A woman? A minister?

As a white male raised in a “Christian” home, I grew up, as most white males raised in such homes, going to a mostly white church—a “Church of Christ,” in the Stone-Campbell, Restoration movement (Disciples of Christ and the Christian Church have the same roots). Unlike most Churches of Christ in the south and across the country, while its leadership is almost entirely white men, the church I grew up attending in the northeast consists of a number of African American families as well. Race was hardly ever a part of our consciousness in such a way that it was articulated or discussed; rather, we all “got along” quite well, and black families in the church, from my point of view, seemed just as much a part of the congregation as white families.

However, sex and gender, as well as sexuality, were very much on my church’s radar, and therefore also on mine as a young person growing up in it. In her book Plenty Good Room, Marcia Riggs describes a number of scenarios allegedly common in the African American church in which women struggle to attain roles of leadership, are manipulated into subservient and/or sexual roles by male pastors, or are the object of misogynistic expressions of desire. As such, Riggs names “the African American church as a site of sexual-gender oppression in which male power (as clergy exercising patriarchal privilege) operates consciously and unconsciously to create sexism and heterosexism” (Riggs, Plenty Good Room, 29). Riggs writes, further, that African American women and men “labor” “under” a “racist-sexist-capitalist oppression” that prescribes or forces certain stereotypes that become accepted roles into which women and men are pressured to fit, and that, under such pressures, “the sexual-gender relations of African American women and men are mostly reactive rather than creative responses” to their oppression (54). In light of these realities, Riggs posits a renewed “moral vision” for the African American church (95), a “moral education whereby women and men acquire virtues and values associated with a sexual-gender morality” that is constituted by just, relational, balanced power dynamics, as opposed to manipulative, controlling, power-over practices of relating across sex-gender lines (100, 105).

I cannot speak to any experience in the African American church as I grew up in a mostly white church that also included a number of African American families. However, insofar as (as Riggs argues) the sexual-gender injustice of African American churches finds its origins, in part, in white, patriarchal, sexist, capitalist forms of power, then it is possible to speak with some experience, as a white male, to the realities Riggs describes and analyzes in Plenty Good Room.

In the Churches of Christ, women are largely resigned (but for a few “progressive” churches pushing the boundaries in recent years) to a kind of second-class status. In more traditional congregations, women are not allowed to speak at all in church services (aside from singing with the rest of the church, a cappella)—no praying, no reading scripture, and certainly no preaching. The stated source of these restrictions is commonly the Apostle Paul’s prohibitions against women’s participation in various aspects of gathered worship, as well as those of his household codes that position men in authority over women in family life.

I can remember a conversation I overhead as a young boy in which my mother and some of her female friends from church were conversing with a woman new to the church, who was struggling with some of the restrictions place upon women’s participation and leadership in worship. I can remember one of the women, in a well-intended effort to persuade their new friend of the good sense of our church’s guidelines, saying something to the effect of, “I’m glad I don’t have to be a leader in the church—it’s easier to stay out of the way!”

Like some (though not all) of the women described in Riggs’s text, some of the women in the church in which I was raised—wonderful, loving, nurturing, hard-working women, and most certainly “leaders” at least among other women in the church—came to be content with the prohibition against their speaking or leading in church—which is, in Riggs’s terms, an unjust relationship of power—and even came to favor such prohibitions as making for an easier existence.

Just a few days ago, my wife, who was also raised in the Churches of Christ, was officially ordained as a minister through our house church (an official “church” with the IRS), which is ecumenical and affiliated with no single denomination. It was a beautiful, deeply moving ceremony held at the site of Nashville’s old Tent City, and was attended and led by many friends, mentors, family members, and former residents of Tent City, where my wife and others spent years working with and on behalf of people enduring homelessness under the shadows of the highway overpasses above. It was only in recent years that she was even able to conceive of the possibility that she might become a “minister”—the church tradition we grew up in never allowed such a thing to even be imaginable in the first place. And still today, there is only one Church of Christ congregation in the U.S. that I am aware of that has appointed a woman as an Associate Minister. A relative heard about my wife’s ordination, and, because s/he simply has no frame of reference for such a thing, having spent his/her life in the same tradition as we have, was somewhat baffled. A woman? A minister? How is that possible? I can’t blame someone for holding to the only belief on such matters they have ever known. But it’s remarkable how “natural” such prohibitions become when they are presented as God’s word, as the only possible way to do things.

While we do not currently worship in a Church of Christ, we do still have relationships with many people in the tradition, and a number of people in attendance at my wife’s ordination are members and even leaders in local churches of Christ. With my wife’s ordination, and with a blog post she wrote that was, in turn, passed along to many people in the churches of Christ, I believe she has enacted, in some small way, the beginnings of a process of what Riggs calls “resocialization”—an “ongoing” process and set of practices that reorient religious institutions toward sex and gender justice through more equitable and mutual power dynamics (111). I, for one, am grateful and exceedingly proud to have the opportunity to be, as a male, the spouse of a female minister—or, as I like to say, “the Reverend’s husband.” I do not know what difference it will make, but I pray that my wife’s witness will serve to further the “moral education” and “resocialization” of a tradition stuck in forms of “sexual-gender oppression” that are embedded in its very “ecclesial practices” (29). My wife’s ordination, in itself, obviously does not accomplish full gender justice in the church, but it is, I believe, a profound, embodied gesture in the right direction, and I hope it will serve to exert pressure, or at least the pressure of conscience, in those places where women are still not allowed, because of patriarchal, racist, and capitalist norms, to exercise the gifts God has given them.

I would like to further study the dynamics of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism for the ways in which they factor in the prohibitions against women’s leadership. Patriarchy’s influences are obvious, but racism and capitalism are less obvious, and yet I would be interested to reflect on the ways they, too, are at work in prohibitions against women—even white women. I would also like to consider the experiences of black women in the churches of Christ, both white and black churches of Christ (there are both in the U.S., though a larger percentage of congregations in the tradition are white).

Episteme #6