Home > Article Index > Advocacy and the Climate Crisis

Advocacy and the Climate Crisis: Reflections from a Canadian Christian Feminist

By Diane Marshall

I would like to share with you a little personal history of my faith journey around advocacy and climate change.

I am a family therapist, not a scientist, and not a politician, although I have always been committed to social and political justice. And I have long been concerned about environmental issues, such as protecting declining species, or lobbying to protect old growth forests (I’m originally from British Columbia, on Canada’s west coast), or supporting Aboriginal communities in their need for safe drinking water, or teaching my children to conserve and recycle, or driving a hybrid car.

But in 2007, I had a profound experience of repentance as I began to grasp the full significance of what being an “earth keeper” would mean in a time of climate change. I was then part of a planning group in my downtown Toronto community for a multi-faith event to be held on Earth Day 2008, in which Jewish, Muslim, Ba’hai, Buddhist, and various Christian denominations would gather together to share our differing understandings of what the earth means— and how we understood our faiths to guide us in caring for the creation.

Experiencing a paradigm shift
This experience became for me a paradigm shift in terms of transforming my previous semi-conscious understanding of the concepts of “progress” and “unlimited growth”—which is our heritage from the industrial revolution and which has resulted in a cultural acceptance of domination of the earth and its resources.

I realized that Jesus and His disciples travelled “light,” and that I was not living in a way that was ultimately sustainable on this earth. While I had for a long time been concerned about our consumer culture and the values of compulsive “getting and spending” that it promotes, I had not thought through the moral and ethical dimensions of what it means to build a culture and an economy of sustainability.

Increasingly, I had noticed that international development organizations like World Vision and Doctors Without Borders had begun to document in their reports that climate change was a major cause of poverty and famine in the developing world and especially the global south—and that the industrialized world (of which I was a part) was a major contributor to this.

New awareness leads to action
With this new awareness, I then joined a small group of Anglicans within our Diocese who began to meet regularly to educate ourselves on the seriousness of the climate crisis and to look at how we, as a national Church, could respond in terms of political action and advocacy.

Our little ad hoc group (most of us grandparents, who were concerned about the effect of climate change on the coming generations, as well as the destructive effects on the global south right now) decided to draft a manifesto to be circulated as widely as possible. It became the framework from which we then worked with our national Church’s eco-justice committee to formulate a resolution on climate change (Resolution 180), which was passed in spring 2010 at General Synod.

God’s faithfulness and our responsibility
We were moved to learn that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke passionately at the Copenhagen Cathedral during the 2009 United Nations Congress on Climate Change, taking as his theme, “Act for the Sake of Love.” There was only one Canadian Christian leader who attended that conference (the United Church Moderator, Mardi Tyndal).

Then in June 2011, I attended an ecumenical conference sponsored by Operation Noah in London, England, and heard the former Bishop of Norwich, Dr. David Atkinson, speak about a “Carbon Exodus”— inspired by the exodus journey out of slavery into freedom. Bishop Atkinson said “we are in bondage to a neo-liberal economic model of perpetual growth,” and he called us to remember God’s Covenant with Noah in chapters 8 and 9 of Genesis— God’s commitment of faithfulness to His promise, sealed with a rainbow, and our response of commitment to follow. Further augmenting this sense of urgency was the November 2011 United Nations report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), representing top climate scientists around the world. It warned of increased risk of extreme weather events if the earth continues to warm.

The whole created order lives under God’s grace and under God’s judgement. We are called to be Earth-keepers, to be carers of the creation: the first mandate given to humanity in Genesis. The worldwide Anglican Communion’s fifth “Mark of Mission” calls us to “strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.” 

Thus, by advocating for more significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, offering worship resources for our communities, learning to pray more intentionally for the earth, and examining our own lifestyles through the lens of caring for creation, we are being responsive to God’s call.

In January 2011, the head Bishops of the Anglican Communion, meeting in Dublin, Ireland, issued a statement on climate change. It included this call:

“We encourage all Anglicans to recognize that global climatic change is real and that we are contributing to the despoiling of creation. We underline the increasing urgency of this as we see the impact of climate change in our provinces. . . . We press Government, industry and civil society on the moral imperative of taking practical steps towards building sustainable communities, and urge them to work to achieve agreement on the way forward at the UN’s Congress in Durban in November.”

And yet, to our shame, and international embarrassment, Canada has not developed a Climate Action strategy in spite of the fact that the elected House of Commons voted to support one last year—which the Conservative-dominated (appointed) Senate then defeated! Canada publicly refused to support the Durban call to action, and withdrew its previous commitment to the Kyoto Accord.

Yet, Canada is one of the world’s top 10 greenhouse gas emitters. The Alberta tar sands is being tripled in size and scope— to the outrage of environmentalists and Aboriginal peoples throughout our country. Those of us active in this movement and in the church believe that we have a moral responsibility in the international arena to bring about a fair, ambitious, and legally-binding agreement on greenhouse reductions.

In addition to calling on members of our national Anglican Church, at parish and Diocesan levels, to incorporate concerns about the care of creation more fully into our liturgies and to become educated about the climate crisis, General Synod Resolution A180 calls on us to formally lobby the Government of Canada to adopt a comprehensive climate action plan. In the background notes to the Resolution we wrote:

“Throughout its history, the Christian churches have affirmed the Biblical belief that ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all who dwell therein’ (Psalm 24:6). Even so, we have participated in the exploitation and pollution of the planet. We have identified too uncritically with the values of Western (industrialized) culture, failed to communicate the Gospel in its fullness, and shared in the conquest and domination of Creation…. “

Speaking the truth in love
Our Christian calling is to “speak the truth in love,” and the need to speak to government is part of “safeguarding creation.” In workshops I have given recently, I have asked the following questions:

1. How do you see yourself advocating for the earth, and “safeguarding the integrity of creation”?
2. How do you see yourself “sustaining and renewing the life of the earth”?

My early commitment to advocacy on the climate crisis that began four years ago has now led me— in addition to signing petitions and meeting with my Member of Parliament — to become a member of the Toronto Diocesan “working group on the environment,” and to organize a mini-conference for my professional provincial organization of registered couple and family therapists.

Writing this brief article for my Christian friends at EEWC-Christian Feminism Today is one further step in raising the challenges facing us in the global north, and particularly here in Canada. “Big Oil” is mounting enormous campaigns in all our media to counter the concerns surrounding the expansion of the tar sands and to quell the growing opposition to the Keystone Pipeline and the Northern Gateway Pipeline—especially as more and more people are becoming aware of the environmental hazards they engender.

This fight for the integrity of the earth—to wean our dependence on oil, to develop instead new technologies for sustainable sources of energy, and to practice conservation—is in many respects analogous to the anti-slavery movement in Britain in the 18th century. The pro-slavery forces, including the church and the government at that time, argued that the “way of life,” “the economy”, and “people’s jobs” would be sacrificed if slavery were ended. The whole economy of the British Empire was dependent on the slave trade. But justice and truth prevailed, and eventually the evil structure of slavery was formally ended.

Today, at a time of climate crisis, we face another moral and spiritual challenge. I believe that we Christian feminists, who have struggled for equality and justice for women and men in the church and in society, now have a voice that again needs to be heard—this time in advocating for the earth, our island home in the universe.

Copyright © 2012 by Diane Marshall

Diane Marshall has served as long-time director of the Institute of Family Living in Toronto, practicing in the field of family therapy and training therapists in the multicultural communities of refugees and immigrants that people Toronto. She also serves on various boards working on public justice issues, urban ministries, and with people with physical and intellectual disabilities, in addition to her work within the Anglican Church of Canada in eco-justice committees. She is the mother of three adult children and grandmother of four. Diane served as Canadian representative on EEWC’s first elected council after our incorporation as a nonprofit organization in 1978.

Home > Book Reviews Index > Sacred Work

Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances

by Tom Davis.   
New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 
Paperback, 264 pp., Index. 

Reviewed by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Although this fascinating history of reproductive politics was published six years ago, it is remarkably timely. Recently I have felt stunned to see the Right Wing aiming its attacks not only at abortion, but even at contraception. However, Tom Davis’ book has provided ample proof that this dual attack is nothing new. In 1916 Margaret Sanger served 30 days in jail simply for disseminating information about birth control. Because of determined Roman Catholic opposition, it was not until 1934 that any American church openly endorsed birth control. And it was 1942 before the American Birth Control League morphed into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the organization currently being demonized as an abortion-provider. But at its beginnings there was not even a whisper about abortion.

In fact, despite the combined efforts of clergy and Planned Parenthood, it was 1958 before contraception became available to New Yorkers in city hospitals, and then only to those who could prove they were married. It was 1965 before the State of Maryland made contraceptives available to unmarried women. Finally, in 1967 the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion was organized by concerned Protestant and Jewish clergy to help women find safe abortions. So historically, it was political opposition to contraception that extended into opposition to abortion, whereas here in 2012 violent opposition to abortion is now extending into opposition to contraception of any sort except abstinence or the unreliable rhythm method.

The Rev. Tom Davis is not just an astute historian of a previously unrecorded coalition; he is thoroughly feminist and has been a family planning activist for many years. He points out an important historical “disconnect”: that “the high rate of criminal abortion seemed to produce no concerted sustained public opposition” from Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist institutions, yet today these same churches proclaim legal abortion as “the gravest of all social problems.” Since these churches also bar women from ministry and priesthood, it seems clear that issues of abortion and contraception are ultimately about controlling women’s lives. Because Roe v. Wade gave women a legal power they had never before possessed, people who did not care about back-alley abortions now portray legal abortion as “the crime of the century.”

Christian feminists can pick up lots of useful information from this history of Planned Parenthood and its interaction with clergypeople. For instance, Davis provides a brief but cogent description of issues surrounding stem-cell research, including the fact that as of May 2003 fertility clinics had 396,526 embryos stored in their freezers – embryos that could be utilized in research to save lives rather than eventually being destroyed. He also mentions that the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice provides proof on its website that Bush’s faith-based initiatives were “a type of cultural change targeted directly at women’s rights.” And the book contains some excellent “quotables,” such as the Rev. Roger Buchanan’s comment that “the sacred fetus is the modern equivalent of the Golden Calf…. If the fetus is sacred [and the mother is not], the mother is subservient, a view that is destructive to women.”

In short, Tom Davis has produced a book that embodies its title, being throughout a Sacred Work.

Reviewer Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. Among the thirteen books she has authored or coauthored are Women, Men, and the Bible; The Divine Feminine; Omnigender; and Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism.

© 2012 by Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus.

