Metro Pulse/Cover/Women in the clergy

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Women in the clergy are becoming accepted, even prevalent, in some faiths

by Mike Gibson

In Gnostic texts that date to the first chaotic centuries after the death of Christ, the Christian God is often depicted as both Mother and Father—as a Being whose benevolent aspect is so expansive as to encompass those traits that we have always (rightly or wrongly) associated with femininity, with womanhood.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons those texts were excised, through those early centuries of patriarchy and politics, from the church's body of sanctioned doctrinal literature. It's no secret, after all, that half of the world's population has consistently been denied access to positions of authority in the world's three major monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

It's divine irony, then, that 2,000 years after the birth of Christ churches find themselves once again wrestling with some of the same issues that roiled among the disparate sects of early Christianity, and that women are finally beginning to find their voice in religions that had no spiritual cause to limit their participation in the first place.

In the latter half of the 20th century, most of the major Protestant denominations began ordaining women; likewise, three of four major movements of the Jewish faith began ordaining women as rabbis. In those denominations where women are still barred from ordination, there's enough debate to suggest that change may be imminent.

Garrisoned in the heart of the Bible Belt, Knoxville doesn't fit any reasonable definition of a liberal city, and that's reflected in its clerical population. In an era when fully half the students in some seminaries are women, female clergy hereabouts are still comparatively few.

But among those women who do hold positions of authority in local houses of worship, the city seems to earn pretty high marks. Though not ordained, Thea Peterson is a ministry coordinator at St. John's Lutheran Church and the executive director for Knoxville Inner City Churches United for People (KICCUP). Her sentiments echo those of her female peers.

"There's been a great acceptance of me and my position in Knoxville; there's hasn't been one incident I can conceive of where I had trouble because of my gender," she says. "Remember that here in the South, it hasn't been that long that we've had female pastors. It's something that some people are still getting used to."

Metro Pulse spoke to a handful of local female clerics, learning their stories, seeking their insights and discussing some of the issues that confront women in the faith community today. These women are not the only members of Knoxville's clerical sisterhood, but they are fairly representative of it. And while their experiences are diverse, they're remarkably similar, linked as they are by the precept that God's call invests in the hearts of men and women alike.

Amy Figg's path to the ministry was tortuous one, fraught with struggles both corporeal and spiritual. Now an associate pastor at St. John's Lutheran, Figg was born Southern Baptist in Lexington, Ky. and entered the Lutheran church as a clinical chaplain years after completing her education at the Baptists' prestigious seminary in Louisville.

Her duties at St. John's include ministering to youth and families, and she's out of town on a week-long youth mission when she speaks to a Metro Pulse reporter, shepherding some 24 teenagers from two churches through a whirlwind of ministerial projects in Wilmington, N.C. "We are at the beach," she says, her smooth, chipper voice marred for only a moment by a ragged hint of fatigue, "but we're working way too hard to call it a vacation."

Figg says she heard the call early. Upon earning her undergraduate pre-law degree at the University of Kentucky, she enrolled in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The late '80s/early '90s were harsh times for prospective female clergy in the Southern Baptist Church, however, and the experience left her with a host of shattered illusions. Only her faith remained unshaken.

"There was a churchwide political struggle at the time, the moderates versus the conservatives," Figg relates. "It spilled over in a harmful, ugly way into the seminary. The board of trustees, in particular, grew very, very conservative." The battle between moderates and conservatives played itself out on many fronts. At one point, the board of trustees of the Nashville-based Baptist Sunday School Board even refused to publish a history of the organization because of a perception that the author, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, had made fundamentalists look bad.

Figg speaks fondly of many of her former professors, and of one in particular who she says "celebrated the gift of preaching in me, and taught me to think for myself. For that reason, the board attacked and condemned him."

Active as a student leader, Figg felt not only frustrated, but thwarted outright by Southern's stifling social climate. "I woke up one day and realized that what I thought was a dialogue was really a monologue, and that I had no voice in it."

