Evangelical Feminists: Ministry Is the Issue

The issue was ministry—ministry for women. And for a change, the question was not whether or not. It was how.

The event? A national conference on “Women and the Ministries of Christ,” sponsored jointly by the Southwest chapter of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus (EWC) and Fuller Seminary, and held last month in Pasadena, California. The conference, held at the Hilton Hotel and the Fuller campus, attracted participants from thirty states and thirty-two denominations. More than 800 women and about fifty men attended.

Conference organizer Phyllis Hart, psychology professor at Fuller’s School of Psychology, drew cheers and thunderous applause when she welcomed the “daughters of Abigail, Priscilla, and Sarah” to the conference, then added: “And we want you men to feel welcome too. We’re using the word ‘daughters’ generically.”

Plenary speakers for the three-day event were Becky Manley Pippert, national evangelism consultant for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship; Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, professor of English at William Paterson College in New Jersey; and Roberta Hestenes, instructor of communication and educational ministries at Fuller.

The stated purpose of the conference was to explore the role of Christian women and to work toward “equipping, training, and encouraging women in their ministries for Christ.” Although, as conference planner Liz Nordquist acknowledged, there was a faction of women present who “came to argue for traditional women’s roles,” the majority seemed unified in their belief that women are indeed called into all facets of Christian ministry. A few women complained that the program had a liberal bias and did not permit debate.

“Ministry is a gift we receive, not a demand that we make,” Roberta Hestenes stated in her opening comments. “We do not do God a favor when we enter into ministry. God does us the favor. Our lives are invested with significance way beyond ourselves.” She likened the situation of evangelical women today to that of Paul, who, in writing to the Corinthians, had to defend not only his qualifications as a minister of the Gospel but also the legitimacy of his calling. To her, the gathering was a “second-stage conference.” She explained: “I’ve been to many events where women have been told to find themselves. I’ve been to very few where women have been told what to do once they have found themselves.”

If women were told to do anything at the conference, it was to “find each other,” to build throughout the nation a network of evangelical women who had “found themselves.” It was not for the drafting of resolutions or declarations that the conference was called, said Liz Nordquist. Rather, it was to bring evangelical women of various perspectives into dialogue, “to unify on the essentials, and to agree to disagree,” she said.

The meeting was the second national conference sponsored by the EWC, an organization that grew out of a task force of Evangelicals for Social Action in 1974, which in turn had its roots in the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelicals for Social Concern. The first conference, held in Washington, D.C., in 1975, attracted 350 participants. The average woman at Pasadena was a little older (in her mid-thirties), and there were more church women and fewer “counter-culture” women than at Washington. “This conference indicates that biblical feminism has come of age,” declared Ms. Hestenes.

Planners scheduled eleven study-and-discussion groups that dealt with such issues as biblical authority and biblical feminism; women and the ministry in the local congregation; language, liturgy, and liberation; and building Christian families in an age of change. Participants could also choose three out of ninety-five workshops, among them: discovering our foremothers, the Holy Spirit as female, urban ministries, living a simple life-style, assertiveness, battered women, mothering, evangelicals and the Equal Rights Amendment, sex roles, and the single woman as pastor.

Among the more than eighty evangelical leaders, clergy, teachers, and writers who led the discussion groups and workshops were: Lucille Sider Dayton, founder of the feminist journal Daughters of Sarah; Fuller president David Hubbard; Editor Sharon Gallagher of Radix magazine; Alvera and Berkeley Mickelson from Bethel College and Seminary; Walt and Ginny Hearn, affiliated with the Berkeley Christian Coalition; Karin Granberg Michaelson from the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C.; and authors Rosalind Rinker (Prayer—Conversing with God), Evelyn Christenson (What Happens When Women Pray), Nancy Hardesty and Letha Scanzoni (All We’re Meant to Be), Paul Jewett (Man as Male and Female), and many more.

Although the issue of homosexuality seemed a likely controversy for the conference (held just weeks after the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church met in San Diego to vote on the homosexual ordination question), conference leaders worked hard to keep it out of the limelight. Individual workshops were held by authors Don Williams (The Bond that Breaks: Will Homosexuality Split the Church?) and Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Mollenkott (Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?). Williams sets forth the traditional evangelical view that homosexual practice is sin and that the church therefore cannot approve homosexual life-styles, while the women coauthors take a much more permissive position. A scheduled debate between the two positions was canceled by conference leaders, who wanted to avoid creating a mistaken impression that homosexuality was a major conference issue. They also feared that such a debate might jeopardize the spirit of unity which prevailed at the event.

