Transcript
My name is Brian Ellison, I'm chair of the TSF Speakers Committee and it's a pleasure to welcome you to our noontime forum today. We are very honored to have the Reverend Kathleen Goodrich speaking with us today. She is the president of the Network of Presbyterian Women in Leadership, which is an organization that she actually helped found and she'll be telling us a little bit more about that. There is some literature about the organization over by the
door and if you didn't get any on your way in, you're welcome to grab some on the way out. Kathy has been involved in the church in a number of ways over the years. She was one of the founders of Presbyterians for Renewal, a network of organizations in the church working to renew it through prayer and work. She's been part of its board of directors and was the founder of its seminary ministry. If you recall, our
speaker a few weeks ago, Bob Henderson, is now their staff person for the seminary ministry and she hired him, in fact. She's also been very involved in the church's structures. She's an active member of the Synod's Permanent Judicial Commission and has been involved in a number of committees of Lehigh Presbytery. In addition, she helped chair a convocation of the General Assembly, a theological convocation in 1995, We Believe in the One Lord Jesus Christ. She's done a
number of other things, including part-time preaching, speaking, she's been a volunteer chaplain, a girls' camp director. She's married to the Reverend George Goodrich, who's the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Redding, Pennsylvania, and she has two children, age nine and six. It's a pleasure to have you, Kathy. We're glad you're here. There will maybe be some time for some questions at the end and we'll try and get everyone out so they can go to class
by 1:20. If I can open us in prayer, we'll get on with our speaker. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the gifts you give us and the privilege we have of being in this place where we can study your word, share it with one another, and from time to time learn from others who have gone before us in service to the church. Lord, bless Kathy as she's about to speak to us, that her words
may not just be hers but be yours as well. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Please welcome Kathy Goodrich. Thank you, and thank you for that prayer, because the truth is none of us come just to hear a person. You came not just to hear what my ideas may be, they may be good, they may be bad, they may be boring, but hopefully what God has to say and God insights are what we really all need.
As you came in today, there was some material on the table over there, and I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about the network of Press Between Women Leadership when you all can read very well and discern for yourselves, but I would encourage you to pick up a copy or two and share it with someone, and I'd be happy at the end to answer some questions about it. There will be a sign
-up sheet coming around, a yellow piece of paper, if you would like to get on the mailing list, but when you move from here, please tell us, because we don't know when you transfer somewhere else in the country, but it really would be great to share ideas together. Networks have been happening for a long time. This has been subterranean and came above board to kind of support women as we have moved, as I was thinking about
this talk and had so much fun, not only looking back over my experience in ministry, but talking with women leaders across the whole country, that at least in the PCUSA, and that's my pond, how many of you all here are PCUSA? Okay, there are a few others. What else is represented here? Non anything, seeking the will of the Lord. We have moved from the era of women leaders as the pioneers. We've just celebrated 40 years of
women being ordained to be ministers, and if you look back in 1975, there were 248 women clergy. Today, there are almost 2,100, and the numbers are steadily climbing with half of the candidates women, and so we've moved from a more pioneer type era, if I could stick with that metaphor for a minute, into more of the age of settlement and settling in, and so we are betwixt and between. Some of the elements of the pioneer
and the frontier remain. There are marauding attacks periodically when someone does not receive a call because she's a woman, and such things do occur, and sexism isn't gone, but it is a bit of a different situation. So what issues may lie ahead for the next 10, 20 years? You know, when you all asked me to speak about this, someone said, oh, what are you going to say? I looked at them and laughed and said, I'm going
to be interested to hear too, and it's been a really exciting thing to analyze and to research around the country. As each of us follows God's call to use the God-given spiritual gifts in the 21st century, what lies ahead? While I'm going to primarily focus on issues for women, I'm so glad this isn't an audience because we're the body of Christ, and what affects one affects the other, and we rise or fall together, and when
we start to be exclusive, whatever way that goes, we get into trouble, and this world is starving to see healthy partnerships between male and female working together, whether that's family or work, and church should be the place it really happens, so that is a bias of mine I lay out at the beginning. I want to look at three areas with you, and what I thought I would do is throw out for you lots of thoughts, and
then have you talk about them over lunch, late night, and see what percolates as you then apply them to your own lives. First of all, looking at some trends in society as a whole, what some implications for us may be over the next 25 years. Second of all, looking more at the church, Christian world. And thirdly, I literally love to teach, but I'm a pastor at heart, and looking at some practical and personal things as I've
looked at my own journey and the journey of many other women that I wanted to close with for you. Trends in society at large, I'm going to throw some things out for you and go a bit quickly. U.S. demographics. Between 1990 and the year 2010, between 40 and 50 million women will turn 45 to 60, and do you know what a huge bubble that is? In society, we're going to see many more women at the
