Resources and Comments in Response to “Is the Pastor Here?”
Melissa Lynn DeRosia, author of “Is the Pastor Here?” (the January 9, 2012 Alban Weekly, excerpted and adapted from The Girlfriends’ Clergy Companion: Surviving and Thriving in Ministry), discusses instances in which her pastoral leadership was resisted—not only by photo-directory salespeople, but also by members of her congregation. DeRosia holds that some of this resistance might have been rooted not simply in gender bias, but also in the possibility that her “being there as a young woman pastor represented just how much their church had changed in the past fifty years.” For people perceiving such changes as negative, or people still living in the “glory days” of the past, his new pastor may not have been such a welcome presence.
DeRosia, however, encouraged her congregation to tell stories about those past days and what they meant. As she puts it, “I felt called to create space where these stories could be told and to be open to how these stories, along with the stories of the Bible, could guide and shape who God is calling us to be as a community of faith.”
Such storytelling, nurtured by warm cups of coffee and warm conversational spaces, served as a foundation for entering into Appreciative Inquiry and the opportunity “to formulate questions about congregational identity and the moments in all those stories when people celebrated the best of who they were and who they could be.”
What resources might support your congregation’s storytelling or use of Appreciative Inquiry? In addition to the items listed at the end of the article, please consider these items annotated in the Congregational Resource Guide: Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change (Second Edition); “Leadership: Appreciatively Practiced” (a podcast interview with leaders of the Samaritan Institute); and “Claiming the Light: Appreciative Inquiry” (a downloadable essay).
What are your stories and thoughts on this topic? And what resources do you suggest? We look forward to hearing from you.
As a religious sister, there are expectations that I would be a docile helpmate willing to serve in the background, but neither training, personality nor changes in the society and Church allowed for that. I resonate with the experiences of the writer, because as a high school principal and superior of a religious community, I was subjected to the same attitudes because I was perceived as young, non-white, and too ‘ordinary-looking’. My high qualifications were another setback because it was assumed that I was too proud to be of service. In time, most people got used to the idea and we could work together. I must add that local male clergy had many similar experiences, coming after a largely white or foreign clerical corps, too ordinary, too similar to the people whom they were called to serve, prophets without honour in their own country. I suppose it is basically a question of people’s fear of difference and of change, but the God who creates all thiings new continues to guide the church. And we continue to try to be faithful to God’s leading.
I’m a 60 year old pastor who went straight from high school to college to seminary to ordination. I resonate with all your experiences. What made a big difference for me is that I had a woman pastor growing up (how unique for 50 years ago!) who took me under her wing when I told her at the age of 12 that I wanted to go into ministry. I might not be here today if it were not for her.
I know this is going to sound hopelessly old school, but I just can’t get worked up about so-called pioneers who play the victim as though society owed them anything at all. This is ministry, it isn’t kindergarten. It happens to be pretty rough out there. The stories told here are natural consequences in a sea-change of societal norms, and the behaviors aluded to have been catalogued by ministers- both male and female, for millenia. However, here they are told as though they were terrible affronts to the dignity of the pastor. I can tell you that I have a whole boatload of real unkindness and mean spirited behavior coming from the faithful that makes these “affronts” sound like a tea party. They had nothing whatsoever to do with my gender and everything to do with the gospel I was preaching. I know of a male minister who substituted for a female pastor who had been in her church for twelve years. A gifted preacher and story-teller, he stepped confidently into the the pulpit duties that Sunday morning, but when he sat on the steps to the dais and invited the children to come listen to the children’s sermon, he was surprised by the reaction of the kids. They rushed to the front expecting to see their pastor and found an older bearded guy taking her place. Some of the them stopped dead in their tracks, uncertain what to do. A couple turned around and went back to their parents, preferring to wait for the real pastor to come back. You know, children can be so cruel sometimes. How dare they be so ignorant as to not know that ministers come in both genders. They left that poor male minister in . . . smiles and chuckles and gave him a great way to establish rapport with the remaining children and to the congregation as he engaged the other children in an impromptu dialogue around what it was like to have a man taking their beloved pastor’s place that morning. You are the guardian of your own significance. Be gentle and apt to teach, and pray for skin as thick as a rhinocerous, because you will need it some day when it really counts.