Home > Book Reviews Index > Integral Christianity

Integral Christianity: The Spirit’s Call to Evolve

by Paul R. Smith.
St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 2011.
Cloth, 408 pp., index, bibliography.
$24.95.

Reviewed by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

What would Christianity look like if every Christian interpreted the Bible through the lens provided by the actions and teachings of Jesus? The answer is: very different from how it looks today! And our guide in making some very rich discoveries along this line is the Reverend Paul R. Smith, who for almost fifty years has been leading Kansas City’s Broadway Church from a traditional Southern Baptist congregation toward a model of integral Christianity. Integral thinking includes whatever is good from previous stages of thinking or diverse religious traditions, at the same time transcending those patterns that no longer serve humankind well.

Take violence, for instance. Some Christians are embarrassed by Old Testament stories of God’s violent actions against human beings (as in the Flood), or counseling the destruction of every man, woman, and child among Israel’s enemies. But certain Christians use those biblical passages to support America’s many wars, including the current ones. Smith’s approach is to stick to Jesus’s teaching to love our enemies and to be as merciful and as compassionate as the One God who sends the sun and rain to bless both the righteous and the unrighteous. Smith regards any violent advice in the New Testament as a reversion to an earlier stage of human development. But “According to the new developmental stage introduced by Jesus, God is only compassion, not a strange blend of mercy and revenge. Many followers of Jesus have yet to come to believe that God practices what Jesus preached” (p. 84).

The reference to developmental stages is a reminder that Smith is the first scholar to systematically apply to biblical interpretation the developmental framework of the great American philosopher, mystic, and theologian, Ken Wilber. Smith also builds upon the excellent books of Christian mysticism written by Jim Marion, with whom I had the privilege to work at the Kirkridge Conference Center. I heartily recommend any and all of Ken Wilber’s books as well as Jim Marion’s two books, Putting on the Mind of Christ (2000) and The Death of the Mythic God (2004).

But for me, the most exciting aspect of Paul Smith’s Integral Christianity is not reading about the various stages, states, and standpoints within religion (enlightening though that is). For me, the excitement stems from the liberating insights that occur when we learn to read the Bible “in a Jesus-friendly way” (p. 73). Repeatedly, theological positions I had adopted with fear and trembling are calmly shown by Paul Smith to be simply aspects of what Jesus actually said and did. Perhaps I would have trembled less if I had not had such a strictly fundamentalist belief system drummed into my head all the way through childhood and my undergraduate years. But what a relief to find such validation, even this late in life!

For instance, although I was inspired by reading mystics from diverse religions to begin believing that God loved me just as I am, I was also cowed by many years of being told that mysticism is just so much hooey. Like Smith himself, I was taught that “‘mysticism’ begins with mist, centers on I, and ends in schism” (p. 44). But Smith points out that when we decide to “follow Jesus instead of a literal Bible,” we find that Jesus was intimately, mystically connected to an Abba who was “unconditionally loving and inclusive” (p. 81). This is the same connection described by every mystic I ever read.

Or take the issue of getting messages from the spirits of those who have “died.” When I tried to share with my brother the joy I got from comforting messages from our mother after her demise, he told me to “shut up” on the basis of Isaiah 8:19 and similar Scriptures. So when a channeler—a modern prophet, according to Smith—when a channeler brought me a wonderfully loving message from my father just a week after his death, I did not speak of it to my fundamentalist family. But Smith swept away my timidity by pointing out that Jesus himself spoke with the dead—and of course, he did, on the mountain of Transfiguration, when he conversed with Moses and Elijah (Matthew 17:3, Mark 9:4). In a way that is very poignant for me, Luke even tells us that they talked about the death Jesus was soon to face in Jerusalem (Luke 9:30-31).

If it was good for Jesus to receive encouragement from those who had gone before him, why should his followers deny ourselves similar encouragement? But I had to ask myself this question: why had I never before made that connection? The answer: because we tend to see only what we expect to see—until some blessed teacher comes along to remove the blinders from our eyes.

Incidentally, perhaps someone who has heard me speaking from a platform may be surprised to learn that I am timid about any shifts in my belief system. If so, please be assured that my shaky self-confidence stems not only from sexist socialization and fundamentalist theology, but primarily from being abused as an infant and young child. Such experiences are known to cause a very tentative and weak sense of certainty. Fortunately, however, that weakness has forced me to search not only the Scriptures but also their surrounding scholarship to provide evidence for the hope that has developed within me. So at this point I feel grateful for my early trials, which were good training for the justice-oriented ministries I have engaged in for many years.

Integral Christianity has been particularly helpful to me in the area of prayer. As a theologian, I have tended to focus on God as Infinite Being—the Single Unified Energy Field of which quantum physicists speak, the ineffable Presence before which we must fall silent in our unknowing. But in times of need, it is difficult to cuddle up to the Ground of Being. Smith helped me to claim for myself other aspects of the Holy One that I’ve been teaching for years: that God is not only Infinite, but also Intimate, Someone who walks beside us throughout life and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And that God is also Inner, the very Realm or Kin-dom that is within each of us as it was within Jesus.

Furthermore, Smith defends the practice of using a special prayer language the way people did at Pentecost. I was taught that glossolalia was no longer needed because now we have the Bible, and I endured many hours of hearing Bob Jones Sr. making fun of speaking in tongues during my years at Bob Jones University. So when I found myself privately praying in a tongue unknown to me, I promptly squashed that impulse. But Smith comments that nowhere did Jesus condemn the use of a private prayer language, and nowhere did the New Testament authors claim that its use was no longer permissible. So I am happy to have permission to allow the Spirit to pray through me, even if I do not always know what I am saying. As Smith points out, in John 7:37-39 Jesus “envisions a release [of Spirit] from the inside and not a ‘coming upon’ from the outside” (p. 117).

From another angle, I have always felt a great urgency about producing meaningful work all day every day, and have had difficulty justifying “time out” for prayer. But Smith assures me that “Spiritual practice which leads to awakening is fundamentally the same as preparation and practice for death…. Once our fear of death is eliminated, then our way of being in the world is transformed” (p. 290). Now, that’s something I can really make time for!

Although he is very respectful of much “New Age” thought, Smith is careful to point out the partialness of the concept that we human beings “create our own reality.” He argues (correctly, I believe) that our thoughts “influence reality but do not create it” (p. 264) because our lives are also affected by the thoughts of the seven billion other people who share our planet, and by the fact that “part of our reality is created by the nature of the material world around us” (tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Smith also denies the notion that “no viewpoint is better than any other viewpoint,” which can end up affirming pathological and destructive attitudes. Instead he calls for “wisdom to discern whether one is helping or harming others” (p. 265).

People who know me are well aware that I have long had a thing for lighthouses. Why? Because I love the fact that Jesus told us both that he is the light of the world (John 8:12) and that we are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-16), thus establishing a connection between our essence and his essence as our Elder Brother, “the firstborn among many [sisters and] brothers” (Romans 8:29). Because I have often been rebuked for my faith that Jesus will bring everyone home to God’s Love, I am grateful to see that Smith’s “Jesus-friendly reading of Scripture” also leads him to trust that everyone will be saved and that the purpose of our lives is to become divinized, with Christ [or Divine Love] living within us, through us, and as us.

And I was delighted to read that for Smith, Jesus’ most astonishing statement is “You are the light of the world.” When Jesus said this, he was talking to a large crowd of people from all over, including the pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon (in what today we call Lebanon). They were people of many religions and no religion. Therefore, Jesus’s point is that “everyone is the light of the world” (p. 332)—so we’d better get over classifying other folks as inferior for any reason whatsoever.

As for ourselves, we had better stop putting ourselves down. For as Smith says, “The light is already inside of us. It is always inside of us. It has never left and will never leave. You don’t need to get it. It’s already there. You can’t earn it. It’s already there. As the real you. You can’t lose it, because it’s the real you which is part of God. And God never loses any part of herself anytime or anywhere. This is ‘the astonishing light of your own being’” (p. 334).

And let all the people of God say, Amen! And then let them go out and buy this book, sharing as many copies with others as we can possibly afford. It is a must for every church and college library wherever English is spoken.

Reviewer Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. A prolific writer (author or coauthor of 13 books, including Omnigender, and most recently, a revised and expanded edition of Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism), she is a frequent contributor to Christian Feminism Today. Virginia will be one of the presenters at the EEWC-CFT Gathering in Indianapolis next summer. Her website is www.virginiamollenkott.com.

© 2011 by Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus. Originally published in the Fall (October – December) 2011 issue of Christian Feminism Today, Volume 35, number 3.

Home > Article Index > Jann Aldredge-Clanton Interview

“Changing Church: Stories of Liberating Ministers” 

 CFT editor Letha Dawson Scanzoni interviews Jann Aldredge-Clanton about her exciting new book

Letha: Jann, you’ve titled your new book, Changing Church: Stories of Liberating Ministers. What is your definition of a “liberating minister”?

Jann: I began the book with a curiosity about ministers who are changing the church through changing worship language and imagery to include the Divine Feminine. My hunch was that other social justice changes would flow from this foundational theological change.

I did indeed discover that ministers who include female divine names and images in worship also take prophetic stands on race, class, sexual orientation, ecology, and other social justice issues. These ministers are working for freedom from interlocking oppressions, so I decided to call them “liberating ministers.” These “liberating ministers” believe that it is vital to include biblical female divine names and images in worship in order to have justice for women and all creation.

Letha: You mention in the introduction to your book that you chose to write about ordained clergy—not because you believe that they’re more valuable to the church than laypeople but rather “because they have the most to lose in advocating for change within the institutional church.” What did you mean by that statement, and what are some examples of what these ministers might risk or lose by advocating for change?

Jann: Ordained clergy depend upon the church for their livelihood, and most laypeople do not. So when clergy advocate for change, especially change that might not be popular, they take risks with their careers.

As we see in the stories of these “liberating ministers,” clergy who work to change the institutional church risk sanction by denominational authorities, loss of opportunities for promotion to larger congregations or to prestigious denominational positions, and often even loss of their jobs. Also, most of these ministers express the ideal of changing from a hierarchical to an egalitarian church structure, breaking down the separation between clergy and laity. But if the church takes this form, will it still support ordained clergy? If not, what will these ministers do to make a living and to fulfill their call?

Letha: One of the things I like best about your book is that you approached the topic through stories— real-life examples of women and men who realized that part of working for justice, peace, and egalitarian ideals was to “include female divine names and images in worship so that females are seen as valuable in the image of the Divine.” Can you tell us about a few positive and encouraging incidents that especially stood out in the stories the ministers shared with you?

