COLUMBUS — It’s been 50 years since Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstadt showed up for Margaret Towner’s ordination service in Syracuse, N.Y.
Her mother borrowed a pastor’s robe and some women hemmed it up so she wouldn’t trip over it.
Earlier, some of the male pastors from Cayuga-Syracuse presbytery, believing that it was time for the Presbyterian church to finally ordain a woman, had taken some of their skeptical colleagues out to play golf. They let the skeptics win. Then they started talking about the possibility of ordaining Towner.
She was ordained on October 24, 1956 — to her amazement, the first woman to become a minister in the Presbyterian church.
But she was never given the opportunity to preach in the congregation where she served, First Church in Allentown, Pa.
And part of her charge during that ordination service was this: to be a shepherd of a flock and not their pet lamb.
The Covenant Network of Presbyterians, meeting Nov. 9-11 at Broad Street Church in Columbus, are celebrating anniversaries of women’s ordination: 50 years for ministers, 76 years for elders, 100 for deacons.
But laced through the celebration is the realization that ordaining women didn’t exactly end the struggle for equality in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
“Yes, we’ve come a long way,” said Deborah Mullen, dean of master’s programs and director of the Center for African American Ministries and Black Church Studies at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. “We have a long way to go.”
Women still have difficulty being called as senior pastors or pastors of big churches, Mullen said. It took decades for many congregations to be willing to ordain women as elders.
Towner, now 81 and retired, took what she called “a slow gentle approach,” starting off in education ministry so male pastors wouldn’t feel threatened, gradually turning to preaching.
“Opposition still comes from women,” Towner said, describing a letter she received not long ago from the daughter of a woman who had taught in the church school in a congregation where Towner worked. After the woman died, Towner sent a note of condolence and contributed to a memorial gift.
The daughter wrote back, to thank her and to apologize for how poorly her mother had treated Towner, saying “how jealous she was of you as a woman pastor.”
The daughter wrote that her mother later changed her mind — and when the daughter decided to become a United Church of Christ minister, her mother supported that decision.
The questions raised by women’s ordination — who has the power and who does not — also are being asked by people of color, by gays and lesbians.
“Someone has to be the `them’ “ demonized as inferior, J. Herbert Nelson II, pastor of Liberation Community Church in Memphis preached during one worship service. He spoke directly of the control white men are accustomed to exercising and said: “It has always been that way.”
Deborah Block, a pastor from Milwaukee and co-moderator of the Covenant Network, describes herself as Towner’s “spiritual daughter” — and she emphasized the role that early women ordained in the Presbyterian church have played in nurturing those who have come after them.
They have taught the church about passion, patience, and perseverance, Block said. And Towner said she’s pleased to see that so many women are attending seminary, finding their voices, winning many of the preaching prizes along the way.
Dale Lindsay Morgan, pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Santa Barbara, told stories from the Bible of women who essentially served in ordained leadership — women like the Samaritan woman at the well, who told her whole village that Jesus was the Messiah.
She has met women elders and deacons of incredible faithfulness, such as Dorothy, a deacon from her church, whose home burned to the ground in a wildfire and whose first words to her pastor afterwards were: “Oh Dale, the communion bread was in the freezer!”
In ordinary ways, “sometimes communion bread is lasagna, taken to the home of someone who’s sick,” a prayer by a hospital bed, cookies served at the reception following a funeral, Morgan said.
And she told stories from the trenches based on her own experience.
Morgan has been called the pastor’s wife; thanked for her “little message” after delivering the sermon; told not to worry, that before long a man would marry her and she wouldn’t have to work as a minister any more, and told, by a man from her congregation: “You’re doing all right. We just had no idea what to expect, I mean what with your being a blonde and all.”
But she finds reason to hope, when a father tells of his daughters’ taking turns being “Pastor Dale,” dunking each other in pretend baptisms in the swimming pool.
And a mother from her congregation recounted her sons’ astonishment when they attended church on vacation and found a man in the pulpit.
The boys asked, amazed, “You mean men can be ministers too?”
