Excerpt
from A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit
by Sarah Sentilles
Chapter One
The Call
I once heard the rector of my church in Pasadena quote Frederick
Buechner’s definition of vocation in a sermon. Vocation, Buechner
says, is the place where the world’s greatest need and a
person’s greatest joy meet. Although selfless struggle is
seductive, doing the work the world needs -- fighting poverty, racism,
sexism, imperialism, environmental destruction -- is only half of the
equation. The work that is yours must also bring you joy.
The word "vocation" comes from the Latin verb vocare, which means "to
call." Vocation as "calling" has dominated how it is understood in
religious contexts. For many who are considering being ordained, the
idea of call is something literal: The voice of God speaks, directing
the listener to a life of ministry. For others, the idea of call is
figurative: It might come as a feeling, a kind of knowing, a crazy idea
that won’t leave, a sense that this is the work they are meant to
do in the world. Sometimes call is understood as the pattern that
emerges in a string of events. Other times the voices calling belong to
friends and family or to the words on the pages of a book.
The Bible is filled with stories about people who hear the voice of God
calling them to a certain kind of work. The plot of most biblical call
stories is fairly standard: Someone hears the voice of God; rejects the
idea that he or she is the right person for the job by listing all the
ways she or he is not up to the task; tries to avoid God’s call
by running away (remember Jonah?); and, eventually, answers the call,
doing what God demands that he or she do. Most often, God calls people
by saying their names. "Abraham," God says, and Abraham -- or Amos or
Isaiah or Sarah -- answers, "Here I am." The Hebrew word for "Here I
am," hineini, can be translated as "ready." God’s prophets answer
God’s call by saying ready, even before they know what they will
be asked to do.
For many Christian denominations, believing that you have been called
is a central requirement for getting ordained. Whether you believe your
call came as the voice of God or as a feeling inside of you, you have
to be able to tell your story to others in a way that reveals you have
indeed been called to be a minister. The task of the budding minister
is to persuade a committee or a priest or a pastor not only that she
wants to be ordained but that God intends for her to be ordained.
Call sets ministry apart from all other vocations, constructs being a
priest or a pastor as radically different than being a plumber or a
teacher or a lawyer. I believe that we are all called to something,
that Buechner’s idea of vocation is open to everyone, that we all
ought to have the freedom to find that place where our deepest joy and
the world’s greatest need meet. But doctors and architects
don’t have to prove they have found that place. Ministers do.
Even though most of the women I interviewed questioned the category
"call," it remained central to the language they used to tell me when
they knew they wanted to be ordained. And this language served them
more than it got in their way. Claiming your call is an empowering
thing to do when other people are telling you that you cannot be a
minister because you are gay, or female, or Black, or too political, or
too young, or too whatever is outside the dominant version of
"minister." Women denied access to ordination -- either by their
denominations or by individual people in authority -- have used their
sense of call to sustain them in the struggle. The knowledge that they
have been called by God gives them strength to resist oppression,
furnishes them with the clarity needed to fight for their vocation and
for their rights.
The central idea of Protestantism -- that each human being has access
to God, unmediated by an institutional hierarchy -- has worked in
women’s favor. Claims of direct communication grant women
authority even when their denominations refuse to. Women have
understood themselves as ordained by God, if not by the institutional
church, and this knowledge has empowered them. At the same time,
women’s assertions have exposed a fundamental inconsistency in
Protestantism: the theological conviction that all human beings are
equal before God and the simultaneous belief that some human beings
(men, Whites, straight, propertied) are better than others (women,
people of color, homosexuals, poor). The professed equality of all
human beings has not translated into actual equality.
Many of the women I interviewed knew from a very early age that they
wanted to be ministers. Although we sometimes like to believe that they
don’t, and even hope that they aren’t, children pay
attention in church and in Sunday school. Most of the women I
interviewed attended church as children. They loved church. Some went
to church alone, without their parents or siblings. Some worried that
when something bad happened to someone they loved it was because they
didn’t pray hard enough or long enough or because they fell
asleep before they finished their prayers. Some held secret communion
services in their bedrooms and tree houses, pressing Wonder bread flat
between their hands and drinking juice. Some cried, not because they
didn’t get asked to a dance but because their churches
wouldn’t let girls be acolytes. When they were teenagers, some
went to church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. They listened
to sermons, fell in love with liturgy, whispered memorized prayers in
their rooms, asked important questions a few adults were brave enough
to admit they didn’t know the answers to. They craved ritual.
They sensed hypocrisy, understood the difference between what happened
on Sunday mornings and what happened during the rest of the week, or
even what happened in the parking lot right after church. They noticed
when they were asked to participate, when they were given
responsibility, when someone cared that they were there.
Although many women knew from a young age that they wanted to be
ministers, most did not know any female ministers, making it hard for
them to imagine themselves as ministers. Because either they did not
know any female ministers or they did not know women could be ministers
at all, their feeling that they wanted to be ordained sometimes made
them feel crazy.
Most of the women I interviewed remember the first time they saw an
ordained woman and how this vision opened up their sense of vocation.
Jamie Washam, an American Baptist pastor in Milwaukee, grew up Southern
Baptist in Texas and didn’t see any female pastors. The women she
did see in church, women who were shut out of most leadership positions
even though they practically ran the church, didn’t look like
her. "Zipper Bibles, elastic pants, big ol’ white sneakers, what
would jesus do bracelets," she said. "I mean, that’s not what I
look like."
It might at first seem shallow, the idea that somehow you need to see
someone who looks like you, even dresses like you, to be able to
imagine yourself doing a certain job, but seeing a minister who looked
like them or talked like them or had theology like them signaled to
these women that there was a place for them in the church. It was a
kind of welcome, and it was only when they felt this welcome that they
realized how shut out they had been feeling. When you belong to a group
that religions hate and ostracize -- or just ignore -- you have to be
able to imagine what you have not yet seen or heard. This is holy work.
And it is work these women did. Called to be something they had never
seen, something their families, their denominations, their churches,
and their congregations had never seen, they chose ordained ministry.
For every single one of the women I interviewed, it was
Buechner’s definition that shaped her vocation. I have seen many
of them at work. Watching them celebrate weddings, preach sermons,
share communion, march in protests, lead congregations in prayer, speak
out against injustice, I had no doubt in my mind that they were meant
to be ministers. They seemed to glow, as if all the molecules in their
bodies had lined up to say yes, this is what I was made to do. This is
what brings me alive. This is where the world’s greatest need and
my deepest joy meet.
Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Sentilles