Women’s Leadership in the Church:   A Mission Perspective

Herb Hoefer

Outline:

Our Image Problem

Issue of Christian Nurture

Issue of Church Administration

Women’s Issues in Society

Women’s Theological Issues

Our Image Problem  

The LCMS has an image problem in our society, and women’s leadership issues are at the core.

We all know that the LCMS is aging.   We have little effective relationship with the younger generations in our society.   The educated and professionals of our society tend to identify our church body with the radical right politically and with the fundamentalists theologically.   From my experience, those who know of us by hearsay typically stereotype us as homophobic, exclusivist, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, anti-women’s rights, patriarchal, tradition-bound, inward looking, socially insignificant.   As one pastor of a growing LCMS congregation in our region regularly tells prospective members, “Don’t judge us by the LCMS web site.”   We are none of these things (or at least we don’t want to be), but we can sure appear that way.

In their national study of “Religion and Public Life,” when they speak of the place of the Lutheran Church in the Northwest region, Patricia Killen (of Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma) and Mark Silk observe that the Lutheran churches of the Northwest have been declining in numbers over the past 30 years.   We have not declined as precipitously as “other moderate and liberal Protestant groups.”   The reason they identify is that we have been “protected by the strong ethnic identifications of Lutherans.”   They predict that “As ethnic identification erodes, Lutheran patterns in the region may come to resemble more closely those of other moderate Protestant denominations.”( Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest :   The None Zone , AltaMira Press, 2004, p. 34)

The authors note that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was not included under “Lutheran” in their analysis, but in the category of “Confessional/Reformed/non-U.C.C. (Congregational) churches.   We are lumped together with WELS , the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, the Reformed churches, and the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.   We are not part of the mainstream denominations, in the view of these researchers.   We may have judged in convention that the ELCA is not Lutheran, but the rest of the world sees them as Lutheran and us as something else.

What are we, in the view of the general American society, in particular in the view of women?   How can our addressing the issues of women’s leadership enable us to effectively address our image problem?   How can women’s leadership in our congregations and church body be used by God to enable His mission more powerfully through us, especially among the younger generations?

In my view, the crisis of image that we have among women in our society is not directly related to our position against women’s ordination.   Other denominations that don’t ordain women are growing and don’t suffer from the same image problems that we do: the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, many evangelical churches, and a religious group like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.   Our issue is a broader and deeper one.

Issue of Christian Nurture

Since our clergy are male, it is common that women feel their issues are not appreciated and understood in our congregations.   There are many personal topics about which they do not feel comfortable to speak with a male. When we bring a female onto our staff, typically it is a younger woman, thinking primarily of her role with the youth.   This is not a person who has credibility or authority with most of the women in the congregation.

Where can a woman go for counseling in regard to a woman’s issue?   Usually, she has to go outside the congregation for secular, professional help.   Otherwise, she might turn to a group of female Christian friends.   If the pastor is leading the women’s Bible Study, she probably would not bring it up there.

One of the great blessings God gave me in my 13 years of parish ministry in Wisconsin was the presence of a volunteer Parish Nurse on our church staff.   When we added office space to our facilities, she requested that her office be in the basement, not in the general office complex.   She knew that the women who came to her for counseling would not want others, especially the pastor, to know.

I used to say that the Parish Nurse had “different eyes” than me.   She saw things that I never did.   She saw women’s issues to which I was totally oblivious, from the needs of new Moms to allergic reactions to perfumes to women’s sexual issues to women’s health issues to issues of single mothers to issues of teenage girls.   In our staff Bible Studies, she would bring up topics that I knew little about.   She helped me to approach these topics relevantly and sensitively in my preaching and teaching and church practices.

She developed her own Bible Study group, for women.   She developed a referral network on women’s issues for the congregation and the community.   The women had an advocate in her.   They did not have one in me, for I was hopelessly a male.   With an adult woman’s leadership on our staff, God’s Word of love and hope reached out much more clearly and relevantly.  

Do women have an advocate, a “set of eyes” in your parish work?   When women in the society see your congregation, do they see a community that wants to serve their peculiar needs?   Do they see this commitment at the level of the parish ministerial staff?

Issue of Church Administration

At our last LCMS convention, we passed a resolution that women might be enabled to take leadership roles in our church administration.   They may serve in an administrative role such as congregational President, as long as it does not involve peculiar functions of the ordained ministry.   We have long held the position that it is not the title “elder” from which women should be withheld, but from the exercising of spiritual authority over men.

In our congregation in Wisconsin , we addressed this issue by incorporating a “Church Discipline Committee” into our constitution.   We stipulated that the President, Vice-President, and Chair of the Board of Elders must be male.   They, together with the pastor,   made up the Church Discipline Committee.   In discussion with our district president and constitution committee, we determined that this was the one issue that women should not handle in congregational life.   The other responsibilities of the elder were not objectionable.

One interesting side benefit of this new administrative arrangement was that the quality of discussions in our Board of Elders improved dramatically.   The men did not want to look foolish and bullheaded in front of the women.   Previously, there were instances when I could see that men had been sent to the elders meeting by their wives to vote a particular way.   No matter how we discussed, they could not budge.   Once we allowed women to run for this office, we never had such obstinacy again.   Seemingly, the women felt that they could have run and made their voice heard, but they had decided to let others do it.   Since they were not systemically shut out, they did not feel the need to get their voices heard through their husbands.

