Christian Feminists: ‘We’re on Our Way, Lord!’

The Christian feminist counterpart to the cigarette slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby,” decorated the gold and blue banner: the words “We’re on our way, Lord,” under a huge ascending balloon. In front of the banner at the opening session, the women sang, “Mary, Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.” They had come from Washington and Florida, from California and Canada, by ones, twos, and twenty-fives, converging on Washington, D. C., on Thanksgiving weekend for a historic event—the first national meeting of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus.

Over 360 women and men (a handful) came from thirty-five states to discuss “Women in Transition: A Biblical Approach to Feminism.” Preannounced speakers included Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, professor of English at William Paterson College of Wayne, New Jersey; Letha Scanzoni, a professional writer from Bloomington, Indiana; and Lucille Sider Dayton, assistant director of the Urban Life Center, Chicago.

The meeting began Friday afternoon with an informal get-acquainted hour during which participants crowded into a stuffy room to draw pictures representing their “centers” or core of thought and feeling. Over the din, one voice asked, “How can one find one’s center in such a mess?”

In her welcoming remarks, Heidi Frost, one of the conference planners, urged participants, “Get what you need from the caucus” and “Don’t expect a party line.” All were asked to pray for 2,000 Catholic “sisters” meeting in Detroit to discuss women’s ordination. At a roll call of denominations, more than twenty-three were represented, the Presbyterian and Mennonite groups being the largest.

Friday evening’s keynote address by Virginia Mollenkott—she received a standing ovation—emphasized the need to “de-absolutize” biblical culture. She called for distinguishing between what was written for an age and what transcends particular cultures. Mollenkott repudiated the “idolatry of the male” found in many recent books on the woman’s role, particularly The Total Woman. With Paul Jewett, author of Man as Male and Female, she roots masculinity and femininity in the Trinity, basing this on Genesis 1:26 and 27: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.…” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Judy Brown Hull, another conference planner, spoke about some of the costs in her own pilgrimage to wholeness. Her husband, Roger Hull, pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church in New York City, told the gathering that he was a “converting male chauvinist in process” and that he believes the Spirit of God is at work in the women’s movement.

Participants were divided into small “discovery groups” of six that met throughout the weekend to talk about needs, frustrations, models, and goals. Between meetings, browsers mingled around a book table well stocked with feminist literature. Free handouts included issues of Daughters of Sarah, a feminist journal published by the non-profit Peoples Christian Coalition, issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY dealing with the ordination of women, and a two-page guide to picketing “Total Woman” seminars. (Marabel Morgan’s best-seller, The Total Woman, grew out of the seminars she conducts on the subject.)

The Evangelical Women’s Caucus had its roots in the following statement from the 1973 Declaration of the Evangelicals for Social Action: “We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity. So we call forth men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.” In 1974, the Women’s Caucus, one of six task forces of Evangelicals for Social Action, drew up a series of proposals dealing with such areas as life-style, sexist literature, job opportunities, consciousness-raising, and the Equal Rights Amendment. From there a small nucleus of women began thinking about a national meeting of women to discuss biblical feminism.

Principal planners of the conference were Heidi Frost, field ministries director of Faith at Work in Columbia, Maryland; Judy Brown Hull, wife, mother, and an elder of Broadway Presbyterian Church in New York City; Karin Granberg Michaelson, a seminary student in Washington, D. C.; and Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. AS the October 15 deadline for registration approached, only seven applications had been received. Heidi Frost told the participants: “We were tempted to cancel the whole thing, but we didn’t want to lose the money that had already been invested.” The first contributions totaling $1,000 had come from the pockets of male sympathizers among the Evangelicals for Social Action. (Other donations included a $500 gift from a relative of one of the caucus planners, speakers’ honorariums, planners’ time and telephone bills.) The cost of the conference had been kept at a nominal $25 per person, which scarcely covered two nights and five meals at the National 4-H Center near Washington D. C.

In early November, applications began pouring in, and by two days before Thanksgiving a capacity crowd of 350 was registered and applicants were being turned away. Scholarship funds worth $3,000 were made available to help forty-eight registrants with costs and travel expenses.

Cafeteria-style meals at long tables invited lively bull (cow?) sessions. Stewardesses exchanged notes with medical doctors, Ph.D’s poured out their gripes to secretaries. An ordained minister from Mississippi remarked to a Harvard student over lunch, “I sure wish I could have brought my husband and my whole congregation to this conference.” A minister’s wife and mother of five told new acquaintances she was attending seminary, studying Greek, because “I got tired of waiting for a younger woman to write a book on the differences between the Bible cultures and ours.”

On Saturday morning, Lucille Sider Dayton and Donald Dayton, who teaches at North Park Seminary, provided a “Historical Base for Christian Feminists.” (Their article on this appeared in the May 23, 1975, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.) Nancy Hardesty, co-author of All We’re Meant to Be, read excerpts from books written by women over the centuries depicting their struggle and agony.

In the afternoon, participants attended any two workshops out of a total of twenty-six. Some of the most popular were: “Paul and Jesus and Feminism,” “Establishing a Career in a Man’s World,” “Being a Mother and a Person,” “Eliminating Self-Defeating Behavior,” and “Relationships: Male and Female.” In a workshop entitled “Models for Marriage,” author Betty Elliot Leitch, who attended the caucus as a participant, not a speaker, carried on a friendly repartee with Letha Scanzoni over egalitarian marriage.

