Emerging Women

By Tisha Brown

One of my favorite scripture passages is the story of Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1:9-11. I particularly love the words that come from the voice in heaven as Jesus emerges from the Jordan “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” When I read this scripture I imagine God’s voice speaking these words to me at the moment of my baptism; “You are my daughter, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Recently, these words have begun to take on new meaning for me as I realize that not only do I claim them for myself as a disciple of Jesus Christ who needs to be reminded from time to time of her beloved-ness but I claim them also as a pastor. I claim them for all of the people in the congregation I serve and most especially for every infant, child or adult I have the privilege of baptizing.

The new meaning of these words has come about through conversations I’ve been having with two teenage boys in my congregation who are considering baptism. I have become aware through these conversations that not only am I their pastor because I work at their church but I am their pastor because they accept me and see me in that role. They have granted me authority in their lives. They listen to what I say, they watch what I do, and they respect me because I’ve been there for them in their lives for the past 6 years for better and for worse.

Claiming the authority and the power that comes with the title of pastor has been a struggle for me since my ordination. I believe that all people, by virtue of their baptism, are called by God to serve and follow Jesus Christ and that no one person’s calling is necessarily more important or authoritative. I have also been intimidated by the level of responsibility that comes along with the role that a pastor plays in the lives of congregations and in the lives of the people who make up those congregations. Clergy are responsible to carry their power and authority ethically, humbly and with integrity in every aspect of their lives. I take this responsibility very seriously and it scares me.

But what I have come to realize through talking with two teenage boys in my congregation is that the power and authority of my role as pastor of this congregation isn’t mine alone. It is a gift from God and a call that I have humbly heard and accepted. In this call I am never alone for the Holy Spirit is always there reminding me of who I am and whose I am.

In addition, this community has grown to trust me and to see me as their pastor and they call this power and this authority out in me. I am their pastor not only because they pay me to fulfill that role but because we have been together through the many ups and downs of life. We have grieved the deaths of significant people in the community, walked together through divorces, job losses and the death of a teenage boy and we have struggled to forgive and move on. We have sung and prayed and worshiped, shared secrets and longings, confessed shortcomings and accepted grace, baptized babies and adults, celebrated weddings and laughed a lot. We have become intimately connected to one another in Christ. Together through the gift of trust that has developed between us, by the grace of God and with much fear and trembling we have accepted this relationship of pastor and congregation. They affirm the power and authority of the role, I willingly agree to be their pastor and God blesses and keeps us all.

I am so grateful to these two young men for teaching me these things. They couldn’t possibly know that their awkwardly mumbled responses to my questions, their non-committal head nods and the way they seem so interested in whatever is on the tops of their shoes was revealing something that I needed to see. I am a beloved child of God in whom God is well pleased and I am their Pastor. And God willing, I will stand on holy and sacred ground in the midst of the community and say to them “I baptize you in the name of God who created you, Christ who redeemed you and the Holy Spirit who sustains you. May the Holy Spirit be upon you, child of God, disciple of Christ, member of the church.

Rev. Tisha Brown is the pastor of Community of Hope, UCC in Madison, WI. Community of Hope and Advent Lutheran, ELCA form the Madison Christian Community, a unique, 40-year partnership of two congregations sharing a building and engaging in mutual ministry. Tisha is new to the world of the emerging church and is happy to say it is saving her faith. In her free time she loves to run, dance and sing. She blogs at Thoughts and Reflections

By AJ Gregory

I’m practicing the discipline of silence. Spending time in the quiet. Just me and the mysteries of the spiritual. Why is silence so hard? Easy. It’s like giving my mind free reign to wage a maniac compulsive thinking spree. This is why it’s hard for me to ‘be still and precisely why I need to meditate more.

When I’m silencing the pounding blood in my being to a soft lull, I start to panic. I feel lazy. Like I’m not saving the world or meeting a deadline or putting another load of laundry in or following up on emails. But once I get passed that, everything is okay. Silence invites me into her loving arms and begs me to stay awhile. “It’s your daily does of goodness,” she says with a wink in her eye and a tray of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. And when I listen to her and follow her voice, I know she’s right.

I laid on the floor today. Closed my eyes. Rested my head in the lap of a world without tasks, deadlines, networking events, fears, doubts, questions, tears, loneliness, and the steady tick of a clock. I was quiet for a while and as solitude took her beautiful course, the thought came to me, “Where are you going?”