helm of corporations. If you look at the topics of films, do you see a shift already with more women directors coming in? Women's health concerns, you see the shift in society. One of the interesting books I've enjoyed for the last couple years is Megatrends for Women by Aberdeen and Nesbitt, and they call this the rise of the wise woman. I'm not quite there yet, some of you are well there. Women with wisdom, power, experience, maturity, a
more settled sense of self and purpose versus the starter years, whether that's as an individual or in a profession. What might some implications? I had so many notes to cull for today. If you have thoughts of your own, write them on the edge, I love to hear them at the end as we exchange ideas, and I love to stick them in mind for the future. One is a tremendous opportunity for new levels of leadership in light
of some of the gross inequities that now occur. It takes a while to smash that stained glass ceiling, and there are not as many women who have had a 25-year track record in ministry around for the first 40 years of ministry as there will be in the next 25-year segment. So that it provides some fresh opportunities. Seasoned people. I think Heidi Husted out in Oregon is the only woman senior pastor I know of who
is under 40. So just with time, some of that will change. Number two, there's an increase in books, programs, theology by women. As life goes, some of the most productive years are the later years of our lives. Now those of us who are younger don't always want to hear that. We want to think that everything we're doing is the most productive. So what will that do for the church? Then you look at all these boomer kids.
I have two. Many of you have some who are now entering high school, college. When you look at how that bubble comes through and affects churches, if we can retain them, which is a whole other thing I'm passionately committed to but not my topic for the day, they don't know anything else but seeing a lot of women in leadership. And they don't really expect women to be paid less than men. And so we have yet to
see what the effect of these boomer kids coming through really will be. And I think they may be some positive spinoffs to what they are used to. Dr. Brenda Brasher, who's a professor of religion out at Mount Union College in Ohio, said she is convinced that a large number of Catholic parishes will be led by women within the next 25 years. Now she said, whether they will be ordained remains to be seen. But they will be
led by women deacons in the Catholic Church. That's the way the Catholic Church is going. So that's just one piece. What about the change in leadership style? If we had looked and we had been listening to leaderships, I remember what I heard in seminary in the late '70s for leadership style. People were just beginning to talk about something that wasn't the top down authoritarian pyramid. Now what do we hear? What is the most effective touted leadership
model is what's known as the woman's leadership style. Which actually looks to me like Christ's leadership style is the truth. If you look at how Jesus led and really live in the Gospels. Anyway, characterized by empowerment, openness, flexibility, being a role model, facilitating teaching, not just issuing orders, networking, team building, keeping the whole picture in mind. Sound familiar from business books? Well that means the chance to refashion and reshape institutions and how ministry is done, what
churches look like. Now to reshape something, to do it effectively, usually requires wisdom, deftness, and a great deal of patience because you don't turn a battleship like you turn a speedboat. And institutions, whether they be a congregation or a denomination, turn slowly. But that change will happen. Talking with a professor at Fuller Seminary, she said we're offering courses in different ways because our women faculty and administrators are saying we want an interdisciplinary approach where three or
four or five courses all work together on one particular area. And that interdisciplinary approach I think will affect how churches do things, how seminaries do things. Another thing, more and more women are leading in the workplace and they're going to expect to see women leaders at church. Whether their theology is there yet, their lives tell them that. And so some who have not necessarily been open to women leaders will start asking some fresh questions. Number three,
an epidemic of brokenness in families and relationships. It's unprecedented if you look at just sociological statistics over the whole history of the humanity we've known. What will that mean? What's interesting is I talked to women across the country. This and some latent sexism were the two things each woman mentioned. This vast brokenness. It results in so many things, but some of it is a fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, fear of long-term relationships, a vacuum
of healthy relationships and models. Well the implications of that are just legion. You know, if we look at the church, if you go analyze a local congregation and what that congregation is doing to deal with this vast, vast brokenness, often there isn't much. But you see, where else can people turn for the healing of their inner selves? They're trying to turn to government, but government wasn't created to deal with the inner person. That's structures and outside
things. Where do people go for those inner brokennesses? Our opportunities for healing and for the heart issues are so good. Therefore, the hunger for community and the hunger people have both for family and for family-like relationships is just exploding. You can probably see instances perhaps from your own life, your own communities. So therefore, this, and this is an unexplored area yet, this could provide a fresh openness and welcoming of women into leadership because some who
have been most resistant to women coming into leadership have been those who will see women as providing family-like ties and nurturing and realize they need that and therefore be willing to welcome a woman albeit ungrudgingly on those bases and then see God use her. And I know when I went to speak in an Afro-American church, I was one of the first white people they had ever had there. At the end of the day, the
