women pastors

The Editors 6-02-2023
A black-and-white photograph of Sinéad O’Connor in ‘Nothing Compares.' Her head is shaved and she is wearing a long-sleeve shirt. She is resting her head in both of her palms with her fingers clasped over both cheeks.

From Nothing Compares

The Sinéad Effect

Nothing Compares documents the tumultuous career of Irish musician Sinéad O’Connor. On live TV in 1992, O’Connor protested child abuse in the Catholic Church, nearly a decade before papal acknowledgment. Her actions jeopardized her career, but she clung to music as a form of healing.
Showtime

Olivia Bardo 3-08-2022

Courtesy photos. Graphic design by Tiarra Lucas / Sojourners.

For the past six years, Sojourners has celebrated Women’s History Month by sharing a list of Christian women who are bringing us hope and inspiring us to action. This year’s group includes pastors and poets, abolitionists and mothers, liturgists and storytellers; women who question authority, disrupt unjust systems, set boundaries, reimagine what’s possible, and pray.

Mae Elise Cannon 9-22-2021
Illustration of Shireen Hilal, Sally Azar, Najla Kassab, Rima Nasrallah, Grace Al-Zoughbi, and Rola Sleiman preaching from different pulpits

From left: Shireen Hilal, Sally Azar, Najla Kassab, Rima Nasrallah, Grace Al-Zoughbi, Rola Sleiman/ Illustration by Raz Latif

FOR YEARS, WOMEN called to leadership in the church in the Middle East have faced a stained-glass ceiling of limitations imposed by the surrounding patriarchal culture and theological presuppositions about the role of women in the church. But while some interpretations of Paul’s instructions to the early church (such as Timothy 2:12) are used as a rationale for limiting the role of women, long-standing cultural traditions regarding women’s roles in religion and society have played a more prominent, and more difficult, role.

“Although religion bears major responsibility for the inferior status of women, it cannot be solely blamed for the gender problem in the Middle East,” according to a report on “Women in the Middle East” published by the Institute for Policy Studies. “In reality, the role of culture has been even more prominent in perpetuating the oppression of women.”

Most denominations in the Middle East (other than Orthodox communions and the Catholic Church) do not prevent the ordina-tion of women for theological reasons. And many Protestant communions, such as the Lutherans and Presbyterians—which have been present in the Middle East since 19th century missionary encounters—ordain women in churches around the world. While Orthodox churches do not have women in positions of clerical leadership, Father George Massouh, then-head of the Center for Christian-Muslim Studies at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, explained in 2017 that the reason is not because of “theological hindrance.” Rather, Massouh said, the absence of ordained women in Eastern churches “was due to social customs”—the Orthodox church, he said, “has no such tradition, whether in Lebanon or anywhere else in the world.”

The past four years, Sojourners has created an International Women’s Day roundup of women faith leaders who are bringing us hope and inspiring us to action. This year’s group includes pastors and environmentalists, writers and theologians, nurses and poets.

Kaitlin Curtice 7-15-2019

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

In some ways, that conversation continues to change as we work through issues of inequality. In a world in which the U.S. women’s team wins the World Cup, we still fight for equal pay, for recognition. In the church, it’s a constant uphill battle to get people to respect women as much as men, and while the conversation makes a lot of people uncomfortable, we are still having it. I wouldn’t know how to begin these conversations if I hadn’t encountered the leadership of women in the church.

David Ensign 4-25-2018

“IT HAPPEDN ON a Sunday night, even though I’d been a good girl and gone to church that morning.” From that opening, Ruth Everhart’s Ruined begs the question: If the sovereign lord of the universe wills you to suffer unspeakable pain, what choice do you have?

Find your voice, and find a better God.

Ruined is a powerful memoir of suffering, survival, and theological imagination. In the age of Donald Trump, it is also subtle yet keen political critique. With unflinching and deeply personal honesty, Everhart takes the reader through the valley of deepest shadows with eyes wide open to the horror of a home invasion and sexual assault she and four Calvin College senior housemates survived in November 1978. The assault ruined more than the author’s sense of what it meant to be a “good girl”; it also ruined her image of God.

Her strict Calvinist upbringing in the Christian Reformed Church taught that nothing happens outside of the sovereign will of God. Yet the assurances of the catechism came up short in the face of the horror and violence Everhart and her friends experienced.

In the aftermath, as days stretched to months, she was left struggling to understand how her rape could be part of God’s will or if it was the punishment God brought upon her for the sin of being a fallen woman. When, against the odds, the rapists were eventually sentenced to lengthy prison terms, she was left wondering: If God was responsible for that “justice,” did that also mean that God was responsible for the crime in the first place?

Emily Jones 10-11-2013

Where do our policies and practices run counter to our larger humanitarian goals?

Editor’s Note: A national study of women in leadership among evangelical nonprofit organizations has been launched by Gordon College. The advisory board for the study is co-led by Emily Nielsen Jones of the Imago Dei Fund and D. Michael Lindsay, President of Gordon College. This essay is adapted from an interview with Emily Nielsen Jones about why this study matters which can be read in its entirety at http://www.gordon.edu/womeninleadership/interview.

I grew up in an evangelical setting, and have been very familiar with gender role ideology that affirms women’s human equality yet still circumscribes women to a “role” at the margins of decision-making. Nonetheless, I was always inspired by the culturally radical way Christ treated and honored women as well as Paul's proclamation in Galatians that in Christ, there is no distinction between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile. So at this stage in my life, I have become increasingly aware of, and distressed by, how some religious-based ideas are contributing to the dangerous mix of cultural ideas, norms, and humanitarian problems that continue to wreak havoc on the bodies and souls of girls and women around the world. That’s primarily why our foundation, Imago Dei Fund, began using a “gender-lens” to guide our decisions.

An autographed photo of Jimmy Carter sits on our piano. A friend of ours wrote to Carter and told him that he was one of our sons' favorite presidents, and would he please send them a signed photograph. When Keith gave our sons the Carter picture last Christmas, my 8-year-old actually teared up.