edited by Patricia Lloyd-Sidle. Louisville: Geneva Press, 2006. ISBN 0-664-50287-3. Pb., 165 pp. $19.95.
Celebrating Our Call: Ordination Stories of Presbyterian Women should be required reading for all Presbyterians. Fourteen of our denomination’s most visible and successful women in ministry share their highly personal and deeply felt experiences of God’s call to serve the church. Gifted, passionate, and articulate–these women speak with joy about their various callings to parish ministry, to mission, and to academia. They are the voices of pastors and seminary presidents, denominational leaders and theologians, educators and ecumenists who speak from their perspectives as Caucasian, Korean, African-American, and Hispanic women.
All Presbyterians should read this book because it allows the reader to appreciate the profound joy and gratitude these women feel to be able to live out their call. It commemorates the triple anniversary of ordained women in the year 2005-2006: It marks the one hundred years in which the church has permitted the ordination of women deacons, seventy-five years of women elders, and fifty years of women ministers. Gratitude spills from every page, for the ‘mothering’ of older ordained clergywomen a fortunate few could claim, for the love and encouragement of supportive spouses, for the grace and love of family that shaped them into people of integrity and faithfulness, for the occasional female seminary professor who upheld the vision when the way became difficult, for the mentoring of male ministers who saw God’s call to women as no different from their own.
All Presbyterians should read this book to see what is right with the church, to see fourteen church leaders of the highest caliber, leading with the strength and the creativity that can only come from following a vision with a passion to serve the church that has overcome deep-seated resistance.
All Presbyterians should read this book to confront, perhaps for the first time, how long and how arduous the road has been for women in ministry. Barbara A. Roche’s excellent account of the nearly three hundred twenty-five years it took for the Presbyterian Church to ordain women as ministers of Word and Sacrament is concise, spirited, and devastating in its straightforward account. As early as 1876, the Reverend Isaac M. See of Newark, N.J., brought up on charges for allowing a woman to speak in evening worship, was able to exegete Corinthians in such a way that he could declare that Paul was speaking about the women of Corinth, not of Newark! In the modernist/fundamentalist controversy of 1920, the modernists won, thereby freeing our denomination from a literalist interpretation of the Bible. That women in ministry–or in society–should still be dogged by people who want to proof-text Scripture in their zeal to fence women’s potential in leadership is a failure to understand one of the most fundamental Reformed principles of biblical interpretation. We read a text in the context of the whole of Scripture.
Deborah Block writes of a seminary president’s assessment of women in ministry as a “passing fad.” Cynthia Campbell recalls being told that maybe a PNC was ready to consider a woman as pastor for a large church. Choi, Moon Young recounts her feelings of deep guilt for pursuing her call having internalized the cultural belief that ministry was only for men. Ofelia Miriam Ortega, born in Cuba, fought the gender roles her poverty, her family, and her culture assigned to her, and found the deep healing she desperately needed in her realization of God’s unqualified acceptance of her. Jean Marie Peacock brings a wry smile to every female pastor’s face as she rehearses the phone conversations of people’s disbelief that they are speaking to the pastor. The resistance each woman has faced in her determination to hear God’s call and do it is the dark underbelly of what it means to continue to be cast in the role of pioneer, even today.
All Presbyterians should read this book because they will learn some theology that has staying power for today. If there were ever a time that Ortega’s discussion of the gifts of women’s spirituality is germane to contemporary America, it is now. Women’s spirituality encompasses the totality of creation, all human beings and the earth our home. The goal of maturity is not simply to achieve autonomy and self-differentiation; it is also to move into relationship. Letty Russell has helped many of us realize that the table around which we gather is large enough for all, even for women in ministry who have been made to feel like “outsiders within.” Susan Andrews lifts up the relational leadership style that is a hallmark of women in ministry, a way of being that grows out of an incarnational theology. God with us, God who came among us as one of us–transforming, forgiving, healing, empowering–this is the starting point for theological reflection by and about women.
As the old expression goes, if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger. Here’s to fourteen female heavy-lifters of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — Pat Robertson doesn’t stand a chance. Thanks be to God for their work and witness.
All Presbyterians should read this book–and be proud.
Carol A. Tate is pastor of Emmanuel Church in Nashville, Tenn.
