Where We Are-
and Where We Ought to Be
The statistics still astound me. According to Louie Crew's Anglican pages, the Episcopal Church counts some 7,500 parishes in its number as of this writing. Fewer than 30 of them can claim a black female priest as their clerical leader as vicar, rector or priest in charge. The number of women of any color leading congregations looks a bit more encouraging--some 560 femaleled parishes--that is, until one looks deeply behind the numbers.
Up until my recent return to parish ministry, I
had spent the last two years traveling around the country visiting churches as the Director of Alumni/ae and Church Relations for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. It has been an enlightening two years. As we celebrate thirty years of women being ordained to the priesthood, it is clear that the stories behind the statistics tell us that we haven't come as far as even these figures would like us to believe.
I an a GenXer who was in elementary school
during the height of the women's liberation and women's ordination movements. By the time I arrived at college in the mid-1980s, the image held high was that of the superwoman who could enjoy a high-powered career, children, marriage--if she so chose--and a dynamic social life that included time to devote to personal and community interests.
As we've all heard before, there was no reason
why women could not have it all. Well, twenty years later, women and men have realized that it is not possible to have it all--at the same time anyway--and that
women continue to bear a larger burden and pay a higher price to hold to the superwoman ideal than anyone would have thought. It should come as no surprise that the church has been slower to recognize this.
In many ways the church exists in a time warp. It's as if we are in the 1970s at the height of the women's liberation movement where female priests face inequalities of pay and position and childcare concerns but the unspoken expectation is that they will be the superwomen of the 1980s--balancing vocation, family and personal wellness without the support (that of a wife) enjoyed by their male counterparts.
I believe there is still a struggle for women's
ordination to be won. It is true that, with the exception of a handful of dioceses, women are ordained to the priesthood or accepted as priests throughout the church. But some of the justice issues related to women in the priesthood--deployment, parental leave and childcare and compensation--are concerns that the church is, belatedly, just beginning to address.
In my travels I have been to some dioceses that
can claim female leadership for 30 percent of their parishes, but the stories behind the numbers show that the women are overwhelmingly serving at the smallest churches. Clergy women still find that balancing vocation and family is more of a challenge in the church than in the secular world. Many still fight for diocesan parental leave policies--despite the parental leave resolution passed at the 2000 General Convention recommending such a policy. The Church Pension Group's latest research on clergy compensation shows that in every category--age, experience, seniority, geographic location, etc.--women continue to earn less than men. These gross inequities exist in spite of the fact that there is no gender differential in workload or expectation for clergy and the reality that many clergywomen--especially those who are GenX or who are closer to retirement--are the primary or only wage-earner in the family. There are stories yearning to be told of female priests who work to support their families, earning comparatively lower incomes that their male peers, while their spouse or partner looks for work, pursues educational goals, or is retired.
And there are the stories yet to be fully told of
GenX women who struggle to balance their vocations with child-raising. The Episcopal Church has finally seen the wisdom in raising up younger vocations, but has forgotten that in this new day, when women are being raised up too, someone has to take care of the children.
With most dioceses preferring their clergy to
be active in the greater life of the church but without providing some of the assistance that might make participation more feasible for clergy with young families--such as childcare provisions at clergy conferences of diocesan conventions--a conflicting message is being sent: if you are a young priest who is male with a family and spouse/partner who works--great. If you are a young priest who is a woman with a family and a spouse/partner who works, the message is: "Great-see you when the kids are school age." There are diocesan conventions where the college of clergy looks overwhelmingly older--not because it is an entirely middleaged clericus but because many of the young women clergy are home taking care of the children.
These concerns alone would be enough to keep
us busy, but I've discovered something I fear more-complacency. Complacency has been described as the feeling of contentment to a fault. I often sense that women who are leading congregations and have adequate support systems, role models and satisfying ministries, feel that the struggle around women's ordination to the priesthood has been won and we can move on with real justice issues.
I have often felt that myself. When I first began attending the Episcopal Church 20 years ago, I
would have never guessed that women could not be priests--there had been a female priest in nearly every congregation I've been affiliated with--but that's New York and New England for you: Problem? What problem? Complacency will thrive in such environments.
Meanwhile, for the women serving in smaller,
less urban or less receptive dioceses, the problem is all too evident and sympathizers can be few and far between. Much of the time the church seems to behave as if it is content with the way things are for women clergy. If we were all content and happy with the way things are for women, that would be wonderful. But I suspect that we settle for an uneasy contentment because (1) we already have too much to do and what about the real justice issues? (2) For some women it is all they can do to make it through another day, so who has any energy to engage in an uphill struggle that seems too large to tackle; (3) this is just the way the church is, so let's get on with the gospel and missionary work; and (4) we don't really know about the issues--we just want those women to stop whining.
Justice is a big house, but it has no room for
complacency. Thirty years of women's ordination to the priesthood has not earned us a victory party. With so much more work to be done to make vocation a fair, viable and satisfying possibility for women (and please understand that I don't expect the priesthood to be without struggle, pains or conflict for anyone, but it must be viable and satisfying) the church cannot afford to let the inequities continue. The church loses when its leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of the entire body. We are all poorer when the particular gifts that women have to share are turned away or hidden.
I'll end with the dynamic with which this essay begins--black female priests, of which there are few. There are but a handful (a handful and a half at most) of black female priests under the age of 40. The issues complicating female priesthood seem all the more acute when race is added to the mix. At a conference last year, six of us young black priests found ourselves talking about our ministries. All of the men were serving as rectors and all of the women were in non-parochial ministry. All I could do was sigh and wonder about the odds.