Jann: I was inspired and encouraged as I learned of the life-giving changes that these ministers are bringing to church and society. For example, Rev. Stacy Boorn, pastor of Ebenezer Lutheran in San Francisco, tells about people who have felt alienated from the Christian tradition and who now experience a “whole new sense of church and communion through images of the Divine Feminine.” A Native American woman who had “sworn off Christianity because of how the church treated women and minority groups,” found self-worth through the liturgy of this Lutheran church, and she found community as she worked on the Faith and Feminism/ Womanist/Mujerista Conference, sponsored by the church. Stacy expresses her belief that the world will change as “we provide church in a different way,” because religious institutions are “so much a part of who the world is.”

Rev. Marcia Fleischman, co-pastor of Broadway Church in Kansas City, tells of a mystical experience of the Divine Feminine that helped her heal from her dad’s and boyfriend’s negative messages about women. She was questioning whether or not she was made in the divine image, and she heard God say to her, “Just as your daughter looks like you, you look like me.” A little later, Marcia was helping to lead the church to include the Divine Feminine in worship, and getting some resistance. In a Sunday worship service during this time, people spontaneously began changing the words of one of the songs, replacing “He” with “She.” With tears in her eyes Marcia tells me: “You could hear it across the whole congregation. They were singing about God as ‘She.’ It was a moment of joy.”

Letha: What about some negative examples—examples where serious problems or conflict arose in churches because of the changes these ministers were trying to bring about?

Jann: Church officials have excommunicated Bridget Mary Meehan, a bishop in the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement, because of her activity as an ordained priest and her use of the Divine Feminine in worship. When she officiated at the ordination of the first women priests in Florida, Bishop Frank Dewane threatened to excommunicate not only Bishop Bridget Mary, but everyone who attended. She reframes this conflict as a positive experience: “I don’t know how many excommunications I’ve had! I think they’re badges of honor actually. The bishop’s threat of excommunication just drew more people. My experience is that opposition can really be the source of growth and blessing.”

Rev. Nancy Petty, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, has experienced conflict when trying to change the visual imagery in the sanctuary to include the feminine and to include diversity in race and sexual orientation. In this church, Nancy says, there’s more resistance to inclusive visual imagery than to inclusive language: “We have people who don’t want anything in the sanctuary to change. It’s hard to know if it’s because they don’t want the feminine imagery in there, or if they truly feel that this space was designed for the purpose and they don’t want it to change. My guess is that it’s both. Some people ask, ‘Why do we have to bring feminine imagery in? We have a woman pastor, and we know what we believe. Why is it important to put stuff on the walls?’ I keep saying, ‘Because it’s theologically the right thing to do.’”

Letha: How did you go about finding the ministers who were willing to be interviewed and share their stories in this book?

Jann: About the time I began this research, I read the book Grandmothers Counsel the World, by Carol Schaefer. The Appendix includes the story of Jyoti (Jeneane Prevatt), who initiated the Grandmothers Council, out of which the book developed. Jyoti had a vision of the Council, but felt overwhelmed and uncertain about how to find the grandmothers. She prayed for direction, and received the answer that she was to start with the relationships she had.

I decided that I would also pray for guidance to find the ministers, and that I would begin with relationships. Rev. Stacy Boorn and I had become friends at the annual Faith and Feminism/Womanist/Mujerista Conferences, so I started with her. Several other ministers I’d known personally or through their books were willing to be interviewed. Guidance came also in unexpected ways, as in my reading an article in the Dallas Morning News about Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan’s leadership with the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, and then remembering her books on the Feminine Divine that I had on my bookshelf.

Divine Wisdom also led through people who gave helpful assistance in finding a diversity of ministers. Some leaders of mainline denominations sent emails with my statement of purpose to all the ministers on their distribution lists. I received many responses with suggestions of ministers to include.

Several ministers I approached expressed appreciation and encouragement for the project, but declined to be interviewed for fear of censure or loss of their jobs. One minister I contacted after I read online her powerful liturgy with the image of God as “Mother” responded that she would like to help with the book, but that she feared for her job because her husband had been fired from his pastoral position because of the controversy her liturgy had stirred within their denomination.

In my search I did not try to be exhaustive, but to find representative ministers who are changing the church through inclusion of female divine names and images. That holy number 12 lodged in my mind almost from the beginning of the project. So after I had written 12 stories, I decided to close the canon—at least on this book!

Letha: I see that the ministers who shared their stories in this book are for the most part women (female leadership of congregations in itself being an indication of changes in many churches). But you have also included chapters about two male ministers who consider Divine Feminine imagery and language to be as important for boys and men as it is for girls and women. One of the men is Rev. Paul Smith, whose book, Is It Okay to Call God Mother? has been reviewed in Christian Feminism Today and whose latest book, Integral Christianity, is reviewed in this issue on page 7. The other male contributor to your book is Rev. Larry Schultz, minister of music at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Could you comment on these words from your chapter about Larry Schultz in your forthcoming book?

 ”Many ministers of music are even more resistant to inclusive language than pastors because of the difficult tasks of finding inclusive anthems and hymns, of changing existing exclusive words, and of creating new hymn texts. Also, ministers of music often face copyright issues when trying to change words in more recent music as well as the resistance of choir members and congregations to singing new words. ‘You have to be brave enough and to find ways to bring inclusive music to worship,’ Larry comments.”

Jann: In many churches people become “inerrantists” when it comes to hymns. Ministers of music then don’t want to stir up people in their choirs and congregations by changing words in songs, and they don’t want to be accused of “tampering” with the original poetry. And Rev. Larry Schultz talks about how difficult it is to find existing anthems and hymns with inclusive language. Larry has indeed been brave enough to find creative ways to include the Divine Feminine in worship music, because of his strong belief in “all the benefits for women, men, and children.” He says that “what we sing in worship shapes us.”

Often it is much easier to create new music than to change existing hymns. For this reason, Larry and I have collaborated on two hymnbooks: Inclusive Hymns for Liberating Christians (2006) and Inclusive Hymns for Liberation, Peace, and Justice (in press). Larry is an accomplished text writer, as well as composer. These hymnbooks include some of his texts, as well as original compositions and arrangements of familiar hymn tunes. Both hymnbooks include female and male divine names and images to support the foundational biblical truth that all people are created equally in the divine image. The new hymnbook also has many hymns appropriate for interfaith settings. It is our hope that the hymns in both collections will empower people to take prophetic action on gender, race, interfaith cooperation, sexual orientation, ecology, and other social justice issues.

Letha: Tell us a bit about how you have handled the issue of God language in working with children, including writing music for children.

Jann: I agree with Larry that it’s vital to include the Divine Feminine and other expansive imagery for children so that “it becomes a natural and meaningful expression for them,” and both girls and boys grow up to know they’re valued. To bring inclusive language and imagery to children, I wrote God, A Word for Girls and Boys with an accompanying coloring book. To provide music resources with expansive imagery, Larry and I collaborated on Imagine God! A Children’s Musical Exploring and Expressing Images of God; as well as another book, Sing and Dance and Play with Joy! Inclusive Songs for Young Children; plus an animal blessing anthem and several other children’s anthems.

Larry’s story includes the mystical experiences that began our collaboration and that led Choristers Guild to publish the children’s musical.

Letha: I was also glad to see that you included at least two names of EEWC-CFT women, Becky Kiser and Judith Liro, in your book. In addition, it was great to see the racial and ethnic diversity reflected among all the ministers whose stories you share with us. Would you like to comment on a few of these women?

Jann: Yes, EEWC-CFT has been important to Rev. Becky Kiser and Rev. Judith Liro, as we see from their stories. Becky tells of her epiphany through your and Nancy’s book All We’re Meant to Be, and years later of connecting with you and becoming active in EEWC. My interview with Becky led to my reconnecting with EEWC. Her story includes excerpts from an article she wrote for the EEWC newsletter on her mystical experiences of the Divine Feminine. Judith’s story also includes her writing for EEWC. I quote an article in which she writes that the dominance of male imagery in traditional liturgy undermines “the possibilities for women to experience ourselves as beloved, gifted, and responsible beings.”

In Changing Church I tried to reflect not only racial and ethnic diversity, but also diversity in sexual orientation and Christian denominations. To pursue their calling some of these ministers have overcome obstacles not only of sexism but also of racism and/or heterosexism. “It’s very difficult as a black woman to get called to pastor a church,” Rev. Susan Newman says, but she finds power through “God’s WomanSpirit within.” Rev. Monica Coleman, a womanist theologian, in her book Making a Way Out of No Way uses images of black women as Saviors. Rev. Virginia Marie Rincon says that it takes courage to use her “voice as a woman and especially as a Latina woman,” but that the Divine Feminine, like the Virgen de Guadalupe, gives her strength. Rev. Isabel Docampo has also faced challenges as a Latina clergywoman, and finds hope through her vision of the Divine Feminine bringing healing as diverse people connect through sharing stories. Rev. Nancy Petty, even in a “welcoming and affirming” church, has experienced some prejudice as a lesbian pastor; she expresses hope that the Divine Feminine will lead the church to represent all people as equals.

Letha: Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us, Jann. We’ll be looking forward to seeing your book in print soon. Meanwhile, I appreciated having a sneak peek at it ahead of publication so that we can call our readers’ attention to it. And I’d like to quote these powerful words from your introduction:

 ”My vision is for the Divine Feminine to shine forth in all Her glory in multicultural visual imagery and in the language of worship, supporting equal partnership of women and men. My vision is of a church where the Divine Feminine and women ministers don’t have to be defended or marginalized, but are fully and equally included throughout every worship service and every activity of the church. My vision is for the Sacred Feminine to be worshipped not only in Christian congregations, but in every religion all over the world, and for women to share equally in the leadership of every religion. My vision is for girls to believe they are equal to boys because they hear and see the Supreme Being worshipped as ‘She’ as well as ‘He.’”

 Do you have any closing thoughts you want to add, Jann?

Jann: In keeping with my Baptist tradition, I’d like to close with an “invitation.” People may read this book and think, “Why didn’t she include so and so?” I hope that they do, and that they will write these stories. This book comes with the invitation to join these liberating ministers in changing the church and the world. 

Jann Aldredge-Clanton is an ordained minister, chaplain, adjunct professor at both the Perkins School of Theology and Richland Community College in Dallas, Texas, and author of numerous books. Changing Church, the book discussed here, was recently published by Cascade Books. Jann will be one of the presenters at the 2012 EEWC-CFT Gathering in Indianapolis. Her website is www.jannaldredgeclanton.com.

© 2011 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus – Vol. 35, No. 3 Fall (October-December) 2011 

Home > Book Reviews Index > A Sword between the Sexes?

A Sword between the Sexes?
C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates

by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen.
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010.
Paperback. 264 pages.

