So, a year ago I wrote a blog about women in ministry that became my most widely read blog. I wrote it during my church's General Assembly, a [usually] multi-day meeting of the clergy of my church [movement] [denomination] that is for the purpose of conducting the church's business. It was a moment of stark realization that while the Church of God [Anderson, IN] has a grand history of women in ministry, the current landscape is less than ideal. In that blog I set out a few steps upon which I felt that the church needed to focus, among them rethinking the way we looked at pastors' spouses, changing the way we speak about ministers, and lifting up Christian Women Connection. Well, this year's GA just finished and I thought it might be interesting to walk again upon this topic and see what a year has brought us.
To begin with as I looked around the auditorium I was still rather disheartened with the lack of a strong female presence. We are still a group made up too largely of men, too many old men and too many white men at that [though that may be a different blog post altogether].
This is not to say that there weren't bright spots, such as that for the first time in our history GA was being chaired by a women, Dr. Rebecca New-Edson. Throughout the day people applauded the fact that she was in the position, but after awhile it seemed like she was becoming the token woman in a sea of male leadership. I by no means want to take anything away from Dr. New-Edson, but I long for a day when it is not a surprise that a woman might be in charge of a large group within our church.
The second thing that was made abundantly clear toward the end of the proceedings was that a certain number of people are still stuck in a 1950's mentality of what a woman should be doing. A resolution was brought to the GA in an attempt to define marriage [i.e. make sure we good upright Christians are never forced to marry gay people], and attached to its purpose was a ridiculous amount of language about the gender of God and what that meant as far as the world at large. This is by no means the first time that I have said or written it but, GOD NEITHER PEES STANDING UP NOR SITTING DOWN. God is not really male or female, because those descriptions are inadequate, and more to the point the Bible points out that male and female were created in God's image. We may talk about God as father, but that is by no means the only way to illustrate how God interacts with humanity, nor is it any more true than any other way that we look at God.
The group of people felt the need to harp on God's maleness to the point where they not only define marriage as being between a male and a woman but also defined marriage in a traditionally conservative view, in other words the man is the master and the woman is the servant [which may be a slight exaggeration, but unfortunately less slight than I would like]. Luckily more progressive heads prevailed and the resolution was sent back to committee [where it will hopefully at minimum dispense of its male female hierarchical language] until next year [when we can again debate whether or not it is a loving thing to decide in the first place].
So what?
Maybe we are making some progress, but we still have a long way to go, and some people have a longer way to go. We still need to redefine what it means to be married to a pastor. We still need to evaluate the language we use and make it more gender inclusive, especially when speaking about clergy. We still need to uplift the CWC and its many varied ministries. We also need to safe guard our church from those contingents that would take us backward instead of forward.
Until next years Isn't It Time blog.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
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