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Close Up: Women in ministry celebrate, but challenges remain
Feb. 22, 2006
A UMNS Close Up Report
By Denise Johnson Stovall*
A 50th anniversary is a time for celebration, and United Methodists around the
world are doing just that this year as they mark the jubilee of full clergy
rights for women.
Such a milestone is also a cause for reflection, and for many women leaders, the
analysis is sobering. While women — lay and clergy alike — have moved from
marginal support roles in the church to positions of leadership, they still find
themselves confronting limited opportunities and problems being accepted.
“Never in my imagination did I expect to experience, in my active ministry, the
sheer numbers of ordained women and variety of ways in which they have been able
to respond to their call through ministry in our church,” said Bishop Susan M.
Morrison of the church’s Albany (N.Y.) Area.
“However, I am deeply concerned about the opportunities for women of color to
serve. Their options have been far more limited. Also, there is still resistance
to women serving large pastorates as well as in the episcopacy.”
The United Methodist Church has at least 10,000 clergywomen, including elders,
deacons, local pastors and retirees, according to statistics.
Of those, 800 to 1,000 are ethnic minority clergywomen. Historically, the
largest number has been African American. Other ethnic groups include Korean
American, Hispanic, Native American, Japanese American, Chinese American and
Pacific Islander.
Bishop Minerva G. Carcaņo of the church’s Phoenix Area shares Morrison’s concern
about the opportunities for women of color in ministry.
“My experience as a woman of color in ministry is that unfortunately one faces
the discrimination of white racism as well as the sexism of both white persons
as well as that of people of color,” Carcaņo said.
“What I have always found curious is that so often the very persons who have
most touched our lives through their faith witness are the very same persons who
most oppose and are troubled by our call and desire to be faithful,” she said.
“There is great irony in this. Racism and sexism are so embedded in the world
that even in their present subtle and sophisticated forms they are viewed as the
normal state of life.
“Such sins — for racism and sexism are sins in that they counter God’s creative
work of making us diverse in color and culture and gender — need to be
constantly named for what they are and overcome,” she said.
The Rev. HiRho Park likens the journey of clergywomen to a race in which success
depends on each person’s contributions. Park is coordinating the Clergywomen’s
Consultation, which will bring people from around the church to Chicago in
August to celebrate the 50th anniversary.
“Making progress in women’s ministry is like running the relay,” said Park, a
staff executive at the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
“Each person should receive the baton and run with her best so that when the
next one carries it, she will run with the wind of spirit of all women who ran
before her.”
Year of jubilee
“Women have always been preachers in our churches since the beginning,” said the
Rev. Marion Jackson, pastor of First United Methodist Church, Monclair, N.J.
Even before the merger of the denominations that became the United Methodist
Church in 1968 — the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches — “all
were ordaining women,” Jackson said.
“However, 1956 was the year that women were given full clergy rights” in the
Methodist Church, she noted. That milestone was achieved by the Methodist
Church’s highest legislative assembly, the General Conference.
For that reason, 2006 is “our year of jubilee,” Jackson said.
“In fact, a resolution was made by the 2004 General Conference for all annual
conferences to observe this anniversary. All clergywomen within the United
Methodist Church should celebrate,” said. Jackson, also a former staff member of
the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
“We can celebrate that women have been appointed to the highest positions of the
church,” Jackson said. “We have district superintendents and women in episcopal
leadership as bishops. They also serve as general secretaries of four of our
general agencies. (But) unfortunately, women are still a minority among lead
pastors of large churches (1,000 or more in worship attendance). The struggles
in the future are the struggles of the past.”
Active lay ministry
Before they became a presence in the clergy, women were active in lay ministries
throughout Methodism’s history.
“Women took seriously their call to social justice ministry and stood together
in opposition to lynching, segregation, and racism within church and society,”
said Jan Love, top executive of the Women’s Division of the United Methodist
Board of Global Ministries in New York.
Love is an example of a laywoman who has served in many roles both in the church
and ecumenically. Before becoming chief executive of the Women’s Division in
2004, she taught for 22 years at the University of South Carolina. She had
served on the Board of Missions, later the Board of Global Ministries, from 1970
to 1976, as well as on the board of directors of the United Methodist Commission
on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, Church World Service and the
World Council of Churches.
As head of the Women’s Division, she is responsible for administering United
Methodist Women, a large-membership organization with chapters in churches
around the world.
“We know that God can use ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things,
and as
laywomen in mission, United Methodist Women have been accomplishing
great things for God for more than 136 years,” Love said.
“It began with women sending out missionaries to India to meet the needs of
women and children there,” she said. “It continued with laywomen recognizing
needs in their communities at home and organizing to meet those needs through
home missionary societies, orphanages, community centers, schools, hospitals and
immigrant homes.
