I became a Christian in an Anglo-Catholic church and my Vicar was very clear about the role of women and the church, i.e. no women priests. I was clear too, I agreed and the Bible did too, so there was no problem. I then went to evangelical churches that stated the same thing.
Then I met up with a women who had been a friend of mine at the Anglo-Catholic church. She said that she now supported women's ministry. I was amazed and asked her why. She replied that she had prayed and prayed about it, and before God, she realised that her attitudes were drawn from prejudice and not scripture. Again, I was amazed, but I knew that my attitudes had nothing to do with prejudice, it was just that women priests were wrong.
I did err... soften on this one, but I was very unhappy when I felt called to ordained ministry, I wasn't at all sure that it was really okay. I blamed the Bible for my views, of course, but the truth is that it was prejudice. When I thought about the meaning of being a priest, I thought about the Eucharist. And in my head I could hear the voice of a man singing in plain song the words of a priest, and my voice singing the responses. Deep in my psyche, the priest was a man and indeed God was male.
These days, when I feel like blaming the Bible for my strong opinions, I try pretending that the Bible says the opposite of what I think it says. Normally, it turns out that it isn't the words of scripture that are driving me, but the weight of my experiences and my values (which may of course be Biblical values).
3 comments:
I've not been reading your blog for long enough to have known much about your background, Lesley.
I returned to Christianity as an adult through an Anglo-Catholic church, but in my case through a church which does support women's ministry and has plenty of women on the ministry team.
So I actually have no experience of this not being the case, and I've often wondered about the experiences of women in churches which don't accept their ministry.
I hope I'm not being too reductive about your post by suggesting that it made me think about how we can internalise prejudices which can actually hurt or negatively impact us.
I wanted to use 'we' and 'us' terms there because it made me think as well that sometimes it can be too easy to just say that it's other people who do this, but actually we all have prejudices and we're all just as likely to hurt ourselves and/or other people with them.
Which is a long way around to say that you've reminded me to take the time to confront my own prejudices and not just assume that the blame for prejudice lies with other people, or even in the Bible itself.
It is the way internalized oppression works -- all groups who are not in power absorb the messages of "you are not worthy" from those who are in power or who are their allies. Then instead of challenging power - we do lateral violence to one another. Re: women - a friend who felt like you said she changed when she dreamed of Mary offering Jesus to the world - as the first priest of the church.
re: Mary offering Jesus - like this
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