The unity theme was also sounded by Fuller’s Hubbard, who cautioned that the “kingdom cause” of spreading the Gospel message must “loom above all other causes to which we attach ourselves.” Becky Pippert emphasized the importance of bringing all areas of life under subjection to Christ. “Why is Jesus’ desire to be Lord of our lives so important?” she asked. “Because he is the only one who can control us without destroying us.”

Words like “sisters” and “daughters” and references to God as “Mother” repeatedly graced the conference hymns, Scripture readings, and prayers, perhaps making some aware for the first time of what author Nancy Hardesty called “the language issue.” Speaking briefly to the conference, she said, “The sting of being excluded, the weariness of translating the language to somehow force my own inclusion, I think, are all part of the reason why I’ve always had trouble feeling that God really loved me.” How language is used is important, she said, because it forms thought patterns and thus influences behavior. She called for women to join her in requiring the Christian community to use more responsible, inclusive language.

At a communion service on the closing night, Virginia Mollenkott received a standing ovation after delivering an address based on Second Timothy 1:7 (“For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind”). Christian feminists, she said, seek liberty and “freedom from servility.” But, she pointed out, “we do not seek liberty and autonomous power in order to aggrandize our ego natures. We seek liberty and autonomous power in order to serve each other out of reverence to Christ.” God was incarnated as a free male, not a slave or a woman, she contended, because “Jesus came into the world to teach us that the proper use of power is to use it on behalf of those who have no hope. He had to have power to teach its proper use.” She challenged women to step out with “holy boldness” to fulfill any ministry to which God calls them.

(Ms. Mollenkott, who received her early training at ultra-conservative Bob Jones University, was probably the most controversial platform personality. She made it clear that she was on the opposite side from such traditionalists on the women’s issue as Elisabeth Elliot, Marabel Morgan, and Bill Gothard.)

A festive celebration accompanied communion. There were dramatic readings. White-robed dancers and violinists performed in the aisles, and daisies were distributed to the crowd. The communion elements were served by seven women, each ordained in a different denomination. Tears flowed down the faces of many who received communion from a woman for the first time in their lives.

For one twenty-nine-year-old woman who said she had felt God’s call to the pastorate when she was fourteen, it was a time of realization and healing. “When I saw those women take the elements,” she said, “I knew in my heart that God had called me to be part of that group. But I had said ‘no’ because of fear of rejection by family and friends and because I wanted to obey those in authority who said it was not for women, that it was not God’s voice calling me.” The healing has come, she said, in realizing that God could again open doors for her to enter the ministry. “If God called me back, I’d be willing to do it this time. I’ve paid a very high cost for ignoring God’s calling, and I won’t do it again.”

To open the EWC business meeting on the day after the conference, Letha Scanzoni gave an overview of the development of the evangelical women’s movement. She noted that the EWC came as an outgrowth of the 1973 Chicago Declaration, which states: “We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity. We call both men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.”

She charged that “detractors” like Richard Quebedeaux (in his book The Worldly Evangelicals) have incorrectly assessed the evangelical women’s movement as “a product of the secular women’s movement” of the late 1960s and 1970s. “The EWC is much more than a warmed-over, imitative, Christianized version of secular feminism,” she asserted. “We did not become feminists and then try to fit our Christianity into feminist ideology. We became feminists because we were Christians.… We heralded the feminist movement because we were convinced that the church had strayed from a correct understanding of God’s will for women.”

Following her speech, the group spent several hours going over proposed bylaws, which were eventually approved. The EWC thus moved from a loose network of autonomous chapters into a formally constituted national organization.

Where the evangelical feminist movement goes from Pasadena remains to be seen. But, said Roberta Hestenes, “We’re in this for keeps, for life, for eternity.”

The Dutch Connection

It was just over thirty-five decades ago that the Dutch in a bargaining session with American Indians traded trinkets worth sixty guilders (about $24) for the Island of Manhattan. A couple of years after that transaction the Dutch brought over their first clergyman, Jonas Michaelius. In 1628 he organized the first church in New Amsterdam (now New York). Fifty persons participated in the congregation’s first communion service.

