Rosemary Lain-Priestly (Dean of Women’s Ministry in the Diocese of London)

You can see this address online at: www.youtube.com/user/inclusivechurch

Thank you, Clare, for the invitation to speak. I have 20 minutes to address the question ‘What other issues remain about the full inclusion of women in the Church?’ Would that it were such a breeze!

A small dilema

In July I found myself in a dilemma. I’d been invited to a three day pre-Lambeth event to be attended by the women bishops of the Anglican Communion and many of the senior clergywomen of the Church of England. But I had a nine-week old baby and I could only get there if I took him with me. My dilemma was this: would turning up with a baby be perceived as an acceptable, even a radical thing to do - or would I just look like that incompetent woman who can’t manage her childcare?

So I e-mailed a colleague to ask what she thought and she replied with some passion: ‘Bring the baby. It reminds us all (even the non-mothers like me) that women are trying to do things differently, that we are different and that we do have a different hinterland from our male colleagues’.

A different hinterland

Our hinterland is the stuff that surrounds and shapes us. The experiences, the places, the relationships and encounters that make us what we are. Male or female we all have a hinterland.

To describe a little more of mine, I’m 40, married with three children aged 6, 4 and 4 months and I’ve been ordained 12 years. I served my title in a suburban parish in Lancaster, then for 7 years was on the team at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square.

Two years ago I decided not to become an incumbent – because juggling that particular role with vocations to marriage and parenting felt just a little bit too precarious. Many men and some women do it of course, and very creatively. Lay people too live out complex combinations of callings. But it didn’t feel as though this particular juggling act was the right one.

So I’ve spent the past two years working out what it might mean to be a portfolio priest – or, some would say, a priest without portfolio. I do some writing, and some radio broadcasting, I’m a trustee of a couple of church-related organisations and chair of governors of a church high school. I work on issues relating to female clergy both in London and nationally and I have a very complicated childcare rota which often makes me think it might have been simpler to have one very fulltime job after all!

But a lot of women live like this. This is our hinterland.

Only by chance did the land become holy

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote:

‘only by chance did the land become holy:

… a prophet set foot there

and when he prayed on a rock it wept

and the mount fell prostrate in piety …’

We make holy ground of the places where we eat, sleep, walk, play, weep and love. We make holy ground of ourselves and others. Making holy ground is about embracing the sacred in the world, discovering the divine in the detail of our lives and finding the sublime in the ridiculous.

But by virtue of many things - our birth, ethnicity, social background, sexuality and gender for example - we all have different holy ground. We bring with us wounds and insights that are ours because of what has happened to us and what we have seen. And once we’ve discovered our own ground as holy, if we’re to know more of God, we need to take the risk of engaging with people whose hinterlands are very different from our own.

Which is why, if in the final analysis the Church fails to embrace fully the experience of women, what we all learn of God will be seriously diminished.

Do women have a different hinterland?

Many women would now say that we’ve been formed and educated in the same ways as men. Some of us are wary of gender generalisations. Every time I begin a sentence with the words ‘women tend to’ or ‘women are better at’ I want to add a disclaimer to say that there are men like that too. I’m also sceptical about some of the easy gender comparisons that are made such as: women are more collaborative and exercise authority in a less hierarchical way. Yeah, some women, but certainly not all – and surely we know some collaborative men?

Yet I’m drawn back to the fact that a room full of women feels different from a room full of men which feels different from a room full of men and women. That there are some meetings I take part in where I can be momentarily paralysed by the thought that I am the only clergy woman present. And that the statistics tell me that the number of women at the top of most professions is still relatively small and has recently gone down.

History matters

Women do have different experiences and a different hinterland and this is partly about our history. For centuries women’s lives were lived almost wholly in the domestic sphere. Our experience of building and shaping community, taking initiative and exercising leadership was primarily in that context. Canon Anne Dyer, Warden of Cranmer Hall, traces all of this most movingly through the history of art. It’s only in the past few generations that women have won an unprecedented share of what we might call ‘public space’. It is still pioneering for us to take authority in a public context.

Even in 2008 in the majority of marriages the woman will be the main caregiver if there are children or dependant parents, and in the majority of occupations women will be over-represented amongst the part-time workers and under-represented in the senior roles. So we do have both a different history and some different perspectives to offer, even before we address the question of sexuality and the hinterlands that gay women bring with them.

In the church women sometimes find ourselves unable to name or describe the things that we find difficult about the culture we’ve inherited. So it can take us a long time to find our feet. Yesterday I met with a group of women from across different dioceses. We spoke about our experience of being in meetings where otherwise bright, articulate and engaged women, both clergy and lay, remain strangely silent. What is that all about? It’s about what it can do to your confidence to operate within a culture which has been primarily shaped by people who are in some way distinctively different from yourself.

Bass voices

At a clergy conference some years ago the few women present were all struck by what happened to us during the first hymn of the first act of worship. The bass voices around us rose to the occasion, and suddenly we quite simply couldn’t hear ourselves, let alone be heard. It’s a great metaphor for those times when we do speak out and so little of what we say seems to penetrate the discussion that we feel as though we’re talking in a foreign language or at best English with a very regional accent.