In our general society, women are accustomed to being treated as equals.   They are accustomed to being in authority.   They are accustomed to being at the center of decision-making.   Educated and professional women find it bizarre that there is an organization that systematically excludes them.   They fail to see how such disrespect of their God-given abilities can be God’s will.   Whether as teenagers or as adults, they are used to being leaders at the heart of the organization, not shuffled off into some RSO.

What is the image we present to our society, and particularly to the women of our society?:  

• Do they see us as respecting and incorporating them as equals?  
• Do they see us accepting them as leaders and giving them prominent, public roles in our activities?  
• Do the teenage girls in our congregations have role models of strong leadership in our congregation, or must they look only to the secular world for such inspiration?
• How does it feel for a woman who comes to our congregation from another denomination where women were accepted and elected as prominent leaders?  
• How do we look to non-believer women?   Do they put us in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan and all-male golf clubs and other out-dated chauvinistic organizations?
• When will women be at the podium leading floor committees and speaking for church boards at our district and national conventions?

Women are expecting equal and prominent leadership in every part of contemporary society.    Many young adults will leave, many youth will drift away, many unchurched will never give us a second look, when they do not feel respected and valued.   It is an issue of dignity as a child of God.   When we appear to shut women out of administrative leadership, we not only deny our church life the gifts they have to bring but we profane God’s Name before the world.

Women’s Issues in Society

We would do a great deal for our image among women in our church and society if we took seriously their social issues.   Women have made a great deal of progress in recent years.   They still face real discrimination and prejudice in our society, but at least such attitudes and practices now are disreputable and illegal.   It’s a worldwide issue for women.   Strikingly, however, developing countries often have been more progressive than we in accepting women’s leadership, even in Muslim societies (e.g., Prime Ministers in Indonesia , Pakistan , and Bangla Desh).

In many fields, women have made their dissatisfactions known, and the general society has recognized the systemic sins of the past.   .Many of the traditional institutions have recognized that they have for centuries systematically excluded women’s needs and viewpoints from their operations:   medical care, psychiatry, financial planning, business administration, household tasks, childrearing, writing of history.   Women’s studies is now an accepted field of academic pursuit in every discipline, and it’s being researched by both women and men.

What about women’s studies in our congregational life?   What would it mean for the women of our congregation and of the wider community if our congregations took seriously the social issues they are facing?:   the glass ceiling, single parenting, daycare, meeting a good man, sexual harassment, pressures on teenage girls, physical self-esteem, history of sexual abuse, self-worth, etc.   We would certainly avoid the horrific image problems that arise when church bodies and congregations fail to act on issues of discrimination and abuse within their own functioning.   We would hopefully be respected and trusted as an advocate for those oppressed by sin, both personal and systemic.

As it now stands, even the positions we take on the basis of biblical principles are often seen as anti-women’s rights and interests:  

• On abortion, we are seen as detracting from a woman’s right to her own body.  
• On male headship in the family, we are seen as countenancing verbal and physical abuse.  
• On our protection of the dignity of the pastoral office, we are seen as acting as an “old boys club,” resisting any accusations against our colleagues.  
• In our insistence on male teachers of the Word to adults and teenagers, we are seen as promoting a male-only perspective on the world.
• In our position against ordination of women, we are seen as weak men threatened by strong women.

How do we counteract this image?   How do we gain the ear of the disaffected so that God’s call in His saving Gospel is heard above the din of these peripheral issues?

Especially here in the Northwest, we all have experienced that the words “Christian” and “church” are viewed pejoratively.   The perceptions around the historic church’s treatment of women are central to this alienation.   How do all Christians address the common conviction that the church has been oblivious to women’s needs and participant in their systemic oppression through the ages?

We begin by publicly acknowledging where we have failed and sinned.   We continue by addressing our failings.   We gain respect and credibility among women when we humble ourselves before them, ask their forgiveness, call upon their help, and take seriously their issues.   That is a church women will value, and even unchurched women would long to join.  

We hear their concerns.   We address their issues.   We gain their confidence.   We point them beyond our institutional failings to the truth and purity of our Lord.

Women’s Theological Issues

We need women to be trained theologically.   We need them writing Confessional Lutheran theology.   To have women defend the biblical principles mentioned above is much more convincing than to have us men do it continually.  

We need their perspective in our theological task.   Already women theologians have opened all our eyes to the neglected history of women in the Bible, to Jesus’ revolutionary treatment of women, to women theologians of the past, to women mystics, to the missionary contributions of women, to “feminine” characteristics of God.   We have some popular women teachers of the Word in evangelical circles and many feminist theologians in liberal circles.   Where are they in our Confessional Lutheran circles?

What a difference it would make for our credibility and witness among women if they heard the true Word of God authoritatively from one of their own.   They could take seriously the scholarly critique of some feminist and liberal positions if it was from their own women’s perspective on the Scriptures.   Women in the general society could understand the call of our Lord more easily if it were presented in terms of the issues they face in the real world of women.

Our topic of women’s leadership in the church is not just an in-house discussion.   It has profound implications for the nurture of women in our congregations and for our witness to the whole society.   We have a lot of work to do in rethinking our attitudes and patterns of ministry if we want the saving Gospel of our Lord to be clearly seen and heard.   It can be done, and our women are the ones to help lead us into this new future of effective life and witness in our Lord’s Name.

In the words of Rev. Grant Knepper in responding to a draft of this paper:   “Wouldn’t it be nice when dealing with non-Christians if the cross were the only offensive thing?”

                                                                                                                              March 30, 2005