Last month spiritual descendants of those Dutch believers gathered in Manhattan for a 350th anniversary observance, a celebration that capped the annual General Synod meetings of the Reformed Church in America (RCA). The big birthday party was linked by a transcontinental telephone hookup with gatherings of RCA members in twelve other locations. Some 10,000 celebrants heard an exuberant anchorman exclaim, “We are the first North American institution to chalk up 350 years of continuous activity of any kind, and we are the first denomination to enjoy a continent-wide technical hookup which allows us to celebrate coast-to-coast!”

The five-day meeting on the Columbia University campus was more like a family reunion than an annual business meeting of the RCA’s national governing body. The approximately 275 delegates, in a somewhat festive mood, reviewed their roots and looked after some housekeeping matters—seemingly intent on avoiding clashes over controversial issues.

Evidence of the Dutch influence was at hand. Chartered buses bringing airline passengers to the campus took a route that included Amsterdam Avenue. The meeting site was adjacent to that section of the city named for another Dutch city: Haarlem. Among the antiquities preserved on the compact Colombia campus are gates from a long-gone Reformed church. And a couple of blocks away was the river first explored by Henry Hudson, sailing under a Dutch flag in 1609. Some New York libraries noted the Dutch influence with special exhibits.

The flagship congregation of the RCA in New York, the 4,275-communicant-member Marble Collegiate Church, was host to the anniversary worship and communion service. Seldom known outside RCA circles as an RCA member, the church in lower Manhattan claims on a streetside plaque that it is the direct descendant of the church started in 1628 by dominie Michaelius and Peter Minuit, director general of the Dutch West India Company and an elder of the church.

A modern-day Dutchman, theologian Hendrikus Berkhof of Leyden, was imported to preach the anniversary sermon. He reminded his listeners that Michaelius, “the first president of your church,” and Minuit clashed over application of the faith before the congregation was three years old.

Even though he is a former president of the General Synod, Marble Collegiate’s well-known senior pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, was not at any of the synod sessions to clash with anyone on anything. He was back in town to preach the next Sunday, however. Other staff members of Marble Collegiate’s sister churches handled host-pastor duties during the week. Arthur Caliandro, one of Marble Collegiate’s ministers, came to the last night’s birthday party to extend greetings.

Even though several potentially explosive issues were mentioned in official reports to the synod, delegates chose not to solve them this year if it meant destroying the gala observance’s spirit. An example was the question of women’s ordination. Albertus Bossenbroek, the retiring synod president, lamented in his message on the first day that “we have not been able to do more for our women who are in Christian ministry.” The denomination’s constitution permits lay women to serve on local church consistories (boards), but repeated attempts to amend the document to authorize ordination of women ministers have failed. Such an amendment requires the affirmative vote of two-thirds of the classes (regional judicatories). Another attempt last year failed when the classes voted 26 for and 19 against.

Advocates of women’s ordination chose not to push for constitutional action this year. Instead, they staged a service at nearby Union Seminary one night. It featured RCA women who have found work as ministers outside the denomination. On the synod floor, the advocates settled for formation of an official “committee on women for the purpose of ministering to the needs of women in Christian ministry …” and a directive to the executive committee to convene a meeting “for the purpose of affirming them in their Christian ministry and offering them our encouragement, support, and counsel.”

(Within a month after adjournment of the synod, two New York area classes ordained women to the ministry despite the lack of explicit constitutional authority. They were the second and third to do so, the first having acted five years ago.)

The synod averted a doctrinal showdown at its anniversary meeting by simply approving a poetic confessional document, “Our Song of Hope,” as “a statement of the church’s faith for use in its ministry of witness, teaching, and worship.” The denomination’s official creeds are the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort, but in 1974 the synod gave “Song” the status of a provisional confession for four years. Opponents of the short contemporary statement did not have to fight an anticipated attempt to give it constitutional status this year. The author, Dean Eugene Heideman of Western Seminary, agreed with the synod executive committee that “the church is not yet ready” to add to its confessional documents.

Off Course At Due West?