So the issues that remain about the full inclusion of women in the church are at root cultural issues. I don’t advocate throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Men have nurtured the church wonderfully in many ways and we need to keep what’s good and take it forward. But I am talking about shaping and refreshing the culture in such a way that women – lesbian or straight, lay or ordained - are more able to find themselves in it.

Women’s Questions

I’m Secretary to the National Association of Diocesan Advisers in Women’s Ministry. Via our e-mail network we debate questions such as: do women lead differently?; what does the Church think leadership is?; where do women get their role models?; is parish ministry ill-shaped for female clergy?; why don’t more women clergy apply for senior roles?; why are women more likely to be incumbents of rural churches than city churches, of smaller congregations than larger ones?; why are so few women given the responsibility of being training incumbents?; how can we challenge the endemic long-hours culture amongst clergy?; how can clergy couples be creatively deployed so that she doesn’t always end up following him around?; and, slightly tongue-in-cheek, what do clergy wear when they’re pregnant? Yes, when they’re quite obviously a different shape and bringing something different to the party …

A lot of these issues sound as though they’re just about HR, but they are actually about the ways in which organisational structures and cultural assumptions can prevent us from fully tapping into the experience, the wisdom and the perspectives of a particular group of people – in this case women.

I’m conscious that most of what I’m saying is ostensibly about female clergy rather than lay women – though lay women may well identify closely-related issues in their own experience. My focus on the clergy is because I am a woman who is a priest and partly because I’ve been out of parish ministry for a couple of years. But I also think that in reality it’s still the clergy who have the most immediate influence on the agenda of the church and on the way things are done. I’m not saying that’s acceptable – just that there’s a truth in it at present.

Changing the Culture

I hope that when women are consecrated as bishops, the culture of the church will begin to feel a bit different, right from the top, and that that will impact on us all. But this is an awful burden to lay on those very few women who will occupy those roles – and in any case some women bishops might have leadership styles which we would not describe as feminised.

So inclusion has to happen at all levels for the culture of the church to be invigorated and shaped by women as well as men. The experience of women, lay and ordained, needs to become much more ‘normative’.

A man back behind the Altar?

A clergy colleague tells me that although she is well-accepted in her parish, when her newly-priested male curate presided at the Eucharist recently someone said ‘Oh it’s nice to have a man back behind the altar’. Somehow it felt like a return to normality after a period of something pleasant but essentially experimental. There is in some senses a residual sense of male priests being ‘the real thing’.

Of course some of this is about numbers and as various tipping points are reached what is normative will change. In 2006 women being ordained outnumbered men for the first time. In the southern province of the Church of England there is an increasing number of women archdeacons. But the number of women ordained to non-stipendiary ministry is disproportionately high and the northern province still has only two female archdeacons. Change can be painfully slow.

Ovaries

When I was on the clergy staff team at St Martin-in-the-Fields my colleague David Monteith and I competed to mention things in sermons that were not generally alluded to from the pulpit. I won definitively one Sunday with a reference to ovaries! Susan Durber, in her book Preaching Like a Woman, argues that culturally, socially and biologically women experience life differently from men. She says ‘to be embodied as a woman makes a difference to how you know and how you are known … and how you talk about faith’. She suggests that the presence of women in the pulpit indicates that preaching can no longer focus on ‘one kind of human experience as though it were normative’.

This is not to suggest that men consciously preach from a male perspective or deliberately exclude others – just that we all preach from our own perspective and for a long, long time most sermons have been by men. Neither does it mean that women must always preach consciously as women and about ‘women’s things’.

The need for listening

For all of us to discover new holy ground, we need to listen more to the experiences of women – clergy and lay. To create opportunities for women to describe those experiences and to explore them theologically, whether through preaching, leading discussion groups or contributing to liturgy. We need to encourage women to explore the question: what does it mean to bring our whole selves before God? Our gifts, weaknesses, gender-related experiences, hinterland and hormones?

Over many, many years I do think the church has encouraged us all to leave a lot of what we are outside of the door when we enter. Some of our uncertainties, our physicality, our sexuality, the stuff of our life that we somehow consider to be less than holy because it jars with the sometimes sanitised atmosphere of church. If women are to feel fully included we need to know that we can risk bringing all of that with us. Doing so can be a gift to the whole church because it frees other people to do the same and there’s the potential for greater honesty with ourselves and God.

Women of the Bible

So what other ways might the church find to embrace the experience of women? Well we could take seriously the witness of the women of the bible. That might require a degree of imagination, because some of the scriptural references to the lives of women are pretty cryptic – but not all of them. Those who preach – women and men – would do well to talk about Sarah, or Hagar, as well as Abraham; Ruth and Naomi, Esther and Susanna as well as Moses, Gideon and Paul. It’s all there ready to be explored. The ground might be less familiar but it’s just as holy.