 Reviewed by Gary L. Tandy 

“Shocking Nonsense about Women”

When Dorothy L. Sayers was asked to recommend thoughtful Christian books, she routinely suggested those of her contemporary and fellow fiction and Christian apologetics writer, C. S. Lewis. These recommendations, however, sometimes came with a caveat. “I do admit,” she wrote to one correspondent just after World War II, “that he is apt to write shocking nonsense about women and marriage.”

As a university teacher who often assigns Lewis’s works in my classes, I’ve seen firsthand the dismay of students when they come across some of Lewis’s pronouncements in Mere Christianity about male hierarchy in marriage or his portrayals of gender essentialism in That Hideous Strength. Like Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, author of the newly released Sword Between the Sexes?, I’ve remained a fan of Lewis’s works in spite of his blind spots; still, before I read her book, I had never really looked in any comprehensive way at Lewis’s view of gender. 

What Lewis Believed and Why

What Van Leeuwen (Professor of Psychology at Eastern University and resident scholar at the Center for Christian Women in Leadership) undertakes in her book is a necessary, if challenging, task: to analyze Lewis’s works identifying his views on gender, to identify the sources of those beliefs and opinions, and, finally, to determine their accuracy (or inaccuracy) based on Christian theology and the findings of the social sciences—and to accomplish all of this without either lionizing or demonizing Lewis.

The Charge of Antifeminism

Van Leeuwen does not shy away from describing in detail the charges that can be brought against C. S. Lewis by Christian feminists. Here are a few: 

° Lewis defended for much of his life a view of male-female relations that was both essentialist and hierarchical. For example, in 1945, he wrote, “I do not believe God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast” (“Membership,” in The Weight of Glory,

° In 1927, Lewis supported a proposal imposing a quota on women admitted to Oxford, siding with the majority of dons who were, as he put it, “anti-feminists,” and expressing his relief in a letter to his brother that “the appalling danger of our degenerating into a women’s university . . . has thus been staved off.” 

° In That Hideous Strength, the third volume in his space trilogy, Lewis seems to argue women must either embrace neutral celibacy or wifely submission.

° In 1948, Lewis argued against the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, writing that a female cannot sacramentally represent the people of God at the altar because God represents ultimate masculinity.
(“Priestesses in the Church?” in God in the Dock) 

° Lewis felt free to make assertions about “what men are like” and “what women are like” without having to defend them empirically. For example, in Mere Christianity, part of Lewis’s argument for male headship in marriage is based on the assertion that the man is more rational and, therefore, more likely to be just in dealing with outsiders, as opposed to the woman, who is fighting for her own children against the rest of the world, and will respond based on intense family patriotism, i.e., emotionally.

Problems with Lewis’s Views

Van Leeuwen also reminds us of why all this is a problem. First, many of Lewis’s most misogynistic statements are found in his more popular works, including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Four Loves. Second is Lewis’s amazing and ongoing popularity among Christians. As Van Leeuwen notes, many Christians have turned Lewis into “a species of plaster saint, whose every published pronouncement has been accorded almost Canonical status” (257).

Van Leeuwen cites many of the American evangelicals who have used Lewis’s most misogynistic statements as fuel for their own theories of gender essentialism and gender hierarchy—most notably John Eldredge and his wife, Staci, in their books Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secrets of a Man’s Soul and Captivating, which, as the subtitle indicates, unveils the “mystery of a woman’s soul.”

Van Leeuwen takes a very balanced approach. She not only indicts Lewis on charges of misogynism; she also does her best to defend him—or, at least, to help us understand what led to some of his “shocking nonsense” about women. She suggests, for example, that Lewis’s stance on gender reflects the assumptions of the Edwardian era he was born into and the largely male culture of Oxford and Cambridge where he taught.

 Lewis’s Interaction with Women

She argues that Lewis was a better man than his theories in that his relationships with actual women were more mutually respectful and egalitarian than his published writings. Here Van Leeuwen provides some original and insightful discussions of Lewis’s correspondence and relationships with Dorothy L. Sayers, who often confronted Lewis about his views on gender; Mary Shelley Neylan, a former female student for whom Lewis provided support and mentorship; Sister Penelope, a correspondent whom Lewis frequently consulted about spiritual matters; Ruth Pitter, poet and good friend; and Stella Aldwinckle, chaplain to women students at Oxford with whom Lewis worked in the Socratic club.

 Indications of Changing Views

A central argument of Van Leeuwen’s is that Lewis moved slowly to a much more gender-egalitarian view. See, for example, the strong woman ruler character in Till We Have Faces or this passage from A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, where he seems to repudiate his earlier pronouncements on gender essentialism and hierarchy:

 “There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is arrogance in us [men] to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, [women] to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ . . . Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them.’ Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.” (p. 58)

Social Sciences and Gender Studies

Finally, drawing on her academic expertise, Van Leeuwen reminds us Lewis and those of his era were largely ignorant of the psychology of gender and that Lewis maintained such a strong prejudice against the social sciences he probably would have ignored the research findings had they been available.

In Chapter 7, Van Leeuwen departs from her discussion of Lewis and his time to review research on gender differences. I recommend this chapter to all readers, even to those who have no interest in C. S. Lewis.

Van Leeuwen notes that evangelical Christians have turned, not only to C. S. Lewis, but also to the social sciences to support their belief in essential gender differences. Through a careful analysis of the data, Van Leeuween demonstrates how Christians defending proscribed male and female roles have misread the psychological literature to prove that, in popular parlance, “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” Van Leeuwen’s analysis of the data reveals, to the contrary, that “women and men, boys and girls, are overwhelmingly more alike than different” (188).

Her view turns out to be similar to that of Lewis’s friend and colleague, Dorothy L. Sayers, who wondered why women and men were called “opposite sexes” rather than “neighboring sexes.” Perhaps the truth, Van Leeuwen suggests, is closer to another bumper sticker slogan: “Men are from Earth; Women are from Earth—get used to It!” (183).

 Some Personal Observations

I found Van Leeuwen’s book extremely well researched and readable. She is more than fair with Lewis. If anything, I expect some readers will think she defends him too vigorously. As a contrast to Van Leeuwen’s approach, I would recommend a book that is much harsher in its assessment of Lewis’s misogynistic tendencies: The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller (Little Brown, 2008).

I wish Van Leeuwen had delved more deeply into other fictional works of Lewis including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce. Laura Miller notes, for example, that in Narnia, two of the most memorable villains are women: the White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle. Both of these temptresses use their physical beauty to seduce and exercise power over men. She also observes that although Lewis includes several heroines in the Chronicles, the women who achieve this status are children, whose sexuality and physical allure have yet to emerge, or tomboys, like Aravis.

While Van Leeuwen does address Susan’s exclusion from the Narnian heaven for womanly vanity, it seems further explorations like those Miller undertakes would have been useful in filling out her description of Lewis’s views of gender roles. In fact, for me these would have been more valuable than chapters 8 and 9, which discuss Lewis’s views on divorce and childrearing respectively and which seem slimly related to the book’s thesis.

These reservations aside, however, Van Leeuwen has made a valuable contribution to both Lewis studies and women’s studies. She concludes her chapter analyzing what psychological research tells us about gender differences with these words:

“Decisions about who should do what should therefore be made on the basis of individual gifts and not on the basis of gender—any more than we would automatically allocate tasks and resources on the basis of skin color, ethnicity, or class.” (188)

 This is a conclusion, I suspect, that could be supported by Christian feminists, and, perhaps, as Van Leeuwen works hard to convince us, even by the mature C. S. Lewis.  

Gary L. Tandy is Professor of English and Associate Director of the Academic Resource Center at George Fox University. He has published essays and reviews on Lewis’s work and Christian spirituality in The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society,  The Christian Chronicle, and Christianity and Literature.  The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis’s Nonfiction Prose was published by Kent State University Press in 2009, and his article, “The Stylistic Achievement of Mere Christianity,” will appear in the Fall, 2011, issue of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal.

© 2011 by Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus. Originally published in the Fall (October – December) 2011 issue of Christian Feminism Today, Volume 35, number 3.

Home > Article Index > My Journey to Feminism

My Journey to Feminism

By Susan Hall

I am a white, educated, middle-class, heterosexual North American woman born and raised in the Midwestern region of the United States—and in that statement lies far more than meets the eye. 

It is to say that on Saturday mornings I was prone to eat a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs before heading out to care for a mélange of farm animals.  It perhaps explains why I never went to school with or even knew a person of Asian, African American or Jewish descent in my first twelve years of education.  Nor was I knowingly acquainted with any gay or lesbian people.

Growing up in the “Bible Belt” meant that what I saw on a drive through town was a plethora of churches and, if I was particularly watchful, maybe one cathedral or synagogue.  All of which is to say that I had a greater than likely chance of being raised in a Protestant, evangelical tradition, which I was. 

In the days of my youth, the pulpits of all those churches were filled solely by white men, as were the positions of elder and deacon and anything else that mattered much in the scheme of things.  For me, growing up in Midwestern evangelicalism meant that virtually everyone I knew gave voice to the same party line, so there was one—and only one—gendered “reality” theologically, and that was that men were created by God to lead, and women were by nature the midwives of life. 

With this foundational belief, it was only natural that women would be in the nursery and kitchen—never in the leadership of men.  With this spiritual “reality” so universally accepted, I was left to squelch and eventually submerge my burgeoning gifts, questions, and desires.  I was simply out of line in my pursuit of a meaningful theology, and I would have to fit my visions into the accepted order, like it or not.

Socially Constructed “Reality”

What I did not realize then was that “realities” are socially constructed.  Lifestyles, norms, values, and beliefs—including religious ones—are transmitted in social contexts.  Conservative evangelicalism was my social location, and I had no way of even seeing or knowing the parameters of my social context until I was outside of it, looking back and realizing that I had never been truly rebellious or odd. Rather, my environment had asked me to be less of a person than I could be in order to fit in an established tradition that denied human beings, particularly women, the possibility of full personhood.  

Feminist and Liberation Theologies

When I was finally exposed to feminist and liberation theologies, I recognized that my evangelical faith tradition had asked me to accommodate sexism under the guise of woman’s so-called need for protection.  It was institutionalized Christianity’s sneaky way of getting women to endorse the idea that their inherent inferiority and evil-doing made them ill-equipped to hold positions of power, while at the same time making women nearly solely responsible for raising up the next generation of leaders.  I quickly understood why feminists called their interpretive method a “hermeneutic of suspicion.”   