As usual, the General Synod of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARPC) held its annual meeting at Bonclarken, the Southern-based denomination’s quiet mountain retreat in North Carolina. However, for the 250 commissioners (delegates) representing the denomination’s 150-plus congregations with about 22,000 members, the meeting last month was anything but quiet. Proponents of biblical inerrancy, who had scored impressive gains in recent synods, this time lost decisive votes.

Among the synod actions was postponement of a proposal to require ordinands to affirm inerrancy. The denominational governing body also turned aside a motion that would have had the force of denying financial aid to Erskine College and Seminary until the institutions comply with synod directives. Trustees of the schools had resisted earlier efforts to force a more conservative stance on Scripture, claiming that bowing to synod pressure could endanger accreditation.

Lack of confidence in the college and seminary, located at Due West, South Carolina, has been at the heart of other problems in the denomination. One case involves Prosperity Church near Charlotte, North Carolina, which issued a pastoral call to someone who had graduated not from Erskine but from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. The local ARPC presbytery (district governing body) declined to ordain the candidate, Stephen Stout, who had expressed reservations about supporting the denominational schools. The synod took action upholding the presbytery’s refusal to ordain him. (A recent influx of ministers trained at Reformed Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, at Westminster, and at other evangelical schools has been seen as a threat by supporters of Erskine.)

Under prodding by conservative elements, the synod three years ago applied for membership in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC), a fellowship of five church bodies. NAPARC decided to investigate the ARPC’s stand on Scripture before accepting the application, and no action has been taken yet. This year’s ARPC synod mulled over a recommendation to withdraw the application but finally voted instead to “suspend” the attempt to join the group.

Some conservatives in the ARPC were upset when they learned that the NAPARC churches had not received the usually routine but nevertheless official invitations to send fraternal delegates to greet the ARPC gathering. Representatives of two non-NAPARC bodies, however, had been invited: the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) and the United Presbyterian Church. How much should be read into the omission remains to be seen. Happily, when some fraternal delegates from NAPARC denominations showed up at Bonclarken anyway, the ARPC commissioners approved a motion to receive them.

The RCA’s ecumenical relationships, often the subject of intense debate at past synods, took up little time on this year’s agenda. The denomination was a charter member of both the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC). RCA leaders were surprised to learn that WCC general secretary Philip Potter came to New York the week of the synod meeting. He came to address the United Nations, not the RCA synod. A sentence in the NCC’s report to the member denomination drew fire unexpectedly from the floor. A section on plans for a new edition of the revised Standard Version of the Bible, whose copyright is owned by the NCC, acknowledged that “there is growing sentiment that even sexist language appearing in the original texts should be changed.” Someone made an issue of the point, and the delegates went on record opposing any tampering with the Bible texts.

Councils representing various minority groups in the RCA, a legacy from the turmoil of the last decade, were discussed. However, attempts to phase out the autonomous groups were defeated by the synod.

A paper on homosexuality was approved for study with little discussion. It called on the church to affirm that homosexuality “is not an acceptable, alternative lifestyle” but states that “denial of human and civil rights to homosexuals is inconsistent with the Biblical witness and Reformed theology.” The document is the first of two on the subject planned by the denomination’s theological commission.

Church growth was a major synod theme. The RCA has been experiencing an erosion of its post-World War II membership gains in the past decade. In 1977 there was a net loss of six churches (to 915) and 532 communicant members (to 214,635). It was reported that a successful “church growth fund” drive raised $6 million to encourage expansion of the RCA. About $500,000 is earmarked for opening work overseas (in Indonesia and—in cooperation with an ecumenically aligned Pentecostal group—in Venezuela). The remainder of the fund will be used for domestic projects. Among them is expansion into “sun belt” states never before served by the RCA, with Texas and North Carolina among the immediate targets. Much of the growth of the last two decades has been in California and Florida.

In another manifestation of its concern for expansion, the synod elected evangelists to its top offices. A veteran missionary to Africa, Harvey Hoekstra, was elevated from vice-president to president. He is now attached to the Michigan-based Portable Recording Ministries organization. Edwin Mulder, former minister of evangelism for the denomination and now a pastor in Hackensack, New Jersey, was elected vice-president.

On its 350th birthday, the church which brought revivalist Theodore Freyling-huysen to colonial America and sent abroad Samuel Zwemer, the pioneer apostle to the Muslim world, indicated that it may have some more good years ahead.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

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