“Today, women continue the legacy of this work. They educate themselves for
mission; they act to change injustices in their local communities, as well as
nationally and globally; and they support mission, as it has evolved and
changed, which their foremothers began.”
Fostering conversation
M. Garlinda Burton, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on the
Status and Role of Women, is a living witness to the power of being mentored by
strong Methodist women. A native of North Carolina, Burton fondly remembers the
dedicated lay service of her mother, Margaret Burton. The daughter said she “was
reared in the shadows of the United Methodist Women, who have raised the bar and
opened our eyes to a world of multinational, multiracial and multicultural lay
voices.”
“I want to push those dealing with justice issues to foster conversation among
men and women of color about gender inequality in personal and professional
relationships in the church,” Burton said.
In addition to being chief executive of the commission, based in Chicago, Burton
belongs to a Nashville, Tenn., church. She tells the story of how “the tables
were turned” when that congregation learned its pastor, a clergywoman, was
accepting another United Methodist appointment.
“Our previous pastor was a woman of many gifts,” she said. “When it was
announced that she was leaving and that our male associate would become senior
pastor, one of my 9-year-old male Sunday school students turned to me and said,
?Miss Garlinda, I didn’t know men could be preachers!’”
She has seen a lot of progress for women in the church, but challenges remain.
“We lament at what hasn’t happened in the church, but I never experienced a
woman pastor until I was an adult and working for the denomination,” she
continued. “We are raising up a new nation of people who recognize and celebrate
the gifts of women as critical to our very definition of church.
“At the same time, I still hear people say, ?I don’t want a woman pastor or
bishop or
superintendent or treasurer.’ We need to continue to say, in love, that sexist
and racist prohibitions are not acceptable.”
Resistance to women
In the local church, the people who most resist having female clergy are usually
the active members, Park wrote in a research study, “Stratification Among Clergy
in The United Methodist Church Due to Gender Difference,” for postdoctoral work
at Boston School of Theology.
She cited Patricia M.Y. Chang, author of the article, “Female Clergy in the
Contemporary Protestant Church: A Current Assessment,” in the Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, published in 1997.
“It is because they are concerned for preserving the church’s viability as an
organization,” Chang wrote. “This concern is from the perception that hiring
women clergy will cause tension, decrease of membership and conflict within the
church. This leads to the conclusion that if laity have positive experiences
with clergywomen, their perception may change.”
Park agrees with Chang but said one benefit of the denomination’s appointment
system is that it “grants congregations opportunities to accept female clergy as
their pastors regardless of their opinions.”
“This eliminates some of the initial resistance that clergywomen have to face in
the local church level in a decentralized denomination. But this does not mean
that clergywomen do not have to deal with resistance once they are accepted into
the local congregation.”
The United Methodist Clergywomen Retention Study, conducted by the Anna Howard
Shaw Center at Boston University School of Theology in 2000, resulted from
concern about the increasing absence of female clergy in local church ministry.
“According to this study, nearly one-third of United Methodist clergywomen in
full connection were not serving local churches at the time the survey was
conducted,” Park said. Some were in other extended ministries, such as serving
as hospital chaplains or campus ministers. Moreover, women “were leaving local
church ministry at a 10 percent higher rate than male clergy,” she said.
Serving in the episcopacy
Park expects ethnic clergywomen to become more accepted as leaders in the United
Methodist Church. “I think it is coming,” she said.
While the church has an increasing number of Caucasian and African-American
women serving as bishops, other cultural groups are not as well represented, if
at all. The church has had three Korean-American bishops so far — all men — and
no Native American bishops of either gender.
If the denomination is going to have a Korean-American woman as bishop, it’s
going to have to work for it, said Park, a native of Seoul, South Korea. “The
whole denomination should strategically work on it to make it happen, since the
Korean-American community is such a small number. Without working intentionally,
it will not happen.
“The Rev. Ha-Kyung Cho Kim, a Korean-American clergywoman, was an episcopal
candidate for the Northeastern Jurisdiction” in 2004, Park continued. “This was
the first time that a woman (of Korean heritage) ran for the office in the
jurisdiction’s history. After she made the withdrawal speech, she turned to the
Korean-American clergywomen who were there to support her and said, ?I did this
for you younger generations ... somebody had to open the door.’”
Added Park: “Maybe in the next quadrennium, somebody may come in through that
door.”
Bishop Violet Fisher, who leads the New York West Area, affirmed the need for
ethnic clergywomen in the episcopacy.
“I feel it is imperative that the United Methodist Church would continue to
affirm the gifts and graces embodied in ethnic clergywomen who serve our
denomination well,” said Fisher, who is African American. “This would mean we
would be more intentional about the election of these women to the episcopacy.
“As we celebrate 50 years of women in ordained ministry, let us begin the
journey towards this goal in ’08. The time is now.”
*Stovall is a freelance writer in Dallas.
News media contact: Linda Green, (615) 742-5470 or
newsdesk@umcom.org.
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