clerk of session confided to me and whispered, you're the first woman we've ever had. And I said, it's good you told me now and not earlier. But he said it was all right. I think he was reassuring his clerk of session, he'd done this dastardly deed. But you know, I looked at that church without a pastor with all the history and things I'd known about it and I came with a ministry of compassion to that group
and they said, this is okay. And I saw some attitudes begin to shift. So who knows what may happen? Also, what's curious is to me, the prediction that by the year 2100, the church will be a female-dominated, female-run institution. Now what does that say? Our commitment to biblical faithfulness, justice, and common sense needs to see that we don't on one end of the spectrum or the other, that with a broken world, people want more
and more of a nurturing possibility. And then when you have a power base of a culture that does no longer view ministry as something that is powerful or important, but materialism and money determine everything and the church has not been known for that in our era, men bail out and women look for professions and that shift is, there again, who knows what happens 100 years from now, it's all projection. But we also need to look at
those possibilities that whoever are the people in power are committed to healthy partnerships between men and women, whoever seems to have an upper hand at a given time. Shared recognized leadership is God's standard, one that we've had to fight for, for about, it was part of the church for the first 300, 400 years, Tom Gillespie's sermon this morning and the examples are legion throughout early church history, but with a shift, we also need to realize other
shifts can take place. With women in leadership, all the fresh models and fresh insights that come for how to do ministry, people looking for healing, opens up many, many possibilities for people that have not always welcomed women in the past. If you look at society, now let's look at our church and our Christian world. One is that if you look at the ecumenism, not just of co-coo that we are dealing with as Presbyterians, but the
ecumenism rush of the larger Christian world all over the world, many of the leaders committed to the goal of one church as the overriding witness to a postmodern world, believe that any impediment to uniting with the Roman Catholic Church must be removed so that that will happen and what is one of the two or three most top issues on the list and that is women in leadership. Some of the reasons many of the Anglican people and
some others have been hesitant to embrace women in ministry. That's just a flag to note. Unity among Christians is one thing. What that will look like from a bureaucratic perspective is another, but it's a flag to look at and to listen to and look at the assumptions in the worldwide ecumenical dialogue. The gifts and personhood of women is not necessarily top on the list. Number two, sexism is not a full justice issue in the same way
racism is yet in many churches. People would not think of saying things about a person of another color in many Presbyterian churches that they would say about some women and that's an unfortunate reality that lingers. Something needs to be said, but how we say what we need to say is so vitally important. We can win the battle and lose the war in how we say what we say and I know that some of the backlash that
is being felt in terms of the employment situation around the country in the wake of the reimagining situation, albeit a very mixed bag, people deal with perceptions and the backlash has come, unfortunately, and so therefore how we go about what we do is so, so important. Our first cause and our first call is Christ and there's a delicate balance between saying what is just and knowing that I think of the family that just lost their father
to AIDS. As I minister to them, they don't care whether I'm a woman advocating something, they just need Jesus to touch their hearts and as I bring Jesus and I happen to be a woman, I know God will use it and while I stand for things, there are times for letting Jesus pave the way and not have my flags waving. Without a totally level playing field, looking at multi-staff churches, we need to think and help
our multi-staff churches include women in leadership, include the woman's voice, preaching, teaching, speaking, looking for the gifts of women and then that's one of the major places. The small church and a multi-staff setting are places where the woman is most likely to be hired first. You don't start at the top usually, but once that happens, what are some dynamics and I was thinking practically when you get inside a congregation, what are some things I
wish someone had said to me 15 years ago? Things that people don't even write because they consider them too pedantic, but the head of staff in 95% of the cases is a man, that person probably is married and so therefore the person to whom he is married plays a crucial role in what happens there and you know when you look back 30, 40 years, many women in their 50s and 60s did not have many opportunities
to go to seminary and so many felt called to be a minister's wife as a way of fulfilling that call, which to you and me is not where we are. But if she is a key minister in that setting, you need to realize what you're going into and you may be competition in a funny, subtle way that those people are never consciously aware of, you wouldn't dare admit that to yourself, but again forewarned is forearmed to
be careful. Also, some women who wish they could do what you are now doing have many mixed feelings and I will never forget Neil Paylor, my pastoral counseling professor saying, you know, one of the major things that happens in a church and he was talking to a class in '79 of mainly male clergy to be, he says is all the unconscious projections put onto a male pastor and all that that feeds inside a woman, well when
she deals with someone like me, who am I? The male tends to be a father type figure, perhaps a brother, what the heck does she do with me? And therefore there's that inner resistance and so dealing with those things that they don't even know about, how do you disarm and love and create a good climate for ministry? Building relationships is something women have to do twice as effectively as men to combat some of these rough pieces.