Recognising gifts

As congregations we could do more to recognise and use the gifts of lay women – all of their gifts, not just their ability to run the children’s work or lead intercessions. Someone suggested to me recently that women (dangerous gender generalisation coming up) often have what in management-speak are known as ‘soft skills’ rather than ‘hard skills’ (so, emotional intelligence or pastoral sensitivity rather than business acumen or leadership potential) and that those soft skills are harder to identify and may therefore remain unused.

I would put a different slant on that. I wonder whether it’s more of an issue that we fail to notice when women do have the so-called ‘hard skills’ and therefore don’t draw them into the relevant leadership positions in the church – in the parish or at a diocesan or national level. Some of you may have seen the report in the Church Times last week about the parish of Cottingley, in the Bradford Diocese, where under the leadership of Canon Sue Pinnington the church has initiated an amazing community project which has won national acclaim. Sue has no shortage of hard skills and that’s true of many ordained and lay women.

Boxing people

A friend comments that the church seems to have a problem with embracing diversity partly because it is so fond of categorising people into narrow bands. She isn’t part of a couple and she isn’t part of a family. It feels to her as though congregations desperately try to put people in boxes and offer them a particular package or experience of church. This doesn’t fit well with a Gospel of wholeness and integrity, or the call to grow into our full stature as mature and rounded human beings in relationship with God. It’s another issue about inclusion.

Squandering talents

And this leads me to one of the things about which I can really get on my soapbox. How much talent the church wastes because it so often fails to offer variety and flexibility of roles to its clergy – and perhaps to its laity too. Many female clergy need to work part-time – and, crucially, be paid a stipend – but would still like to develop and grow and engage with challenging roles. But most stipendiary jobs are fulltime and a lot of part-time roles are unpaid and carry less responsibility. The church needs to find ways of enabling women to explore their gifts in the service of the institution even if their lives do not fit easily into the shape of the roles currently available. Otherwise it wastes a lot of wisdom, gifts, talent and experience – a sort of ecclesiastical brain-drain.

Embracing the whole

So inclusion is not just about how we embrace different sorts of people, it’s about how we embrace the whole of each person. One of the marked differences in the way I relate to God since I left parish ministry is that people don’t chat with me on a daily basis any more about the church’s mission priorities, the theology of last Sunday’s sermon, or what God might be saying to us about Zimbabwe. No longer can I walk into a meeting and expect to see on the agenda what someone thinks God is concerned with today. I have to work that out for myself, making my holy ground pretty much like most lay people in the grit and the glory of everyday life outside of the structures of the institution.

A world beyond the Church

But lo and behold most people do not lead lives that are primarily shaped by the institutional church. No really! For clergy this forces us up against questions such as: what does it mean to equip people to serve God in the world, not just to service the church? For laity it means asking: how might I find holy ground in business, education, retail or volunteering, in playing with my children and in being at home? These questions aren’t just about women, but because in some ways some women occupy the edges of the institution, we have a greater tendency to ask them.

And whilst we’re talking about reality and how the church resonates or not with our own hinterlands, let’s talk about what women might bring that is distinctive to the emerging ‘fresh expressions’ of church.

Sundays don’t work

I risk being iconoclastic but I’m afraid Sundays don’t work for me any more. I continue to struggle to make them work – I haven’t actually given up going to church – but it’s an uphill struggle. And that’s not at all about the quality of the worship, the gifts of the clergy or the provision for children at my local church – all of which are excellent. It’s just that when you have young children who blow hot and cold about the Children’s Club and a partner who isn’t averse to church but certainly doesn’t want to spend half of every weekend there, Sundays are problematic because they cut right across the precious little downtime that modern families, couples and friends have together. I know I’m not alone in this because I talk to other people who would like their lives to connect more with the life of the church, but say that church at weekends doesn’t work for them either. I wonder what fresh expressions might emerge from this.

Many benefits

So to be more inclusive of women we need to recognise that they have a different hinterland and that that’s a good thing because we learn about God by being invited onto one another’s holy ground. We need to acknowledge that the culture of the church has been shaped for centuries – sometimes in very good ways – by men, and that women’s contributions and approaches are a long way from being considered normative. We need to believe that the culture can be refreshed, reinvigorated and in some parts redeemed by the contributions of women, and in order for that to happen we need to listen to women’s voices and identify and use the whole range of their gifts. This will mean bringing the whole of ourself to church, may give rise to new ways of being church, and should affect the way that we enable people to be people of faith in the world, and therefore crucial affect our witness to a world which at the moment must think we are so far from being in touch with reality.

A fuller relationship with God

In all of this what we’re seeking to do is to enter more fully a relationship with the God in whose image we are made, female and male. To discover what we’ve missed about God because the experience of women has not been fully explored and women themselves are not yet fully included. Our calling then, as we seek to be an inclusive church, is by our prayers and our attention to each others’ lives to honour one another’s hinterland and to discover what is sacred in other people’s experience, as together we make the ground holy.