Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

PLURAL RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AND HOUSEHOLDS

1270 l CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S ISSUES IN RELIGION church bureaucracies. The United Methodist Church, for example, adopted a plan in 1972 that allocated women one-third of the seats on most of the church’s national bodies, along with one-third laymen and onethird clergy. Pursuing simultaneously the strategies of separatism and inclusion, leaders of the Women’s Division opposed a plan to limit the division to twenty-five representatives on the Board of Global Ministries and obtained fifty-eight seats. The church’s permanent General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, begun in 1976 and composed of forty-two women and men, carefully monitors the position of women and vigorously advocates for issues of particular relevance to women, such as gender-inclusive language. Although tremendous variations in organizational behavior existed among men and among women, women’s ascension into powerful positions encouraged the exercise of new styles of leadership in churches, as they did in the secular world. Female leaders seemed more prone to an inclusive decision-making process and to participatory management, and they often took greater care to examine the impact of decisions and actions on individuals and on human relationships. The Reverend Joan M. Martin, for example, employed a “collective feminist style” in her leadership of the Justice for Women program that the National Council of Churches’ Division of Church and Society established in 1975. The rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s posed a countermovement to women’s expanding power in church government. In 1963 and 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention elected women as vice presidents. But as fundamentalists gained the upper hand, the percentage of women serving in leadership positions as clergy or laity declined. In 1984, the Southern Baptist Convention condemned female ordination, a matter that church policy left to local congregations. The resolution approved “the service of women in all aspects of church life and work other than pastoral functions and leadership roles entailing ordination.” Its rationale echoed historic reasons for the exclusion of women from church leadership: “to preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall” (Lindley, 350). In addition to the fundamentalist churches, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and Eastern Orthodox churches similarly continued to restrict female leadership . In the mainstream Protestant bodies, however, women continued to inch their way into positions of leadership. African American women gained leadership roles more readily in white denominations, but in 2000, the African Methodist Episcopal Church elected its first female bishop, the Rev. Vashti McKenzie, a graduate of Howard University’s School of Divinity and pastor of a large Baltimore congregation. Of the fifty-one bishops in the United Methodist Church in 2000, eleven were women, including three women of color; and women constituted 36 percent of the delegates at the 2000 General Conference. In 1999, the Presbyterian Church elected a woman, Freda A. Gardner, moderator of the 211th General Assembly and thus principal ambassador for the denomination for the ensuing year. At the beginning of the twenty-first century women were no longer marginalized in most of the traditional Protestant denominations. In no church did they enjoy equal power with men, but there were few national of- fices that women had not held. How far women’s movement toward equality would go remained in question. Methodist women had retained their separate organization as a vital force within the church, even as they saw their numbers increase in general governance bodies . Yet women’s organizations found it increasingly dif- ficult to attract younger members, a basic imperative if they were to continue to pursue the separatism-withinintegration strategy that had moved them toward equality in the past. Moreover, women’s gains in mainstream Protestant church governing bodies occurred as these churches declined in membership and in influence in the larger society while the thoroughly male-dominated fundamentalist churches flourished. SOURCES: The following provide historical overviews of women’s status in the churches: Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (1993); Susan Hill Lindley, “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America (1996); and Catherine Wessinger , ed., Religious Institutions and Women’s Leadership (1996). For studies of women in particular Protestant denominations, see Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (1990); Lois A. Boyd and R. Douglas Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America: Two Centuries of a Quest...