My introduction to feminism and feminist theology happened in a flurry of separate events in 2001 and 2002.  I recall a keen sense of curiosity well up within me in a graduate course I was taking in preparation for my counseling degree.  A favorite professor asked the class to read a small portion of Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and instead of critiquing or dismissing her thoughts, he fairly gushed about her work and stated that “feminist theologians are doing some of the finest work in theology today.”  I was stunned.  I had never before heard feminists spoken of positively, and my immediate response was a glimmer of hope that women might really have something to say to men—and that some men might even have ears to hear their words!

A New Way of Thinking

A few months later I was indulging in a favorite pastime, perusing garage sales in my neighborhood, and I picked up the book Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind.  I will never forget the afternoon that followed: curled up in my backyard in an Adirondack chair, my body wrapped in sunlight and my mind open to possibility, I devoured the book—my first feminist text.  Within the first forty pages, the thought crossed my mind, “I could read this stuff for the next forty years.”  I was hooked. 

Providence seemed determined to make sure that I didn’t fall off the hook.  Only two months after the delicious afternoon in my backyard, I met my first feminist theologian at a women’s therapy week I was facilitating on Whidbey Island in Washington.  I knew that Jennifer was working on her Ph.D. and that it had something to do with theology, but I didn’t know enough to be aware that I was communicating all sorts of traditional gender assumptions to a woman who had long since thoroughly deconstructed all of those outdated notions!  She very kindly began to question my gender ideologies, and I began to realize that I was passing along knowledge that had been received from patriarchal religious systems along the way.  I hadn’t done enough homework to find out that different ways of thinking about women and men existed, particularly in theology and psychology. 

Traveling the Inquiry Road

Simply having my assumptions questioned was enough to start me on the road of inquiry.  It gave rise to a question that I wrestled with for several years: in three decades of dedicated Bible study, church attendance and commitment to religious organizations, why had I never been exposed to the liberative theologies that I now found so intriguing?  How was it that no one had ever suggested to me that there were suspect translations and alternative interpretations to sexist Scriptures? 

Those questions eventually turned to indignation and then a sense of mission, particularly after a visit to the library of a mainline evangelical college.  One day I randomly seized fifteen texts off of the library’s shelves in order to research I Timothy 2.  I  found that all fifteen texts, mostly authored in the 1970s and ’80s, said the same thing: verses prohibiting women’s speech and teaching in the church reflected the context within which they were set (ancient Greco-Roman culture), were meant for that context, and were not to be extrapolated to current church practice. 

 Apparently this was common knowledge among academicians, but literally none of the evangelicals with whom I socialized either knew of or agreed with the idea of unfettered women’s leadership.  None taught from a truly egalitarian interpretive lens.  The gatekeepers in evangelicalism were not telling the truth, and their prohibition of its dissemination had a profound effect on my life and on my faith. 

My Sense of Mission

Within three years of my introduction to feminism and feminist theology, I was studying under the tutelage of Dr. Letty Russell in the Doctor of Ministry in International Feminist Theology program at San Francisco Theological Seminary (a program that has since been temporarily suspended following Letty’s death in 2007).  Ever since my feminist awakening, the proverbial “fire in my belly” has burned for those countless evangelical women who are faithfully practicing the spiritual tradition that has been handed down to them, unknowingly replicating a sexist, exclusivist hierarchy of privilege, which promotes life for an elite few while denying the dignity —and multiplying the hardship— of the majority of the world’s population. 

Be it in my therapy office, my writings, or in leading group retreats, it has become my mission to close the gap so that earnest women, many struggling as I once did, might practice their faith while also enjoying a sense of dignity as a human being and as a woman.  There is so much to do.  This is a portion of my offering.  Small though it may be, it carries with it a world of hope and commitment for the transformation of women like me—women who wish to know God and self and feel no divide in between.

Susan Hall, D.Min., is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Seattle, Washington and has worked in social service and counseling settings since 1991 when she co-founded a transitional housing program for women and children in central Indiana. After completing her graduate counseling degree in 2000, Susan started her private counseling practice where she now works solely with women and specializes in women’s issues. She graduated with a Doctor of Ministry in International Feminist Theology from San Francisco Theological Seminary in May of 2008 and is now giving her attention to writing, counseling, and leading therapy retreats for women across the United States. Her “baby” is a 2.5 year old Chinese Shar Pei named Simone, after her heroine, Simone de Beauvoir.

© 2009 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus.  Originally published in Christian Feminism Today Volume 32, No. 4  Winter (January–March) 2009.

Home > Book Reviews Index > Confessions of a Christian Humanist

Confessions of a Christian Humanist

by John W. de Gruchy
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006)
Paper, 218 pp., Index, n.p.

Reviewed by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Back in 1967, I subtitled my first book A Christian Humanist Approach to Knowledge.  I had recently finished my Ph.D. studies, during which I had been profoundly influenced by the great Renaissance Christian Humanists such as Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and above all John Milton.  At the time I had been teaching in fundamentalist colleges, with their distinct bent toward anti-intellectuality, and I was concerned to defend the pursuit of classical and “secular” knowledge as a vital and honorable calling for Christian students.  Now, almost 40 years later, I am working on a revision of Sensuous Spirituality to be published in the Fall of 2008, and I am planning to give it a new subtitle: A Christian Humanist Perspective on Sex, Gender, and the Deeper Life.  So when Letha Scanzoni suggested that I might review Confessions of a Christian Humanist, written by one of our most distinguished contemporaries, I welcomed the opportunity.

John Wesley de Gruchy is a leading scholar of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so he is fully conversant with the struggles of German Christians as Hitler was coming to power.  And as a professor at the University of Cape Town, de Gruchy lived through the years of apartheid and the struggles of the South African Council of Churches as well as the first democratic elections, the making of the Freedom Charter, and the rise of the Reconciliation Movement.  If ever there was a man equipped to comment on the importance of Christian Humanism for the Third Millennium, it is this man.

Here is what de Gruchy emphasizes:

The opponents of the Confessing Church in Germany were not secular humanists or communists, but Christians who had capitulated to Naziism; just as in South Africa, those charged with the heresy of apartheid were not people outside the church, but insiders  –  those who, in the name of Christ, perpetuated what was contrary to the gospel.  In other words, a true confession of Christ is not for the sake of demonstrating doctrinal purity, to show whether or not you are “sound,” but for the sake of the well-being of the world.  To surrender the truth of the gospel, to deny Christ, meant denying humanity, denying the victims of Naziism and apartheid.  To affirm the truth of the gospel, by contrast, meant affirming humanity, expressing solidarity with the victims of injustice, and affirming the good and great in culture, and thus standing with those secular humanists who stood for the same values. (Pp. 183-4)

I wish these insights could be lodged in the minds and hearts of every Christian in the world— especially the religious and political leaders.

De Gruchy was a member of the Rondebosch United Church in the 70’s and 80’s, when the congregation began to identify itself with the anti-apartheid movement.  On two different occasions the pastor, Douglas Bax, walked past groups of fully armed soldiers and police who had surrounded the church, and in their presence ripped from the front door the proclamation that the building could no longer house meetings of the liberation forces or provide a home for conscientious objectors.  I tremble inwardly at the thought of how much courage it would take to do such things!  And now, in the post-apartheid period, this same Rondebosch United Church continues to support anyone ostracized by society or other churches: street children, domestic workers, refugees from Rwanda and elsewhere, gay people, prisoners.  Furthermore, many of the more “conservative” white members have remained in fellowship, at times unsettled but always enriched: “evangelism by those formerly excluded [leads] to the humanization of those who have been privileged” (p. 171).  Out of all this concrete experience grows de Gruchy’s definition of a genuinely Christian church: “an institution in which people are enabled to be truly human, truly themselves, in Christ” (p. 170).

De Gruchy explains early on that his book is a “sharing of some perspectives on being human and Christian” drawn from his own experience and reflection “after more than 30 years of teaching on the boundaries of theology, religion, and the human and social sciences, and many more years of Christian ministry.”  When de Gruchy reached the mandatory retirement age of 65, his friends and former students urged him to tell the story that had led to his conviction that “being a Christian is about recovering our humanity” and also to elaborate on his understanding of “what it means to be a Christian Humanist” (p. 4).  The result is a strongly convincing, extremely interesting combination of autobiography, introspection, and explanation of often-misunderstood concepts.

For de Gruchy, the theology and life of Desmond Tutu is a perfect encapsulation of what Christian Humanism is all about.  De Gruchy summarizes the Christian Humanist credo in the following six concepts:

1. All of life is bound together in an amazingly complex, diverse evolutionary web. 
2. Because we Christians share a common humanity with all other human beings, we must respect differences. 
3. We should join with secularists and people of other religions in the struggle for human rights, peace with justice, and sustainable economic and ecological policies. 
4. Salvation in Christ is about making us more fully human, more creative, more peaceful. 
5. The Church is called to be a sign of the “new humanity.” 
6. Christian faith must be related to the best wisdom of human culture, whether classical or current, local or global, European or African or Asian or American (pp. 30-31).

A delicate balance must be carefully maintained between the Christian faith and the humanism:

For Christianity to be Christian it cannot by-pass St. Paul’s confession of Christ crucified as “the wisdom of God,” for it would have nothing distinctive to contribute to the humanist project.  But for it to be humanist it cannot ignore the truth wherever it is to be found, for all truth ultimately reflects the beauty and goodness of God. (P.177)

How well I remember trying to embed these ideas in my students’ minds during my early teaching at Bob Jones University, Shelton College, and Nyack Missionary College!

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of Confessions of a Christian Humanist is de Gruchy’s candidness about pacifism and “the counter-violence of the oppressed.”  De Gruchy never uses the latter phrase, but I am using it because it has been helpful to me in grasping why basically pacifist leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Nelson Mandela could turn to the use of violence in extreme circumstances, Bonhoeffer by participating in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, Mandela by leading an armed struggle for liberation.  De Gruchy himself holds pacifist beliefs, has had warmly positive relationships with Mennonite peace churches, and is now living on a Moravian farm near Cape Town that has evolved into the Valmoed Community, dedicated to human healing, reconciliation, and renewal.  Yet his admiration of Bonhoeffer and Mandela is strong, although there is a Freudian slip in his index that may reveal a continuing internal conflict: the listings concerning Nelson Mandela omit the reference on p. 148, the only spot where Mandela’s turning to “the counter-violence of the oppressed” is mentioned.  Ultimately, however, de Gruchy seems to agree with Bonhoeffer’s “ethic of free responsibility,” meaning that “in some situations [such as resistance to Hitler’s savagery] Christians would have to make decisions that were not ‘pure and undefiled,’ but necessary if they were to be responsible” (p. 149).  I remember that when I was teaching at Nyack, the senior class “will” awarded me a box of crayons in various shades of gray — a memory that assures me that during the mid-60’s I was indeed trying to convince students of something similar to Bonhoeffer’s ethic of free Christian responsibility.