By the end of her seminary training, Figg was convinced she would never serve as an ordained member of the clergy, so affected was she by the enormously "wounding—and healing" nature of her time at the seminary. Weary of the contention her gender fostered, she entered clinical ministry, completing three years of chaplain training at hospitals in Louisville, Winston-Salem, N.C., and finally Knoxville's East Tennessee Baptist Hospital. Her program of clinical pastoral education required one year of parish experience, so she accepted a part-time position as a youth minister at St. John's, a move she now calls, "one of the most important spiritual steps in my life.

"I went in ready to do battle over the question of my gender," she remembers. "I had been in the fight before, and I knew what to say. Two months later, I was walking through the church after worship and I suddenly exhaled. Right then, I knew I'd come to a place where I was celebrated as a daughter of God. I didn't have to fight anymore."

The Lutheran Church has been ordaining women for decades. With the encouragement of St. John's pastor Steve Misenheimer, Figg completed ordination requirements and accepted the associate pastorship in early 2001. She says the Lutheran Church and its programs are singularly inclusive, dividing with some care teaching, leadership and outreach responsibilities among both men and women.

Though Figg was a vocal advocate for women's concerns while in the seminary, she says her convictions are best reflected now in her life and in her work.

"Being an ordained woman in the buckle of the Bible belt means there will be some conversations with political content," Figg avers. "But first and foremost, I'm called to proclaim God's word. I'm not a militant feminist, but I am very serious about being a model for leadership with integrity. I can make a stronger statement by how I live my life than by anything I do from the pulpit or shout from a street corner to promote an agenda."

The principle of inclusion was an integral part of St. John's Episcopal associate rector Paige Buchholz's decision to enter the seminary. Over a plate of fruit and falafel at downtown Knoxville's Crescent Moon, a favorite lunchtime haunt, she elaborates on the social context of her call to the pulpit.

"I'm trying to put this succinctly," she says, adding for emphasis one of the boxy gesticulations that sometimes accompany her measured speech. "I felt a particular sense of call to let people know that God was an inclusive God, and that everyone was welcome in the church.

"When I was first in church, as a young person, I was fairly strident about things like inclusive language, about wanting to have women and minorities included. When I was in church and I looked up and every person I saw in leadership was male, I was upset."

Buchholz's path to the ministry was a circuitous one. In the 20 years that separated her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro from her seminary training in Alexandria, Va., she worked variously as an elementary school teacher, a peace corps volunteer in West Africa, a massage therapist, a church secretary, and a lobbyist for the Common Cause organization in Washington, D.C. Her calling was more an evolution than an epiphany.

"It was a life-long process, not an 'A-ha!' moment," she says. "I'd been around the church for years and seen what happens every day, not just Sunday. And I'd worked for women's ordination. But I hadn't thought that it was an option for me. That came as a very gradual sense."

After graduating from Virginia's Episcopal Seminary in 1988, Buchholz moved to Knoxville for an "internship" with the Volunteer Ministry Center's homeless outreach. Afterward, she lived one year in the Holy Savior Priory monastery in South Carolina, near her parents' home, before moving back to Knoxville for a spot in the chaplain program at the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

In 1991, Buchholz became priest-in-charge at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, a predominantly black congregation in East Knoxville, where she would spend the next nine years. Now at St. Elizabeth's, a 500-member Episcopal church in Farragut, she oversees a number of church functions including outreach programs and youth ministries, as well as assuming the rotating responsibility of leading Sunday worship.

Buchholz has evidently earned the respect of her peers, through her work and through her staunch adherence to principle. A friend stops at the Crescent Moon table and remarks in passing that, "everyone would be saved if we had more like her in the church."

And Buchholz indeed seems a good fit for her community. "I feel enormously respected and supported in the church right now, as a woman and as a priest," she says. "But that is a change, and it's still not true in all denominations. When I was first looking for jobs, especially in rural areas, the byline was 'We're not ready for a woman,' like it was some big radical thing they were going to do."