Professional, so you don't get co-opted into their issues, but yet warm, friendly, reaching out. Once that, you know, it's winning a hearing and once you know you need to do that and it's okay, it's part of a job and it will make so much easier later on. Watching for subtle ways that your ideas get taken, but who originated them gets wiped off the slate? That's a touchy one because the truth is, is if a good
idea is accomplished, that's the main thing, but at the same time there needs to be equity in professional relationships. And guarding against becoming what some people have called the organizational wife. You get hired to do all the wifely things of the church organization when that's what the senior pastor's wife does. And a book, I'll just throw out to you, Women Leading in the Church by Carol Becker, touches in a chapter on that issue if it's of
interest to you. Inside congregations, but then wherever someone may minister, whatever type of call, so necessary is increased theological discernment. We live in a time, actually, you know, maybe some of you who've taught for a very long time, maybe there never was a time in church history when there weren't lots of theological crosswinds, but there are a lot of theological crosswinds, a lot of theologies emerging. We look at developing countries, we look at Christianity new in
places around the world, we look at oppressed peoples finding a voice, we look at communication and the internet. So much is bubbling to the fore. And then we have a spiritually hungry culture. Theologies and spiritualities are legion. If I can say only one thing, keep your theological moorings and have key theological discernment and biblical literacy. I am appalled at how some people take a passage and make it say something that it never was supposed to say,
and its context sure never meant it to say. One of my favorite research projects in high school, I was a history major at Duke, was I looked at Robert E. Lee. What a fine man whose Christian faith was very deep. I don't believe for a minute he really thought that what he was defending was something so abominable to God. He just couldn't see it. He was so acculturated, so committed to family and community. You and I
haven't the foggiest clue what that meant, but the South 175 years ago was much closer to what biblical times are and how you upheld the honor of your family and if you left what they stood for, you left them and you left everything. But the acculturation that we experience today is like that too. It's like the science experiment. I don't know if any of you were bizarre enough to do it in biology in high school, but
if you put a frog in water and put the Bunsen burner on, you put decent temperature water to start out with, then you slowly turn it up. Do you know what the stupid frog does? It boils to death. It does not realize that it is slowly being boiled. It just stays there because the incremental change is so slow. We're just like that. We're so a part of this culture, we can't see it all. We need to
keep being rooted in strong Reformed theology and scripture to say, Lord, keep letting me see what I've got wrong here. So much sounds so attractive. So to stick to our Reformed roots of Christ, the Word, of the primacy of scripture above everything else, even when everybody says, but my experience doesn't feel that. Experience is so valuable, but it comes underneath. It doesn't come before. And then looking at the insights from our Reformed confessions and then on
we go. Don't lose that. It's like a ship adrift. A final thought on the church. Is that with waning sexism still lingering, belt tightening in the economy, reticence of churches to hire women still, clergy couples, two career marriages, balancing ministry and family with that whole set of needs that many of us face. Women must exert creativity and flexibility as spiritual entrepreneurs in our call process and in how we serve. Whether you're going to be clergy, whether
you'll be in a search committee, we need new paradigms for how we call people, for the job descriptions, for the partnerships between congregations and ministry groups and ways ministry takes place. We need to not denigrate smaller churches. Terry McAnulty is here as a woman pastor of a smaller church. God does great things. Why is big always better? The Presbyterian church needs to loosen up on how we take calls, how we can't move from one job to
another. Friends, I'll be, and I fought this in CON on the floor of Presbyteria for a while, how we move is based on a male pattern of moving with a one income family. I have a pastor husband. I can't go anywhere. I really like him. I like my kids and I like to see them periodically. That's even a challenge living in the same house, much less commuting long distances. The church has to take this into account
and we need to make them take it into account and we need to bring pressure from all kinds of places to loosen up this constrictive grip we've got on the call process and how you can't do this. There, you know, we're doing rules on calling based on a few abuses. End of sermon, excuse me. But anyway, go look for entrepreneurial ways of God doing your call. You may need to talk people into calling you, write the