De Gruchy drives home the timeliness of his insights by comparing the rhetoric of the contemporary Religious Right to that of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.  Anything that suggested a humanistic concern was described as anti-Christ and the enemy of Germany and South Africa.  “’Leberalisme, kommunisme, en humanisme’ was the war cry that prepared the ground for Naziism, Fascism, and apartheid” (p. 79).  What a warning to us today, when the rhetoric against immigrants, poor people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people has become even nastier than in the 80’s!

Because it is so readable, timely, and important, Confessions of a Christian Humanist is ideal for discussion in reading groups and adult education classes.  I am grateful to John Wesley de Gruchy for writing it and to Fortress for making it available to readers here in North America. 

Reviewer Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is renowned for her writing, speaking, teaching, and social activism. The author of 13 books, she describes herself as “a Christian Humanist since the early ‘60’s.” More information about her may be found on her website at http://virginiamollenkott.com/

© 2006 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, volume 30, number 3, Fall (October-December) 2006

Home > Book Reviews Index > Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

• Leaving Church – Review
• Mary Jo Cartledgehayes Response
• Becky Kiser Essay

• Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

  by Barbara Brown Taylor
  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006
  234 pp.

  Reviewed by Kendra Irons

  As I write, a new semester is staring me in the face, threatening to send me into apoplectic shock at any moment if I don’t start churning out syllabi and lecture notes at warp speed. So, why did I just spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing to avoid this catastrophic demise? I was in the grip of my latest Amazon.com postal bundle: Barbara Brown Taylor’s absorbing narrative, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. A courageous account, Taylor’s descriptive writing will reward most anyone with a renewed wonder of God’s creation and a transforming desire to relish life.

  Leaving Church is a memoir of finding, losing, and keeping—although with none of the preachiness that sometimes accompanies such narratives and with an ever-present consciousness of doubt and uncertainty. Taylor’s honesty on these points pervades the narrative and makes it one not to miss.

  The ambiguous title delivers Taylor’s intent: a distinction between faith and religion, a vocational crisis, not a buckling of faith. Through a series of surprises and unexpected turns, Taylor finds herself no longer serving as a parish priest. Rather, the reality of God’s call to be fully human, a call she believes we all share, is too encompassing to be contained in clerical collars and ecclesial polity. Some twenty years after her ordination in the Episcopal Church, she currently is a priest who ministers in the context of a college classroom and is not so disillusioned by the church that she can walk away, inclined to resist all ecclesial structure. She loves God and, as it turns out, loves the church, too. At least enough to hold out hope.

  A deep awareness of Divine Presence during her childhood, especially in the midst of nature, formed the foundation for Taylor’s later faith and ministry. Not raised in the church, she did not have the language of faith that church structure provides, but she apparently did have deeply-felt and deeply-moving experiences of God. These are especially acute when she explores the natural world around her. A religion major in college, she continued to feed her curiosity about God, an interest propelling her to seminary. Eventually she was ordained in the Episcopal Church, drawn, she said, not by the beliefs particularly, but by the opportunity to behold others, to spread the love of God.

  After serving a large urban church in Atlanta, Georgia, for nine years and a rural church in Clarkesville, Georgia, for five, where despite congregational growth she felt “compassion fatigue,” Taylor made the painful but necessary decision to leave church. Still, hers is not a diatribe against a particular church nor her Episcopal denomination. Rather, Taylor produces a narrative teeming with life, vibrant in its reassurance of trusting God, steadfast in its praise of creation and Creator. Lessons abound for the faithful and the faint of heart: practice Sabbath, be compassionate—very compassionate, realize that following Jesus is not easy and that none of us can do it very well, trust God with an awe of the many mysteries certainty can never deliver, and be aware of the Divine Presence infused in nature all around us.

  Despite Taylor’s beautiful description of priestly vestments, communion, worship processions and so on, she does offer a well-timed word of advice for the chasm existing between conservative and progressive Christians. Using imagery of a circle that contains a center and a periphery, she calls the church to recognize its need of both: the center for its continuity, the edge for its prophetic voice. Taylor experienced the challenge of holding these often opposing groups together when, as the priest of the Clarkesville Episcopal Church, she was required to lead her parish in discussions about homosexuality. Maintaining a sense of neutrality, she became frustrated by the limiting notions of what she heard, by the certainty of some, by the idolizing of the written Word. This experience left her wondering, “If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common?” (111)

  If there is one puzzling omission in Taylor’s memoir, it is about her popularity, how widely-known she has become for her preaching and writing. Surely this public life that is now hers has affected her faith and ministry. In fact, this is the one place in the book where it is difficult to identify with Taylor’s vocational switch. To have the luxury of a teaching appointment thrust at one, to have a safety net nicely in place, seems to put Taylor in a different category from most of us.

  Still, Barbara Brown Taylor’s wise narrative is a helpful addition to other recent faith-filled memoirs: Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, Joan Chittister’s Called to Question, and Anne Lamott’sPlan B. Each of these are engaging narratives, replete with intelligent insight and witty humor. Taylor’s unique contribution is her encouragement to bask in the liberating presence of the Spirit, trusting God to lead—even to Clarkesville, even from the center to the periphery.

   

  Kendra Weddle Irons is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Her first book, Preaching on the Plains, a study of Methodist women preachers in Kansas, was published this year by the University Press of America. She is currently working on a second manuscript that includes a biography of M. Madeline Southard as well as several edited volumes of Southard’s journals. Readers of Christian Feminism Today will remember Kendra’s earlier article, “The Alien among Us: Woman as Prophet” in the spring, 2006 issue.

  © 2007 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, volume 31, number 1, Spring (April-June) 2007

• On Leaving

  A response by Mary Jo Cartledgehayes.

  This essay is the second section of a three-part discussion, beginning with Kendra Irons’ review of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.”

  First, let me clear up a misconception created by the title of Barbara Brown Taylor’s 2006 literary memoir Leaving Church. Taylor has not left the Episcopal Church, nor has she left the ordained ministry. In 2007, she remains a priest in good standing. The difference now is that rather than practicing the ministerial office as the leader of a congregation, she does so as an educator, teaching classes in religion at Piedmont College and in Christian spirituality at Columbia Presbyterian Seminary.

  Why, then, the title of the book? And what’s the big deal about a woman’s leaving parish ministry anyhow?

  To answer the second question first, it’s a big deal when the only woman named on the Baylor University list of the best preachers in America steps down from the pulpit. It’s an even bigger deal if you were hanging around a divinity school in the mid-1990s (as I was) and heard the awe and admiration in the voices of preaching professionals when they spoke of her. Scuttlebutt had it that Taylor was offered positions in various homiletics departments but turned them all down because she felt called to what United Methodists call parish ministry. Even more remarkable to the speakers was the fact that she chose as her parish a small congregation in an even smaller church building in northeast Georgia, rather than a high-steeple church in a major city.

  It’s a big deal when that person chooses to leave parish ministry and then goes on to write an elegy, aching with sorrow, about her departure.

  I was introduced to Taylor’s sermons in 1993 in my first preaching class at Duke University’s divinity school. Ever since, I’ve admired her extraordinarily thorough exegesis, her brilliant mind and diction, her wisdom, and her elegance. Underlying these qualities are other strengths that hallow both her work and her listeners: a seemingly boundless joy in the gospel message and an astonishing power in her presentation.

  I will never forget hearing Taylor preach to a small group of academics in Duke Chapel in 1994 or thereabouts. The word Yahweh made an appearance late in the sermon. As she drew out the first syllable—Yaaaaah—the breath from her mouth became the wind of the Spirit, a cyclone twirling down the center aisle of that stone-cold edifice, and as she breathed the second syllable—Weeeeeeh—the cyclone turned on itself and tumbled back up the aisle, unseen leaves and twigs rustling in its wake.

  Because of that moment, when I was pastoring I often turned to Taylor’s sermons when I needed to be reminded that, even in ordinary time, preachers are about the work of the holy.

  Here is the great dichotomy within Leaving Church. Taylor had every reason to continue in parish ministry. She didn’t lose her faith. She didn’t suffer burnout in the usual way that is defined. She didn’t reject the Episcopal Church as an institution. She only had one problem, but it was the kind that trumps everything else: She couldn’t stop crying. She lived a life some people can’t even dream of—a happy marriage, a house in the country with chickens to feed and horses to brush, sufficient income, a meaningful job—and the only flies in her soup were her constant, no-evident-reason-for-them tears.

  Such great grief … Where did it come from? What was it about?

  Certainly, it was not the result of poor self-care. Unlike every other pastor I know, Taylor learned, most likely in her year-long residency in Clinical Pastor Education (CPE), that self-care is essential, and she acted upon the knowledge. She availed herself each month of the services of a pastoral counselor. She belonged to three clergy groups, in one of which, she says, people were actually honest. She was one of the religious leaders who reintroduced the concept of Sabbath, the nearly heretical idea that clergy need a day set apart for rest, rather than the more usual “day off” spent in sermon preparation. Perhaps sabbaticals are more often taken among Episcopalian clergy than among United Methodists, but she’s the only pastor I know who actually took recommended sabbaticals in order to read, travel, write, and be refreshed. Taylor did everything right.

  What, then, went wrong? And is wrong even the right word?

  If the sorrow that accompanied her departure weren’t evident on every page of Leaving Church, then we could pretend that it was okay, her leaving; that in the great tide of Christendom it doesn’t mean anything; that pastors come and go for reasons both outward and visible and inward and spiritual; that it doesn’t really matter.

  And yet Taylor’s book doesn’t allow for the easy surcease of “so what?” She speaks too forthrightly about feeling defeated and bitter. She—in spite of her evident commitment to self care—reveals that she thought being faithful meant “ignoring my own needs and [the needs] of my family.” She remarks upon the “toxic effect of being identified as the holiest person in the room.” Above all, she offers a truth that we’d rather not hear: that doing everything right was destroying her.

  It is difficult to describe how important Taylor’s pulpit ministry has been in my own life. I, who myself resigned from the ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church in February, 2006, found myself feeling bereft at the thought that she is no longer preaching each Sunday. If she could not remain in the pulpit, I thought, what about the rest of us? And what a confusing question, given that I had already opted out of the rest of us due to my denomination’s refutation of its historic commitment to inclusivity.

  Adding to my confusion over Taylor’s departure, I was not only bereft but deeply annoyed each of the three times I read her book. I wanted to be reading about that other Barbara Brown Taylor, the perennially joyful one in my imagination, rather than the flesh-and-blood woman she presents herself as in Leaving Church. I’m less content with this woman. I didn’t want to know about the incredible radiance on her husband’s face after he participated in a native American healing ceremony, her thrill in his changed demeanor tempered by fear that her congregation would get wind of his quintessentially non-Episcopalian worship experience. I prefer love to be easier, and free of competing trajectories, in her life, if not in my own.