Normally I would have an answer for that because my daily routine is pretty planned out so I know what I’m doing at hourly intervals…i.e. today I know in 30 minutes I have to run out to Target and buy ice cube trays and apple cider vinegar…then I have to return my library books…then go home and work on a chapter for a client …you get my drift.
A few years ago I would have told you exactly where I was going with my life. ‘Matter of fact, I recently read a journal entry in 2002 where I wrote something like “I will kill myself if I don’t become a NY Times bestselling author by the time I’m thirty.” I also remember having lunch for the first time with my now one-of-my-best-friends when she candidly blurted out, “I have a feeling you’ll be married at twenty-seven” and I almost choked that country bumpkin with my Jersey claws because I was twenty-two at the time and thought FOR SURE living in the Bible Belt would guarantee me a marriage license at MAXIMUM twenty-five.

Needless to say, life happens. Today, at the tender age of thirty-three, I can say I’m not sure where I’m going. It’s not an ambiguous answer because of my lack of enthusiasm for the future, or because I have no long-term goals, or because I’m apathetic or hopeless. It’s just because, for the first time in my life, I don’t know. And that excites me! I catch glimpses of what’s possible every now and again…a seductive taste to keep me from pigeon-holing myself and to, like Henri Nouwen, said “create a space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.”

This is where silence has brought me. To a humility about tomorrow—that it might never come and if it does, I still won’t know for sure what it will bring. To a peace (sometimes overwhelming, sometimes barely beating, but nonetheless always there) that as long as I am doing my best to keep healthy (in all ways), continue in my seeking out of faith (with revelation and without a clue), and love others as I want to be loved…whatever joys, surprises, beauty, divine intervention, and purposed events that are mine to enjoy will unravel, unfold, and open up at the right time.

Where am I going? Definitely somewhere.

AJ is a 30something single Jersey girl living in the Garden State who has published 2 books (Messy Faith, 2008 and Silent Savior, 2009) under Baker/Revell and ghostwrites for some pretty neat people (She’s co-authored ten books ranging in topics from marriage to the mob to international military). Her unconventionality has gotten her in trouble sometimes, but she’s a firm believer that God gives different pathways to people for a reason. She loves to write about faith and life and how messy and beautiful the coupling of both can be. She blogs at Roars & Rambles.

By Kim Wilkens

Rebellion permeates all aspects of human life. It originates from the subconscious will of mankind not to surrender to destructive forces. But rebelling is not the same as defining a cause that would improve the quality of human life, or formulating a constructive program of action. Marching in a parade is easier than blazing a trail through a forest or creating a new Jerusalem. Daumier’s hero looks like many rebels in our midst. He is fighting against evil rather than for a well-defined cause. Like most of us, he is a rebel without a program.4
— René Dubos

I’ve always had a rebellious nature. I don’t think it’s riotous or boisterous; it’s more driven and determined. My primary cause has been feminism. My earliest memory of this rebellion was at some extended family gathering, probably Thanksgiving or Christmas. At the end of the meal, I noticed the women go into the kitchen and the men go to the living room. That didn’t seem right to me, so I announced that I was not going to the help in the kitchen, I’d hang out with the guys instead. And as I’ve heard my mother say to me on many occasions the response I got was, “Where do you get these ideas?”

Well, she’s not completely blameless. Even though she did a majority of the domestic chores and actually claimed to enjoy cleaning — “it’s therapeutic,” she said — my mom also balanced being a stay-at-home mom with a part-time nursing career (working the late shift). She was on the cutting edge of childbirth education, bringing couples into our home for Lamaze training when other facilities were not available or more likely not ready to support this radical new approach to childbirth.

My feminist rebellion energized me to excel academically. It droveme into the male-dominated field of computer science. It pushed me up the corporate ladder. It alienated me from religion. Sue Monk Kidd in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter gives a very good description of what this alienation feels like:

A girl, forming her identity also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns, and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness,the lessness, of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.

For several years, I was humming along quite nicely in my feminist cause, but then I had a child, left corporate America, turned forty and had a huge identity crisis. I had done well in a man’s world, but now I found myself in the world of motherhood. How was I supposed to excel at something I had no training for? What was happening to my feminist agenda? I thought I was helping to pave the way for the women after me to be treated as equals, but instead I was just playing by the rules of corporate America and they no longer seemed adequate for my life. I felt like a rebel without a clue. I needed to redefine the rules for living my life.

First, I tried finding balance. I searched for the magical formula that would give me just the right balance between family-life, career-life, community-life, volunteer-life and church-life. It felt like a juggling act and when I would get too much of one and not enough of the others, I started feeling out of control and unbalanced. I would lose track of some of the balls. I would have to regroup and try to figure out the formula again. Usually the new formula worked for a time, it was fresh and it was fun and exhilarating! But I would end up in a cycle of trying to arrange the balls just so, putting them up in the air, and juggling them for a while until I started to lose some of them. This strategy for living wasn’t working either.