The Episcopal Church as a whole has been ordaining women for about 30 years, and Buchholz recognizes that whatever reticence still exists among some of its congregations is in many ways representative of that evolution. She says that rather than blatant hostility, the prejudices against women's participation are more often manifested in unspoken ways, through avoidance and silent predisposition. Neither of which sit well with Paige Buchholz's principled and strong-minded approach to matters of spiritual import.

"It was pointed out to me by a friend that all we need to do as women clergy is be there, and that speaks for itself," she says. "But I have to disagree strongly whenever I see society or religion sticking women in a secondary role. I don't think God sees it that way, and I think it's arrogant to think women are somehow less holy, less qualified or less spiritual."

Wendy Neff smiles when she remembers the elderly Southern gentleman seated patiently on the front pew of the church in Jackson, Ala., a church for which she was a guest speaker, and of which he was a long-standing member. It was a small congregation, and unbeknownst to Neff, its membership had never before seen a woman looking back at them from the pulpit.

"I was getting notes together, and he was there early for the service," she recalls. There's no small irony in the fact that she relates the story today from behind a desk, in her own office in the lower eastern quadrant of State Street's First Presbyterian Church.

"Then he looks up and says, 'So, you're our preacher today....Well, I'm not so sure you should be up there.' I said, 'Well, we'll leave that up to the Holy Spirit.' Afterwards, he came up in the greeting line and said, 'Well, I guess maybe you can come back.'"

Neff, now an associate pastor at First Presbyterian, admits that her status as a woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA has drawn little in the way of ill favor. She sometimes has trouble getting parking exemptions while visiting area hospitals, she says, though she admits the extra scrutiny may have more to do with her age (red-headed and freckled, Neff is a young-looking 30) than her sex. "People sometimes get a shocked look on their faces when they learn I'm an ordained minister," she says. "But overall, I've enjoyed Knoxville."

A native of Mobile, Ala., Neff graduated from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., and spent 1999 on an extended mission in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She moved to Knoxville and her position at First Presbyterian in March 2001. The church's pastor in charge of youth and community ministry, she's also its representative on the KICCUP board.

"Wendy is well-grounded in her faith, just a neat person all around," enthuses Thea Peterson. "She's a dynamic, energetic, gifted pastor. She preached at [KICCUP's] Easter sunrise services this year. Anyone who can be perky at 7 a.m. is doing well in my book."

Says Neff, "If my sermons resonate, it's because they tend to be justice-oriented. Issues of equality and love and justice are at the core of the Gospel, and that tends to reverberate in my speaking."

It's unsurprising that Neff would be a talented orator; she takes a pointed interest in the subtleties of language. One of her ongoing concerns is the use of inclusive language in worship, doctrine and church literature, an issue that the larger body of the PCUSA has also struggled with in recent years. (A church hymnal published in 1989 changed masculine references such as "Good Christian Men" to be more gender-neutral, i.e. "Good Christian Friends.")

"How we talk about God and about humanity—using 'male' language in referring to humans; these things are limiting," Neff says. "We want to recognize God as fully as possible. I find it can be liberating to have new images of who God is.... Language is a powerful tool."

Many of the other gifts she brings to her ministry are a byproduct of her womanhood, Neff says. "Women have a different style of leadership than men, which can be both refreshing and confusing. Typically, women tend more toward making decisions by roundtable, in community. Women are more relational. I think I bring that perspective to our church, just like many other women in the ministry do the same in their work."

The Presbyterian Church USA (an entity separate from the Presbyterian Church of America, which does not ordain women) began ordaining female clergy nearly 50 years ago. The results are telling, says Neff. The PCUSA has been a world leader in the faith community, remaining internationally active in a number of issues pertaining to women—gender-related health issues, access to contraception, etc. It has its own women's advocacy group, and its stances on social and political issues that affect women have generally been moderate, colored by an empathy for the female experience.