  But that’s not the real issue. It’s taken me months to understand that perhaps I and others who admire her may be responsible for her decision. While Taylor takes unflinching responsibility for her departure (even when quoting a snide and unfathomable statement from a congregant about her “building an empire”), I think her leaving had to do with our salvation as much as her own.

  Since the first time I read one of Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermons, a little piece of my soul, about the size of a chipmunk, has lived on the verge of groveling at her feet. Her sermons give me access to the holiest of holies within the errata of my life. In response—and, I must add, through no fault of hers—I balance on the cusp of offering her, if not oblations, then at least devotion. Like an adolescent who thinks life inviolably improved if he or she can wrest an autograph from Britney Spears, I am closer to salvation—can smell it, can almost taste it—as long as Taylor is out there preaching somewhere.

  Perhaps my feeling of near-adoration, which I’ve seen reflected on other faces, is the source of Taylor’s tears and an underlying reason for God’s leading her away from the ministerial tasks she loved so well.

  If you are a faithful person, and Taylor assuredly is, the idea of somebody groveling at your feet must be an anathema. And she’s too savvy to have missed the evidence, the trusting, startled faces turned toward her when she preaches; the respectful tones of her colleagues; their unstinting admiration. She says that she had to leave in order to find out what it is to be human. What she doesn’t say is that she may have been alone in wanting such a thing for herself. The rest of us are like methadone addicts craving a fix, with God as our drug and Taylor as our dealer.

  When she pointed to God, we admired her graceful fingers.

  When she unleashed the wind of the Spirit, we stayed sheltered in the pews and let her take the buffeting when it returned.

  She ushered us down the path of righteousness for Jesus’ name’s sake, and we hurried to catch up because we wanted to be nearer to her rather than to God.

  Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps I’m like an Elvis fan standing outside the gates of Graceland on the anniversary of his death. Perhaps the sea of adoring faces never sent shivers down her spine.

  In any case, I find Taylor’s book to be, above all, courageous. Her essential claim, the heart of the book, is that we—all of us, including her—get to be (are called to be, God wants us to be) who we are; that we are permitted (required, empowered) to live and love authentically; and that a reputation for exceptional goodness has nothing to do with the life of faith.

  If you haven’t been in the pulpit, I’m not sure you can comprehend the joy that comes with preaching. Preaching, and the ordained status in which the authority for preaching rests in Taylor’s tradition and mine, is a complicated, enriching, stultifying, expansive, maddening, miserable, glorious way to live. There is the intrigue of research, the enchantment of writing, the pressure of presentation, and the responsibility that would be onerous if you didn’t know yourself as part of a triumvirate, with God and the congregation able to make of your words what they will.

  If you haven’t been in the pulpit, I’m not sure you can understand the grief that accompanies leaving it. It’s been nearly six years since I preached, and I still mourn the challenge and the sweaty palms that morphed into serenity when I took that first long breath on a Sunday morning and, with the first word of my sermon, gave over control of the event to God.

  That time of preaching is over for me and, perhaps, for Taylor. We, like many others in this generation of preachers, are left to limp into the future, a bit bloodied and yet daring to trust that this new path, too, is one of faithfulness.

  Mary Jo Cartledgehayes lives, writes, and loves in Kentucky, where she was recently named the newest member of the Louisville Craft Mafia.  A review essay about her book, Grace, was published in our Winter 2003 issue and on eewc.com.

  Photo credit: Newton Photography

  © 2007 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus

   

• Some Thoughts on Leaving Church

  By Becky Kiser

  This essay is the third section of a three-part discussion, beginning with Kendra Irons’ review of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.”

  Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith was, for me, a series of “ah-ha’s” and “me, too’s.” From early experiences of wonder at creation and love for God to talking my pastor into a re-baptism at 16; from entering seminary totally in love with God (“Where else would I go?” Taylor writes) to a joyful discovery of Native American spirituality; from the attainment of the dream of ordination to the midlife disillusionment with the organization of “church”; from the joy of belonging to the awareness that I no longer fit well, I felt a keen identification with Taylor as a sister journeyer of faith. I like the style of spiritual memoir writing, hearing truth and experiencing companionship in another’s story— although I can also hear faith and struggle even in a more straightforward theology.

  Others have pointed out that Taylor really didn’t leave church; she left parish ministry. In my Presbyterian denomination’s words, she found her call in “specialized ministry” through teaching, speaking, and conferences. My current presbytery, in addition to the called and installed parish ministers, has clergy members in many different specialized ministries. Some teach undergraduates, or serve as chaplains in hospitals and retirement communities, or are specialists in interim ministry. Others are social workers and counselors, or are “tent-makers” (supporting themselves through “day jobs” as the Apostle Paul did with his tent-making), or may simply go by the generic term of at large. None of these necessarily work in a parish in any capacity, although some may volunteer as do other members. Each year, however, all non-parish minister members of presbytery report on their work to the respective committee of oversight. Technically, they have not “left church.”

  Many ordained and non-ordained people have found themselves in the same place as Barbara Brown Taylor, finding the gap between their own faith journey and the proscribed faith of particular churches so wide as to be uncomfortable. They have “left church” in the sense of not having a regular place of attendance; while at the same time not really leaving church, as in faith in God and a love for the people of God. There are whole networks of folks who feel disenfranchised from “church” as it is today, who yet still hold deep devotion to God and convictions of Christian faith, who long for community, and are creating ways to find each other and be together. Probably a good many readers of Christian Feminism Today find themselves in such a position. As Taylor says, “I may have left the house, but I have not left the relationship. After twenty years of serving Mother Church at the altar, I have pitched my tent in the yard….”(222).

  The memoir traces Taylor’s relationship with God and the church from the childhood that led her to the ministry to her joys and struggles in fulfilling her calling. Although she had thrived as an Associate Pastor in an urban setting, Taylor yearned to serve in a particular rural church where her creative spirit and outstanding preaching gained her renown far beyond her small community. But she describes a gradual burning out as she loses herself in the day-to-day work of this solo ministry, responding to needs that truly never quit, and not finding a way to feed her own soul. This crisis leads her to say goodbye to a parish that initially seemed her perfect ideal, and move to teaching. And so the Spirit moves.

  Taylor is not alone in her struggle with the demands and ardors of solo pastoral ministry, in her feeling of isolation from collegial support and in her search for inner sustenance, while giving out to others day after day. Nor is she alone in her feeling that she has moved out of the main current of “church” and is somehow on the fringe. In my favorite chapter in the book, the last one, “Keeping,” Taylor summarizes what this shift or growth means. She writes, “For most of my adult life, what I have wanted most to win is nearness to God” (218). I echo that, although without the opening phrase, because that has been the desire of my heart for all the life I remember. Like Taylor, I assumed that meant I was called to ordained ministry, and then was shocked to discover that serving God’s church as a clergy was not the spiritual be-all and end-all of my search. The longing and search are not satisfied by the vocation.

  However, the lessons of the vocation can and do lead on down the road of faith, as the Spirit of God uses the” stuff” of our lives to teach and lead into a fuller humanity. As Taylor learns in her struggle, “You have everything you need to be human.” She talks of “feeling her way into faith” after her father’s death, as opposed to religious certainties, and she values the companionship of those who have undertaken the same journey. She realizes how much she owes to the traditions of the church, and says, “We would not be who we are without them, and we continue to draw real sustenance from them, but insofar as these same traditions discourage us from being with one another, we cannot go home again” (225). She ends with expressing hope that the Spirit who has led thus far will also lead us into a new way of being church together.

  Perhaps an answer is learning to separate the work of ministry from our personal journey of faith—a difficult task because they are also intertwined. Surely someone along the line must have explained this difference to me, although I obviously didn’t get it nor remember it. Perhaps not all clergy feel the same disconnect; perhaps for some of us the pilgrim/seeker/journeyer metaphor is dominant, and for others it is not. Perhaps women clergy have talked and written more about it as we now have begun to have women who have spent years in the ministry. Perhaps I just never read the right books, or wasn’t at the place where I could receive their wisdom. Whatever the reason, I had a real struggle realizing that the church wasn’t heaven and its people were still growing into the sainthood that Scripture credits us with.

  I’m ready to see that new way of being church together that Taylor hopes for. The church provoked and nurtured me through years of my own faith journey, and still does the same for others. That level of church and ministering still speak to many, and are not trite. Perhaps letting go of trying to get my own needs satisfied by the church can actually free me to go back and consciously minister like I never did as a younger woman. Perhaps it’s not so much about my own needs being met at church (I can find other ways) as it as about being there for one another in community and enjoying the ritual of worship and the dance of relationships.

  I wonder.

  Becky Kiser is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, USA. She lives in Norfolk, VA, and presently serves in an “at large” ministry.

  Photo credit: Letha Scanzoni

  © 2007 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus

Home > Book Reviews Index > The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life

The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life 

by Joan Chittister, 
with art by John August Swanson. 
Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2000, 
xii + 92 pages, hardcover.

Reviewed by by Kathryn L Pigg

I began the book, The Story of Ruth, Twelve Moments of Every Woman’s Life at a period in my life which I was calling “life review.” I was drawn to it by an interest in the biblical book of Ruth and by my own belief that art and ideas together have great power. 

This is a visually beautiful book as well as being beautiful in its message. Artists are often among the invisible in our society, and giving attention to the process by which artist John August Swanson worked is an important aspect of the character of the book and the character of its author. 

I approached this wonderfully small volume as the perfect accompaniment for the personal retreat I had in mind. I planned to pick it up, see what stage I was in and proceed in the usual linear style that life seems to suggest to us. Then in the process I discovered that although the story of Ruth has a linear plot, there is no beginning, middle, or end for the wisdom in this book. Wherever I read, I could identify personally with what was happening with Naomi and Ruth. Chittister brings the ancient text close to home and close to world systems as they are. Sometimes closer than is comfortable! 

In her foreword, the author states this clear word , “In the Book of Ruth, the Word of God takes a position on women that defies the social tradition, in this day as well as in that one.” Her biblical exegesis calls on the work of contemporary women scholars of the Bible as well as men. 

The story of Ruth clearly needs the woman’s voice to be understood in our time or it will fall back into the voice of patriarchy, still active in society and religion today. The ultimate religious questions of redemption make new connections for us today through this story. And the biblical book of Ruth, Chittister says is as much about the redemption of Boaz and the nation, about the family and the culture, about the next generation of men and the next generation of women, about the righteousness of religion and the salvation of religiosity, about us and the disjointed world we take for granted, as it is about the redemption of Ruth and Naomi. It is a book about women helping women to break the isolation of powerlessness that affects every other man, woman, and child alive. 