Then I heard an interview on NPR with a soldier in Iraq. He said he had to compartmentalize his soldier-life and his home-life. He gave an example of a cell phone conversation with his wife: She’s talking about her “bad” day with the kids and he’s thinking about his “bad” day cleaning up dead bodies. Compartmentalization was necessary for him to focus on the task at hand or he might get shot. But the cost is high as it wreaks havoc on relationships because the whole person is never completely present.

It struck me that this is what I’ve been doing. I hadn’t been thinking of it as compartmentalization, but as I was performing my juggling act, I was really assigning out pieces of myself to get the tasks done. When I was working on one task, another part of me was usually occupied with lists that need to be completed for other tasks. I was rarely wholly involved with the task or relationship or situation at hand.

My new cause is wholeness. “There is nothing more important than being fully where we are, in the plain ordinary events, day in and day out. I think women understand that we create change as we live out the experiences of our souls in the common acts of life.” Where I used to be like Martha, worried and distracted, I am trying to be more like Mary, taking time to learn about Jesus (Luke 10:38-42).

I find my new cause still has room for the frustration I feel toward gender issues found in many religious institutions. Instead of fighting against the male/female stereotypes that have kept me from moving forward in my faith, I feel that God wants me to walk humbly through these human failures and acknowledge them. I believe that God can reorient the whole world from one of inequality to one of equality and I believe God wants you and me to help.

Kim is a daughter, sister, wife, mom, aunt, friend, geek, activist, volunteer, mentor, student, teacher, postmodern, seeker, writer, child of God. She and her dad have recently co-authored the book, Un-American Activities: Countercultural Themes in Christianity. This awakening is from Kim’s response to her dad’s chapter on “The Mothering Vocation of God.”

The Building Fund
By Marnie Bullock Dresser

My brother said monkeys lived in the sanctuary beams
And if I would just sit still that one would drop
On my head and hug me tight and sit on my lap.
I prayed and waited, hands cupping “please.”
We grown-ups say church walls hold memories.
Acoustic tiles keep every hymn ever raised.
If we could somehow tap the glass, the stains
Would pour forth scenes of Easter hats and solvency.
But O! This old wineskin has a problem with mold,
And once the roof is fixed, the furnace needs
To be replaced. The whole foundation’s mortgaged.
The best fund raising in the world can’t bring
The monkeys back. The dust from angels’ wings
Drifts down in the pale quiet and drifts like snow.

Marnie Bullock Dresser lives in Spring Green, Wisconsin with her husband and son and is involved in starting a home church after years and years and years of church in buildings.

By Mihee Kim-Kort

Moments of irony hit me hard…I think it’s because I subconsciously hold up my worldview like a blanket wrapped around me, these expectations and preconceived notions woven together tightly in my brain, so when something outside of my usual assumptions happens to me, it knocks me out cold and stays with me for awhile.

I grew up in a traditional Presbyterian home…culturally Korean on the inside, culturally attempting-to-be-American [whatever that means] on the outside. But, no doubt there was an undeniable hierarchy in the house, as well as at our church home. My father was the bread-winner, and my mother the homemaker, while at the church, only men were the elders, the leaders of the church, and certainly the pastor and any visiting preacher during the yearly weekend revivals. The women were always deacons, literally servants of compassion and hospitality for the church, which essentially meant they rotated bringing food, washing dishes, and cleaning the kitchen every Sunday after the fellowship lunch, and heading up the church bazaar fundraisers. This was my world, and I never gave it any thought until my dad attended seminary while I was beginning my undergraduate studies.

At the same time, as I reflect back, I remember it wasn’t so black-and-white, and there were little moments of contradiction that I brushed off, but kept on the back burner. My mother, solely responsible for taking care of the home, also managed a few stores, that is, businesses that they attempted to start up in various parts of the city during various parts of my childhood. Over and over again they would tell me their dreams for me were to enter into some kind of successful, public profession [medicine, law, education], but very little mention of marriage, family, and a home life. I went to a church service once where a woman preached that Sunday morning, and I was simultaneously repelled and enthralled by it. Perhaps these moments caused the little rips and tears that would make the entire cover almost completely unravel at the seams that one fateful day.