"I think women are socialized to be more compassionate than men, and I think we have a recognition of women's lives that a man couldn't have," she says. "We read the Bible through female eyes. We see things men can't see."

There's little doubt who's in charge when you're in the presence of Rabbi Beth Schwartz of Knoxville's Temple Beth-El. Not because the Philadelphia native seems bossy or strident, mind you, but rather because she exudes an unfaltering aura of confidence, competence, of sage control. "The couch is fine," she says, directing a tardy Metro Pulse scribe when he looks for the appropriate seat in her roomy office. More than once during the ensuing conversation, she stops to remind him, with a certain polite austerity, that the Jewish house of faith can not be classified under the distended labeling of "church."

Now in her 50s, Schwartz, a former systems analyst, came to be ordained in the Jewish clergy later in life, after years as a wife, mother, scholar, teacher and lay-leader in the Jewish community. "The people around me saw the potential before I did," she says. "They would suggest I do certain things, and I would reply, 'No, because I'm not a rabbi.' And they'd reply 'But you could be!'"

Schwartz earned her Master of Arts and Hebrew Letters and Rabbinic Ordination from Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College in the late '90s, and found her post at Temple Beth-El through the college's placement service. "I was looking for a small city, a university town," she says. "And looking back, I was probably looking for some place with hills and trees."

And perhaps Knoxville and Temple Beth-El were looking for someone like her. Bernie Rosenblatt, executive director of the Knoxville Jewish Alliance, met Schwartz during her interview process and was duly impressed. "I thought she was forthright, articulate and a person of strong principle," he says. "It was evident that she had a real sense of community and collaboration."

Temple Beth-El falls under the umbrella of the Jewish faith's Reform Movement, one of four active designations, the others being the Orthodox, Conservative and Re- constructionist movements. The Reform Movement is the faith's so-called liberal branch, and has been ordaining women since 1972. In the movement's rabbinical seminaries, Schwartz says half the students are now women.

Still, Schwartz is the first female rabbi to serve in East Tennessee, and only one of four currently heading a congregation across the state.

"Many of my congregants are very happy to have a woman rabbi, appreciative of the skills and perception I bring," Schwartz says. "For some, it's still an adjustment. I have some who will say things that indicate they prefer things the way they used to be, then look at me and say, 'Oh, but I didn't mean you.' So I feel very accepted.

"Many people around Knoxville say, 'Wow, I didn't know a woman could be a rabbi.' It's a novelty. Personally, I don't feel like I need the attention, but part of my role is educating the community."

Schwartz expresses an understanding of and an appreciation for the roles traditionally thrust upon women in society, Jewish and otherwise—roles such as that of caretaker, mother and nurturer. She says they afford her "a different perspective. I've had some congregants come to me very pleased that there is a woman there to listen."

Her favorite means of socializing new converts, both men and women, is by integrating them into the life of the Jewish kitchen. She adds with a chuckle that many converts discover theretofore unknown talents, such as the new member last year who with a little instruction "made the most beautiful matzoh balls ever," or the convert whose special gift was the ability to chop onions for hours on end without tearing up.

"People talk in the kitchen, about family, about previous passovers, telling stories," she says. "Judaism is lived in community. It's handed down generation to generation, so we need each other for mutual reinforcement."

Like many of her female peers in the faith community, Schwartz is perhaps more attuned to issues of equality, though she says that within the Jewish Reform Movement, the balance of participation is not always skewed in favor of men. "In some instances, men have actually stepped back because of the new influx of female participation," she explains. "And that's a concern. In some instances, I've looked at a committee and said, 'We need more men.' I think women rabbis are more sensitive to issues of inclusion in general.

"I think we're reaching a point in the Reform Movement where the issues of gender are receding, overshadowed by the larger issues that confront all faith communities. That's how it should be. You hear about the supposed differences between men and women, and a lot of them are just stereotypes. But some of them are more than stereotypes. Some of them are strengths."