Letha Scanzoni spoke about “life-style” on Saturday evening. She urged women to balance freedom with responsibility, confidence with control, and hope with love (not bitterness) in their quest for wholeness. Alternative life-styles were stressed: singleness, childless marriage, egalitarian marriage, and communal living. Responding to Scanzoni, conference committee member Cheryl Forbes told “how I met my single life” (a variation, she explained, on the usual question, “How did you meet your husband?”) and regretted the fact that a single woman often presents a threat to the Christian community.

Karin Granberg Michaelson offered mutual servanthood as a model for marriage. Her husband, Wes Michaelson, an assistant to Senator Mark Hatfield and a contributing editor of the Post American, told the assembly that he was “awed by the love you’ve shown me.” “Rarely does an oppressor feel such love from the oppressed,” he added.

At a business meeting Sunday morning, participants voted to send a telegram to Detroit reaffirming solidarity with their Catholic sisters in the struggle for ordination. A resolution supporting the Equal Rights Amendment was passed with eighteen opposing votes, although some grumbled about “ramrodding.” An interim committee of five was formed to discuss the possibility of another national meeting and regional workshops. Participants gave over $4,700 in cash and pledges to get the proposed actions and incorporation underway. A temporary national office was established in Minneapolis.

During the informal testimony period at the emotion-packed final worship service, Rufus Jones of the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society rose and told the group he had been struggling with a certain Bible passage and then “yesterday a Priscilla came and expounded to me the way of God more perfectly.”

Some spoke of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus as a “mountain-top experience,” a “highlight in my life,” “the greatest encouragement in my struggle to be whole.” Another said, “I never realized there were so many of us wrestling with this issue.” But one from Chicago said of her group, “Before we came out here we said we didn’t think we’d learn anything new, and we haven’t.”

As Heidi Frost had warned, there was no party line. The caucus made no attempt to iron out differences or draw up a platform. Any attempt to do so would surely have caused friction, given the widely varying backgrounds.

Surprisingly, the differences did not seem to matter as much as the common feeling that all were sisters and brothers in Christ struggling to find a more perfect way, the way of Galations 3:28, which became the byword of the caucus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Formed: Reformed Forum

Representatives of five small denominations of Calvinistic heritage met in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, this month to form an organization named the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. According to the constitution, its main purpose is to “facilitate discussion and consultation between member bodies on those issues and problems which divide them as well as on those which they face in common.”

The charter members are the Christian Reformed Church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (Convenanters). None is a member of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, or the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. A membership application from the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church was received. It must await approval by vote of the founding denominations, a process that can take two years.

The first chairman of the new group is John Galbraith, overseas missions executive of the Orthodox Presbyterians.

The new council, in which the five denominations are represented officially, took note of the existence of the unofficial National Presbyterian and Reformed Fellowship, in which ministers and lay leaders from ten denominations are involved. It recorded its encouragement for NPRF’s plans to hold a North American Congress on the Reformed Faith.

Religion In Transit

In a joint effort by the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church, a bicentennial television series entitled “Six American Families” is being produced in cooperation with the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company. The series will deal with the day-by-day ethical and moral decisions that face families. It is being partially funded with a $125,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment.

A reportedly secret document of the Czechoslovakia Communist Party uncovered recently reveals that the government intends to take “harder and more direct” measures against Christians in the country. “It is vital that we select our policies in such a way that the church’s opportunity for activity becomes more and more limited,” says the document. It says this objective will be achieved by urging directors of all factories, schools, and offices to call on people to withdraw from church membership. Western church leaders who have visited Czechoslovakia say persecution of the church now is the worst in decades.

Churchmen from both eastern and western Europe called for universal disarmament and said that the money saved should go toward developing Third World countries. The appeal came from some fifty representatives of Reformed, Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, and Lutheran churches in fourteen countries who were gathered at an East German site for the eighth assembly of the Geneva-based Conference of European Churches.

OMS International is sending to every telephone subscriber in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, an edition of the New Testament prepared especially for new readers of English.

As the first full-time secretary of the French Canada Mission Board of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, clergyman William L. Phillips will direct that denomination’s expanding operations aimed at Quebec’s five-million-plus-French-speaking population. He is a former president of the trans-Canada fellowship of 375 English and French-speaking Baptist churches, and he has been active in French Canadian evangelization for nearly twenty years.

Professor Thomas F. Torrance, 62, of Edinburgh University has been nominated moderator-designate of the Church of Scotland general assembly.

Dr. J. H. Pickford, former dean of Northwest Baptist Theological College in Vancouver, was elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada (FEBC) at the denomination’s convention in Winnipeg. The FEBC has 375 English-and French-speaking churches.

MESSAGE TO MILLIONS

The Christian-oriented World Satellite Network, a non-profit organization owned by the Sun Oil Company, is launching a six-hour Christmas Eve program entitled “The Messaih 1975” (to be aired at 9:00 P.M. EST). Beamed from an RCA-owned satellite, the show will be the first gospel presentation from outer space to appear on television and will reach much of the Western Hemisphere. Astronaut James Irwin will host the program, and well-known speakers will blend Christmas messages and music with an outer-space emphasis.

A videotape presentation is available through the network for local cable systems or television stations that do not have satellite hookup facilities.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.