When I started my undergraduate studies, I had planned on going pre-med [I know, so stereotypical of Asian Americans, though actually a number of my Asian American friends are in medicine]. But I fell in love with the humanities courses I was taking particularly in the religion, English, history and philosophy departments. I was also involved in various ministries to high school and college students, and felt a tug towards church and ministry. But I would never have considered it in a million years until that one conversation with my father in the middle of my freshmen year. He was attending Princeton Seminary at the time and enjoying the classes and community with numerous women who were studying to also become…pastors. “Pastors??? But the Bible says that women are supposed to submit to men…and church leaders are just supposed to be only men; I can’t imagine a woman being able to do it!!!” I argued with him over the phone and we went back and forth.

And there’s the irony.

My father, the symbol of Asian patriarchy, was trying to persuade me, a woman, but a young girl at the time, that women could and should do much more in the church. My father argued for an egalitarian view on the role of men and women in the church, especially in the Korean church. He told me stories of how women had been leaders of the church for a long time, and many were elders in the Presbyterian church, and also becoming pastors all around him…and he admired and respected them, in fact, supported them. He reminded me that the first people to preach the gospel after Jesus’ resurrection were women! He was taking a class on feminist/womanist theologies…the same class that would impact me deeply some years later during my own seminary coursework.

“And, you can be a leader, too, an elder, a pastor, anything you believe God is calling you to be in your own life…” he said to me.

I know it seems a little cliche, a little after-school special, like too “you can be anything you want to be.” But for me, these words were truly radical. They turned everything upside down, in a frightening, but truly redemptive way…one of the first few tastes of grace for me. I can’t help but remember the words to a Christian song, though honestly I rarely listen to this genre of music: Redemption comes in strange place, small spaces calling out the best of who we are…I look back and see that was certainly the case here. And while I was left with bits and pieces of yarn, string, remnants of that shroud I had hung onto for so long, I realized that these pieces were an invitation to create and make something new because I was given the ability, power, and freedom to do and be something more… This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful…This is grace, an invitation…So here I am on the other side thankful for that one moment, and all the small inspirations in this journey that have helped me become more of me, a more faithful me, encouraging me to respond to God’s call courageously, and most of all, to share it…And I want to add to the beauty…to tell a better story…

[Lyrics from Sara Groves Add to the Beauty]

Mihee is an associate pastor at a Presbyterian church for youth and children in Pennsylvania. This post originally appeared at Mihee’s blog First Day Walking

By Renee Hixson

It was a rainy day. I needed to wash clothes, clean the house and prepare a lesson for Sunday school. But I just wanted to crawl in bed, pull the covers over my head and fall asleep. At least it would give me a little break from the crazy mess my life had become. No matter how hard I tried I could not keep the house clean enough for all the people that dropped by throughout the day, train my kids well enough to impress the congregation of the church where my husband worked, or network cleverly enough to fulfill my role as a pastor’s wife. I was a failure. That was all I would ever be.

“Mom, we got books overdue,” one of my kids tugged at my arm as I shoved a large plastic dump truck out of the way and picked a few dirty cereal bowls off the table, “Can we go to the library?”

“Why not,” I muttered and grabbed my coat. After leaving instructions to my oldest child to take care of his little brother we left the apartment and headed to the library.

“Somebody’s hurt,” my son gasped when the wail of a siren came from somewhere behind us. My son pressed his chest against his seatbelt to get a better look at the ambulance that raced by seconds later.

“They’ll be O.K., right?” He asked when the rescue vehicle disappeared into traffic. All he wanted to know was a medical prognosis for an unknown individual suffering from an unknown trauma for an unknown reason. My job was to provide the answer “yes” because I was Mom and somehow it was in my job description to make “everything beautiful”. Another failure. But, I had to try.

“If God cares for sparrows…” I sputtered in my best this-is-from-the-Holy-Bible-but-I-will-dumb-it-down-for-you voice, “You know…those…um…scrawny little birds that poop all over the sidewalk…he must really love every little boy and girl…”

In the middle of this pitiful theological dissertation my son pointed to a cluster of weathered apartment units complete with sagging swing sets and scattered toys.

“Look,” he squealed, “that sign says, ‘Pets Welcome’.”

I glanced at the two words carved on a wooden sign in front of the complex and braced for a passionate plea for a family pet. At least it would an easier conversation to maneuver than an inquiry into the medical state of an unknown person in speeding vehicle.

I was wrong.

“I am so glad,” my son said as the sign receded in the distance, “there is a place for pets that have no home.”

“Not…exactly,” I stalled as I scrambled for an answer that would not totally destroy his joy over the kindness of strangers in weathered apartment units, “It’s for pet owners who want to move in.”

Too late. My imagination was captivated. Tired, lonely pets lining up in front of the co-op for comfort and sustenance. Little puppies that’d been abandoned, cats on their own, maybe even a gerbil or two could wander by and find a welcoming shelter from the cold, cruel world.