It is somewhat surprising to me, but not really, that the issue of acceptance of a female pastor did not include the reasoning that one might believe that it is unGodly, unscriptural to be a female pastor. To ignore or be ignorant of this question or concern reflects either the culture of the writer or a deliberate intent not to bring this reality up. I have been a pastor for 35 years and this part of the discussion always comes up!
Pastor DeRosia raises some very important points as a young, female pastor, and my heart goes out to her! Thirty-eight years ago and for years thereafter I was a proponent of the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church.
Leadership is such a complex subject! The minister’s profession is first characterized by transference which may explain some resistance. I also don’t think many other woman experience envy due to opportunities not available to them in ordained ministry. Rather, women parishioners and male pastors often have made implicit agreements that each gender will do only certain kinds of ministry as a result of long-standing sexual role stereotypes. A female pastor by simply showing up shatters the old patterns. Also, not all male leaders lead “top down” and not all female leaders have a conversational style that promotes a shared agenda. It depends a lot on the personality and style of the leader. Finally, as we strive to be “non-anxious” pastors, how we react to the many challenges of pastoral ministry has a great impact upon how we’re perceived and whether or not our authority is accepted. In the end, we are simply “earthen vessels,” as St. Paul said. I try to see each parishioner as a gift from God, and not to take myself too seriously. Laughter heals many wounds.
A lovely article; thank you! But here, when we here someone ask, “Is the pastor here?”, what quickly follows is a complicated story of slim resources and a request for money.
What catches my attention most about Melissa’s experience as “the” woman pastor is that she’s not 104 years old! This kind of thing happened to me, but I entered pastoral ministry as a young woman pretty long ago. In other words, change is a lot slower than we thought/hoped. Only a few years ago, I learned that teens in my church were being told by friends from other churches that they would “go to hell” because they had a female pastor . . .
I must add one funny story to Melissa’s “church directory salesMAN” stories: it was the day of a wedding at the church, and the videographer was in clear violation of the church’s printed policies which had been provided to the couple. I came to tell him that he would need to move his large cart of equipment from the center aisle . . . . “Oh, the pastor said it was ok to put it here,” he said, certain that the young woman confronting him had no autority. BUSTED!!
In her final paragraph the author states,
Members of the congregation expressed how with a male pastor they felt that an agenda was being pushed from “the top down.” With a woman in leadership implementing a conversational approach to ministry, they sensed a partnership between all the members of the church and the pastor..
The reverse sexism in her conclusion is appalling. As a mid-level judicatory supervisor for 8 years, with 90 local churches served by 55 pastors, I will testify that many male pastors prefer “a conversational approach to ministry” and see value in appreciative inquiry. I hasten to add that the single best example of “the top down” approach to ministry was a woman pastor. I am dismayed that Alban would allow this kind of unexamined assumption to be expressed in one of its publications.
The congregation I most recently served in Lenexa, KS entered into an extensive re-visioning process. We used appreciative inquiry to help our people listen to one another about values and meaning for them individually and as a church body. At the time, I did not know this technical term for what we were doing. We called them roundtable discussions and they were very positive experiences in helping the generations understand one another. Each table had a scribe to record the perspectives that were shared. As a pastoral staff we were able to review and pray over all of the notes as we worked at creating a cohesive vision for the church. It was a series of five evenings, once a month for five months. It was sometimes difficult, but a beautiful process.
Twenty years ago, as a paster (male) new to the “South,” a women’s group of a neighboring church invited me to lead a retreat about “women” issues in the church. Not knowing the immediate culture, I included an exercise in which the participants were led to express their subjective image of God. The results were to me astonishing: With few exceptions, “God” was described with very masculine images, such that they could only imagine a spokesperson for God (i.e., pastor) as masculine. It was a much more basic problem than just not having a career opportunity in the past.