev. Lucia Oerter said of her experience at John Knox Presbyterian
in Louisville three and half years ago.
In interviews with 15 women ministers, most said they had worked or were working
at small congregations, often those that were dwindling. In all cases, the
ministers had built up Sunday attendance. But such a track record is often
not enough to win a post at a larger, more affluent congregation.
A Presbyterian minister in Northern California, who asked not to be identified
because she did not want her congregation to know she was looking for a new
post, said she received 65 rejections when applying for a job in the mid-1990’s.
Over the last two years, as she has sought to move to a larger church, she said
she has been passed over by 15 churches, even though her own church is thriving
and she teaches preaching at a prestigious seminary.
“When a senior pastor is consulted about whom he would like to succeed him,
there aren’t any women on those lists,” the minister said. “The
good-old-boy network starts there.”
Experts on women in the clergy said that while the leaders of mainline
denominations support women in the ministry, not enough is done to back their
rise.
One small but important step male pastors can take, these experts said, is to
get congregations to hear women preach. For example, those pastors can ask
women to be guest preachers or have them fill in when they go on vacation.
“I speak differently than a man does,” Ms. Escobedo-Frank said. “To hear
the fullness of God’s voice, you need to hear both men and women. People’s
ears are opened more because of the surprise, and they are delighted by
surprise.”
Certainly, not every minister wants to lead a large congregation. And in
Protestant traditions that do not ordain women, such as evangelical megachurches,
lay women who lead youth groups or women’s groups influence the faith of
hundreds of congregants in a way that a woman minister in a small church cannot.
The Rev. Alise D. Barrymore, 37, grew up in the Church of God in Christ, part of
the Pentecostal movement. She is co-pastor of the Emmaus Community, a
non-denominational, “post-modern African-American church” which she founded with
another minister in Chicago Heights, Ill.
Like many women from conservative Christian backgrounds, she had to leave her
denomination, hop-scotching from one tradition to another, to enter the pulpit.
The church she grew up in has powerful women as members, she said, but it does
not ordain them. Yet she had long wanted to enter pastoral ministry.
Women in the black Pentecostal tradition can be itinerant evangelists, but
rarely pastors.
“You can’t handle the sacraments, and it would not be rare for you to preach
from the floor and not the pulpit, though that has changed a little bit in
recent years,” Ms. Barrymore said. “Names and nomenclature in the black
church are so important: as a woman, you teach but don’t preach. Yet
the teaching sounds just like preaching.”
Ms. Puckett, the United Methodist associate pastor in Atlanta, left pastoral
ministry for a time, she said, because she felt that she could not get the kind
of work she wanted. She returned because she felt called to preach.
But answering that call, she said, is a struggle.
“I’ve felt depressed sometimes, but the support of friends and colleagues got me
through,” she said. “I’d ask them, ‘Is what I’m feeling about what is
happening real or am I just crazy?’ and they would tell me I’m not crazy.”
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