“Wouldn’t mind checking one out for myself,” I thought as I pondered the mangy, flea bitten core of my being. I felt like a stray dog in the world of the spirit, even though I had an owner. God was my father. Where was He now?

I know. I know. The Sunday school teachers of my childhood adopted “God is everywhere,” as their battle cry while they fought for space in children’s minds to store eternal truth. I had witnessed enough flannel graph lessons to know that God was too big to huddle in the confines of a temple made of stone, wood or any other material. He swelled the ocean waves, echoed through the mountains and gently rustled through the meadows in the early morning sun.

My struggle was not with His omnipresence but with my unworthiness to be in His world. I was a shy kid growing up, practically invisible. As an adult, my peers looked right through me in search of friendship with people of consequence, movers and shakers in confusing world of spiritual greatness.

After dumping our overdue books off at the Public Library I drove back home. The chaos of a tiny apartment filled with three other kids had not disappeared but a brought something back with me, something tiny and precious. It was a glimmer of truth no bigger than a thought but I held on to it. I still hold onto it today. God delights in his children not because they are skinny, or clever or careful to follow all the rules. He loves the broken, the bruised and the strays. His love is untamed and unending. It takes my breath away.

Renee Hixson is a mom, wife, and former pastor’s kid. She’s currently on a journey making her way back to the truth and often finds direction in the innocence of her own children.

By Cindy Wallace

A few weeks ago I gathered on the beach with other women to take a moment at the summer solstice and praise God for the spring and the summer, for creation, for the rhythm of our lives as women, to praise God for the beauty and beg mercy for the pain.

The image I couldn’t get out of my head was of a young migrant worker holding a baby, trying to get the child to nurse. But the baby won’t eat. The baby is sick after spending months in the womb while its mother worked in fields sprayed with devastating pesticides and lived in shacks at the edges of these fields. (Cherrie Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints is a powerful statement about this reality, as does Ana Castillo’s novel So Far From God.) I couldn’t stop thinking of this young woman, and many more like her, and the spotless produce I buy for the price of their infants’ wellbeing and even lives. I thought of the aching loveliness of life, and the aching agony of it, and babies’ cancer-wracked bodies that someone in an office somewhere refers to by phrases like “spatial racism” or the “geography of racism.”

I thought about the sticky jeweled purple of the plum pie I had baked the day before, its tart-sweet nutmegginess and flaky crust. I had stood making pie dough in my 90-degree kitchen, grating frozen butter to mix in with the flour. I relished the melt of the yellow butter, the feel of the words “sweet cream” in my mouth. I used the back of my hand to brush hair off my forehead in a move I’m sure millions of women have done throughout time, leaving that iconic slight trace of flour on my face. I thought of the plum pie cooling on the table, and then cut and tumbled into white porcelain bowls, and its tang next to the smoky smooth of a dark cup of coffee. I thought of how simply thankful I was for this pie, the process of making it, the slow joy of eating it bite by bite.

And at the same time I thought of the laborers who pick the plums, and their babies, and their wages, and their sunburned skins. I thought of floods and droughts, famines, food surpluses left to rot because of that idol-god “the market.” I tried to pray aloud, and I choked on my own words, and I felt the anger of helplessness, an anger I have been feeling a lot recently as I read books recounting histories of injustice and raise my eyes to look at the world around me.

When will we have the beauty without the pain? Especially, when will we have the beauty without someone else’s pain?

And I thought of the cross.

The beauty will always be based on Someone Else’s pain.

But not the pain of the migrant worker, or the sweatshop laborer, or the sex slave: because one day, the Messiah will make it right. Jesus Christ will redeem what he has promised to redeem. He will make us whole, and the whole earth that groans because of what we have done to it, and the whole population weeping because of what we have done to them — we all together will be made whole.

What are we doing now in the name of that promise? How are we, as the continuing presence of God on this earth, Christ’s body, pursuing wholeness for our sisters and our brothers? Tonight, I stood in the wholeness of a circle of women praising God for the beauty and begging mercy for the pain.

I don’t understand this economy of justice and grace. But here are a few words from Psalm 10: may they convict us even as they give us hope.

Psalm 10.1-2, 10-18 (NIV)

Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.
His victims are crushed, they collapse;
they fall under his strength.
He says to himself, “God has forgotten;
he covers his face and never sees.”
Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
“He won’t call me to account”?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness
that would not be found out.
The LORD is King for ever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

Cindy Wallace is a graduate student, a recovering fundamentalist, and a church-planting plotter with her red-goateed seminarian husband. She blogs at http://lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com/.