Early in the book, the author calls the work, “Your story and mine” setting the context as a communal one. In the text of the Bible story, which begins each of the twelve chapters, Chittister recognizes these twelve moments: Loss, Change, Transformation, Aging, Independence, Respect, Recognition, Insight, Empowerment, Self-Definition, Invisibility, and Fulfillment. 

Each of the chapters, based on one of these moments, is rich with wisdom and insight. I can envision a group of women reading the book chapter by chapter and discussing it together, sharing their stories, evoked by the text and pictures, as well as becoming sensitive to the struggles of other women in the world who experience systemic oppression and seek to make the world better for all people. 

Even as I read it privately I felt connected to the many women who have shared my life and my struggles to, in Chittister’s words, “move beyond the stereotypes and the social barriers to fullness of life and wholeness of being.” 

This is a book of distilled wisdom. For me, the moment called “Aging” was especially poignant. It is certainly part of my life review at this period in my life. Reading and responding to the words here was invigorating. Also challenging. No rose-colored glasses here as the author writes, “Yet, of all the people unheard from in our society, it is still the older woman whose voice is missing most.” 

But in Naomi, Chittister sees no dispenser of victim mentality. She says of Naomi: 

She stands at the gates of the city of Bethlehem, newly returned to the place of her birth, broadly experienced and immensely wiser than her peers. She has known death and gone on living. She has been struck down and refused to quit. She has looked square into the face of a bleak future and determined to shape it herself. She has challenged God as did the patriarchs before her and come back from an emotional grave as proof to the rest of us that God is not a noun, God is a verb. 

Thanks be to God for the character and witness of Naomi and Ruth, and for the character and witness of Joan D. Chittister and John August Swanson in this small invigorating, empowering book.

Reviewer Kathryn L. Pigg is an ordained United Methodist pastor in Suffolk, VA. Her art and poetry have appeared in previous issues of EEWC Update.

 © 2000 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus volume 24 number 2 Summer 2000

Home > Book Reviews Index > A People’s History of Christianity

A People’s History of Christianity: 
The Other Side of the Story

by Diana Butler Bass
New York: HarperOne, 2009, 353 pages.

Reviewed by Kendra Weddle Irons

Diana Butler Bass’s A People’s History of Christianity is a welcome and long overdue revision to the “orthodox” history of Christianity with its narrow focus on creeds, councils, and winners. Providing a nuanced work, including persons (often women) usually overlooked and dismissed, Bass brings to light the ways in which these previously disregarded people were important shapers of Christian history and tradition.

Here Bass draws on her training as a church historian, along with inspiration from other recent studies, as she seeks to construct a fuller and more accurate understanding of the church from the underside. This one-volume study will readily become standard fare for introductions to church history.

Bass explains the rationale for this book in her introduction by asserting, “The usual story is that of ‘Big-C’ Christianity—Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America” (p.4). Portrayed as morally righteous and right, this version—one focusing only on the winners—is also militant and often arrogant. Yet, as Bass points out, this is not the totality of the Christian story. There also have been and continue to be people who strive to follow Jesus, even—and especially—when this involves counter-cultural living.

Using the term “generative” to describe this aspect of the Christian movement, Bass argues her book “is about memory found and the ways in which Christian history tethers contemporary faith to ancient wisdom” (p.10). Taking Jesus’ great commands—to love God and neighbor—as her rubric for the book, she organizes each major time period around two overarching themes: devotion and ethics.

The Beginning
Beginning with early Christianity (100-500 CE), Bass argues the first followers of Jesus understood their task to be a way of life. In other words, this nascent movement succeeded not because of adherence to strict doctrines or a promised salvific future, but rather because this way of living transformed people while simultaneously challenging traditional Roman values.

These first Christians understood love of God as imitation of Christ and as such, some of them, like Perpetua and Felicitas, willingly died as the ultimate expression of that imitation. And yet, Bass explains, this was not a band of followers seeking to deny their bodies. Drawing on insight from Irenaeus that often goes unexplored, she explains his idea of deification and the counterpoint this offered to Gnostic groups, some who did not honor the material world.

Bass ensures that many of the usual players in this story are included and here references not only Irenaeus, but also Origen, Clement, Antony of Egypt, the Cappadocians, John Chrysostom, Constantine, Ambrose, Augustine, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr. At the same time, though, the narrative’s focus is not doctrine so much as how the ideas of each influenced their living. Thus, more attention is given to living peacefully, and scant mention is made of ecumenical councils.

The Medieval Period
Medieval Christianity (500-1450 CE) is the second part of this history. Using the cathedral—spiritual architecture—as her organizing principle, Bass invites the reader to understand this period of history as “a confluence of diversity and local custom” (p.89). As a visual representation of such meeting of two worlds, the cathedral serves to illuminate how medieval people lived in light of these two realities.

Whereas Celtic Christianity usually receives cursory attention, Bass begins her explication of medieval devotion with the story of Patrick arriving in Ireland and the corresponding ideas of pilgrimage and spiritual exile. While the Roman church may have contained and used its institutional power, the Celtic tradition simultaneously offered a repository of wisdom and spirituality.

Not surprisingly, Bass allows Julian of Norwich to figure prominently in this section and encourages the reader to explore a feminine image of God, as Julian did so long ago. Additionally, Abelard and Heloise garner attention as their relationship illustrates the place of passion, a path combining the robust quests of intellect and sensuality as a way that leads to God (although Christian tradition has often rejected the sensuality aspect).

Bass also uses her discussion of Abelard to explain the difference of atonement theories—a clear intention to debunk a common mistake made in many churches today who teach only blood sacrifice. And so she is clear to present Abelard’s model of Jesus as the ultimate example of love resulting in self-sacrifice in contrast to  Anselm’s idea that Jesus’ blood was required to satisfy God’s justice and rectify a broken situation.

Much of this medieval section, however, is centered on ethics; and Bass begins the discussion with the seventh-century advent of Islam forcing medieval Christians to ask themselves, “who is my neighbor?” In this context, Bass covers a myriad of figures ranging from Hildegard of Bingen, who includes the cosmos as neighbor; to Thomas Aquinas whose answer spurred him to consider the justness of war; to Francis of Assisi, who included attentiveness to animals; to the Beguines and Beghards, including Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Antwerp, who saw outcasts of society as neighbors; and Geert Groote whose experiment known as the devotion moderna exemplified Jesus’ call to share all things in common.

The Reformation Period
Part III covers the Reformation period (1450-1650 CE). Moving from an image of cathedral to one of word, the Reformation begins with the development of the printing press, the new technology of movable type. With centrality of word, Bass explains, “they developed a host of spiritual practices—reading, speaking, singing, teaching, and praying” (p. 162)—all aspects of proclamation. And yet in this new shift toward literacy, the seed for potential dispute was sown, indicated early on when Erasmus pointed out a biblical passage that had been mistranslated for ages (p.158).

Love for neighbor during the Reformation created a new opportunity to consider the motivation for such love. As Bass explains, during the Reformation a shift in ethics occurred from obligation to intention. Of course Bass provides appropriate attention to Martin Luther and John Calvin. But, continuing to allow previously absent people to contribute to the story, she also includes Katherine von Bora (who, after leaving monastic life, married Luther); Anne Askew and Janneken Munstdorp, who wrote their testimonies and were condemned for their beliefs; and the Anabaptists, often considered the radical wing of the Reformation.

The Modern Period
The Modern Period (1650-1945 CE), labeled “The Quest” by Bass, is Part IV. The quest is, of course, one for truth arising out of the context of optimism about knowledge, revolutionary change, and economic prosperity. During this period, theology “de-emphasized the supernatural aspects of faith, rebased faith on morality rather than doctrine, celebrated tolerance, and elevated the role of the natural world and humankind” (p. 216). As intellectual assent took center stage, light became a dominant metaphor for preachers and philosophers (p. 222).

Here Bass pays attention to the emergence of Quakers, including Margaret Fell; Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun whose life exemplified the love of learning despite the church’s intimidation; the Methodist movement, including Jerena Lee, an African American Methodist preacher; and even Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.

Bass locates the ethics of the modern period in the ideas of tolerance, demonstrated in the recognition by some that acceptance of diverse views need not be seen as heresy at odds with theological purity; equality, as demonstrated by Maria Stewart, an African American and first woman to address a group of abolitionists; freedom, clearly illuminated by Harriet Tubman; community, explicated as “Christian socialism” by Vida Scudder; progress, framed by the argument over evolution; ecumenism, heralded by the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference; and pluralism, illustrated by the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and the Chicago World’s Fair.

Contemporary Christianity
By using the image of a river, Bass astutely constructs Part V— the final segment, “Contemporary Christianity” (1945 to now) . This visual metaphor, one that is ever-changing, always moving, unpredictable, sometimes constrained by dams until it changes course, enables Bass to extend her methodology of history from the bottom up. She does so by allowing a few “ordinary” people to describe their current experiences and understandings of faith. And it is their stories, Bass argues, that constitute “the undertow of those quiet souls—some named, many unnamed—who have made the world a better place, as Jesus so instructed” (p. 309).

I imagine a common critique of Bass’s book will be that if this is the only book one reads, much of the traditional narrative about heroes, events, and theology will be absent. And this concern may be well-founded. Yet, as Bass contends, historical awareness is useful to the extent that it informs current faith expressions. In A People’s History of Christianity, by telling “the other side of the story,” Bass has provided a superb study, rich for contemporary consideration and application (as she models throughout the book). As such, I suspect despite these fears, her study succeeds—and little is, in reality, lost.

At the time that this article was first published, reviewer Kendra Weddle Irons, Ph.D., was teaching online-hybrid courses for George Fox University (GFU) in Newberg, Oregon. Despite having been tenured at GFU, she had moved to Texas, the result of changing circumstances related to her husband’s employment. She recounted that story in her article, “Tenure Downturn,” written for the Winter, 2010 issue of Christian Feminism Today. Having become a committed feminist while in graduate school, Kendra’s research interests center on Christianity in America, women in Christianity, and Methodism. Her first book, Preaching on the Plains: Methodist Women Preachers in Kansas, 1920-1956 was published in 2007. Kendra lives with her husband, Bryan, and their yellow Labrador retriever, Pippi, in Irving, Texas. She now teaches in the religion department of Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth and also serves on the EEWC-CFT Council, representing the Southwest.

© 2009 Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, volume 33, number 3, Fall (October-December) 2009