125 4.5. The Ordinary Woman in the MCSA
In the previous section I have examined some of the aspects of the four women’s organisations within the MCSA and although a large percentage of female members of the MCSA does belong to the women’s organisations, many women do not. It would then be amiss not to provide space to discuss the options open to the ordinary woman in the pew in the MCSA. The reasons some women do not join the women’s organisations are varied.
For some the reason would be the relevance of the women’s organisations to their personal understanding of being church. Yet for others it might simply be that they do not have the time that commitment to a woman’s organisation demands. However, lay women like Gina, whose story will be told in chapter five, need to have a voice in the Church.
Women are eligible to be elected to leadership positions in the Church regardless to whether they belong to a woman’s organisation or not. They can respond to a call to preach and they can be a Bible study group or ‘Class Meeting’113 leader. On paper, therefore, the ordinary woman in the pew has equal opportunities to the ordinary man in the pew. In practice, however, the majority of Society leaders remain men and the majority of Sunday School teachers remain women.
126 referred to by Paul, who was the missionary largely responsible for spreading the Christian faith throughout the Roman world of the first century CE. Schüssler Fiorenza (1983/1994:100-101), drawing attention to the fact that two movements originally developed in the period immediately after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, explains that
[a]s a religious missionary movement the Christian movement intruded into the dominant patriarchal cultural-religious ethos of Roman Hellenism, while, as an alternative Jewish renewal movement, the Jesus movement was in tension with the dominant patriarchal ethos of its own culture.
Although this movement was coordinated by faithful Jewish women and men, sections of the ‘Jesus Movement’ or ‘The People of The Way’, as they were also known, soon stopped restricting their membership to Jewish people. Gentiles were welcomed as full members without having to first convert to Judaism. Both the originally Jewish ‘Jesus Movement’
and the Gentile ‘Christian Movement’ claimed that “the reality signified by these two symbols115 is experientially available here and now in the work of Jesus Christ and his discipleship of equals” (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983/1994:104).
Simply because Jesus, according to the Gospel writers, only appointed twelve ‘men’
to be disciples does not automatically exclude women from the priesthood. The context needs to be examined along with the current theological thinking of the day. God’s revelation to human beings continues to expand and grow in the same way as human beings obtain greater knowledge, wisdom and understanding. If the theological understanding of humanity does not grow and develop it will become stunted and fossilise.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, in her address entitled ‘Clericalism Versus Ministry’ to the WOW Conference in July 2005, claimed that
The Christian church from the beginning was understood as a community of liberation from slavery and oppression, drawing on the ancient theme of Israel as an exodus community from slavery in Egypt and a journey to enter into the Promised Land. Baptism was at first embraced as the sacrament of conversion and transformation through which one entered this community of liberation that overcame all social hierarchies of ethnicity, class and gender, a baptism into the Christ-nature in whom there is no more Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female. But this vision of a community of discipleship of equals was quickly spiritualized and the concrete reference to changing social hierarchies denied.
115 For the Jesus Movement in 1st Century Palestine the key integrative symbol was the ‘Baseleia of God’
and for the Gentile Christian Movement it was that of becoming ‘a new creation’ in Christ (paraphrased from Schüssler Fiorenza 1983/1994:103).
127 The patriarchal system favours the ways in which the male-dominant hierarchy of the Christian Church has for too long sought to exclude or limit the participation and ministry of women. The discussion as to whether women should in fact be ordained caused much pain for some of the already ordained women at the WOW Conference but Ruether’s point is valid. Hierarchy, to a large extent, has unfortunately usurped the purpose of Christian ministry and in too many instances clericalism has become the aim of the Church rather than servant-leadership and self-giving ministry.
Women, as well as laity in general, have suffered under the Church’s hierarchical structures. Ruether (2005), continuing with her address to the WOW Conference in Canada, suggests that although the Roman Catholic Church is talking about sharing power
… the Vatican quickly rejected real power sharing with the bishops, and the bishops with their priests. Partly due to extreme shortage of clergy, there has been some progress on lay ministry in parishes and the participation of laity in church councils. … But because there is no final accountability to the people, this remains a benevolent despotism at best, not true democracy.
Such challenging statements indicate that whether Protestant or Roman Catholic the hierarchies within the official structures of the Christian Church have been responsible for a definite lack of fulfilment in the spiritual experiences of women in the Church.
Women bring a peculiar gift to the ministry, which might be seen as fulfilling and complementing the incomplete male-oriented ministry of the past twenty centuries.
Scholars have no doubt that women played important roles in the early Christian Church but by the 4th Century CE patriarchy was back in full force. However, Schüssler Fiorenza (1983/1994:85) writes that
… like historians of other oppressed groups and peoples, feminist historians seek to comb androcentric records for feminist meaning by reappropriating the patriarchal past for those who have suffered not only its pain of oppression but also participated in its social transformation and development.
If this thesis could do both it would provide a resource for the MCSA. Celebrating the achievements, experiences and contributions of women in the world and in the Church is something which everyone can do. The big historical silence on the achievements of woman artists – poets, painters, authors, sculptors, composers – can and should be reversed.
So the story of the Church is tainted with forced or coerced conversions, forced removals from homelands, religious intolerance and racial or social discrimination. The
128 challenge for the MCSA at present is to find how healing and transformation can take place in such a way that everyone finds fulfilment, and that members begin to reach their full potential as spiritual, physical, intellectual and social beings.