The purpose of this forum is to facilitate communication and mutual support and edification among those who strive toward gender justice in Churches of Christ. If you would like to join the forum, send an e-mail (including your first and last name) from your primary address to forum@gal328.org.
For those who are not aware of this, Irie has a blog up and running. I just finished visiting and reading it. It will be one of the regular blogs I keep up with. Here is the address: http://www.ntrouble.blogspot.com/
:::posted by Wiley on 8/30/2005 07:35:00 PM
Friends,
This weekend just past I spent 24 hours on retreat with the women clergy of the Disciples of Christ in Georgia. There were ten of us -- not a large group, and only about a quarter of the forty or so women DOC clergy in the state. Many of those women are bi-vocational, however, and all of them are busy, so to get ten of them in one place was no mean feat!
In short, the time was breathtaking. We established a deep level of intimacy in a huge hurry, largely because, we all agreed, we were starving for collegiality and friendship and spiritual companionship. There are plenty of opportunities for lunchtime gatherings with different configurations of clergy -- the Atlanta-area DOC clergy, the Gwinnett County DOC clergy, etc. -- but in these groups there's often not the kind of conversation that really enriches and challenges the spirit. Among these ten women on retreat, however, there was a willingness to explore, reveal, pray, cry, whisper and shout as we moved through our one night and day together.
There was a fresh-out-of-seminary woman serving her first church at the age of twentysomething, but then a large jump to a couple of us in our thirties and several women in their forties and fifties. I mention the ages because the journeys of our older colleagues have been so difficult; they were true pioneers. Most of the women in the group did not grow up in the Disciples of Christ but felt like they had come home when they found it. About half of them have husbands in ministry; half of us do not. Most of us could relate in various ways to the challenge of hearing God's call to ministry and experiencing resistance to that call -- from family, from the church, from within ourselves.
To share much more would betray the confidence of my new friends and colleagues, but I asked their permission to share a bit of our experience with you all. I guess what I want to say in this forum is, the struggle for the recognition and use of women's giftedness is not unique to the Church of Christ, and not abdicated by finding a vocational path that leads to another branch of the family tree. It's just that "over here" the discussion is encouraged by the denomination and recognized by the leaders of the denomination to be a crucial issue in our testimony of the gospel to a world that needs God's good news. The righteousness of gender justice is not under negotiation -- we're just trying to work out the practice of it.
And of course, we spent some of our time together revelling in the recent confirmation of Rev. Sharon Watkins as the new General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ. If you want to know more about that, check out www.disciples.org and find the link to General Assembly 2005. She is going to inspire us for a long time, God willing!
peace -- Katie Hays
:::posted by Katie on 8/29/2005 10:03:00 AM
Our friend Don Haymes, the Serials and Archives Librarian at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, regularly passes along notices of articles of interest to gal328 readers as they appear in various journals and periodicals. This week he calls attention to
"Women and Missions," edited by Terry C. Muck, in Missiology: An International Review 33 (July 2005): 275-340.
According to Haymes, this issue includes five essays and an editorial. The editor asks, "Is there a women's way of mission?" Missiology is the journal of the American Society of Missiology, based in Wilmore, Kentucky. You can find out more about that organization at http://www.asmweb.org/.
:::posted by Christopher on 8/16/2005 02:57:00 PM
archives