job description and convince them how you can do it and then say, I need a three quarter time call with benefits please and I'll help you work it out. They may not even have thought of it, but it's possible and they need to do it for men as well as for women. Anyway, end of sermon. Personal and practical reflections to end on. My call and your call is from Jesus Christ, called to serve Jesus Christ in
whatever incarnate form God may present that to us and our call is foremost to love God with all we are. The trappings of all this professionalism and titles and technique keep obscuring that in this culture. Stay rooted in who you are and surrounded by the love of God. Ministry is difficult, but it's so exciting. Cling to spiritual disciplines. If you let them go, you're really in trouble. And cling and stay connected to people who point you
to do that. Who says to you, how are you and God doing these days? What are you learning? Who does that for you? Find them and stay close to them. You see, there's a high cost first of all to discipleship and second of all, there's even a higher cost to leadership. We try to pretend that's not true. Leaders are called to be models, not have a profession for self-actualization. You know, as I'm preaching on Luke
9 at Presbytery next week, preaching to Presbytery is a wretched task, pardon me. A bunch of ministers critiquing and better, you know. Those of you who've done it probably know what I mean. It's a great opportunity, but it's not terribly rewarding. But you know, Luke 9 says, God promise us it's going to be really tough. We're going to get a lot of persecution. We have to leave a lot of stuff behind we like. And that's what
it's all about. So we can't be surprised. We do what roots us, enables us to survive in the midst of it. So keep those roots. Second of all, be aware of the ambivalence about power that women can have and others can have about women who have power. And be aware of the power. Be aware. One of my two ordination sermons was about power. You know, I thought it was great at the time, but I didn't understand
a word of it. Now I see what the person meant. To not be afraid to have it, but not to abuse it in that delicate balance. And work with yourself. NPWL is planning to sponsor something in this area the next year about women and personal power. Number three, be connected with some other people who can mentor and encourage you in whatever formal or informal way that may be. Some people who are down the road. It's one
of the reasons Terry's here today. She's done some things and seen some things. Connect with some women who you see have stayed at the core. And sometimes while I have so appreciated women models, sometimes when you're in far flung Nebraska, God may have a person mentoring and encouraging you who is a man and your encouragement from women may come through the mail and the telephone. So those of you who are men, how can you encourage that?
I tell you, one person who's done that for me is Ulrich Mauser for many years and I'm very appreciative of what he has built into me and how he's affirmed me in ways he didn't even know half the time. Network relationships, that's what NPWL is about. And finally, as I looked around some of my friends in ministry, I thought, I wish I could have helped them back then to guard against the root of bitterness bringing up
inside of them, against the righteous anger starting to harden and then turning to hatred and bitterness for what's happened to them. You know, the gender wars are a reality and bad things are gonna happen to good people and you and I are gonna have some unfortunate things happen to us in ministry, whether we're women or men. Sometimes women have more of them but we can't claim any victim rights on it. You know, what about the pictures
in Rwanda this week and Zaire? We know nothing about suffering compared to those people. I had a choice to make at a point when I was sexually harassed by a famous minister in the Presbyterian Church and he didn't rate me or anything like that but it was awful and the men all circled the wagons around him and protected him and didn't really take my complaint seriously. They hadn't put anything in the book of order, hardly heard
about it back then. I had a choice to make and it wasn't easy and it wasn't quick but I had to decide if I was gonna forgive that guy. It affected a lot of what I thought was my whole career because of some choices I had to make. And I am so glad that I wrestled and had people around me who encouraged me to forgive and grow through it all and say, you may have meant it
for evil but God meant it for good, just like Joseph said. And if we can just let God yank up those little plants of anger that start to grow and teach us to forgive, we'll be such more Christ-like people to be in Korea and what they have been through, seeing ordination just in the past two years, it's exciting. And I think of sisters around the world who are longing to be where you and I are.
So listen to God and enjoy your call and let people see Jesus in you.