(Image: Stained glass windows in the Stone Church Community of Christ congregation, Independence, Missouri, designed and installed in the 1970s Photo courtesy of John Hamer.)
This episode features a brief introduction to the RLDS/Community of Christ, what ordination and priesthood entails, and what church life was like for women before women’s ordination.
Featured interviewees: Carolyn Brock, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Becky Savage, Linda Booth, and Marge Troeh
Written and produced by: Gabby Sciarrotta, C’20; Sophia Pellis, C’20; Lydia Gustafson, C’23
Duration: 22:20
Transcript
Music…. [“Bird Therapist”]
Sophia: “This is ‘Women’s Rites: A Podcast about Women’s Ordination,’ written and produced by students at Smith College!”
Music….
Lydia: Hi, I’m Lydia
Sophia: I’m Sophia
Gabby: . . . and I’m Gabby.
Sophia: We’re your hosts for this episode of ‘Women’s Rites.’ This season, we are exploring the story of women’s ordination in Community of Christ, a church with a quarter million members and formerly named the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This denomination began ordaining women in 1985, and, on the 35th anniversary of these first ordinations, we’re taking this season to look back on the journey towards women’s ordination in Community of Christ. To do so, we’ve interviewed women ordained in the first decade after the 1985 policy change, women who went on to be leaders in Community of Christ.
Each episode in this series investigates a different topic, and today, we’re going to look at the immediate era before women’s ordination in Community of Christ
For this episode, we asked each of our interviewees three questions to better understand their experience in this era. In our first question, we asked, “How would you have explained your church to an outsider in the era before ordination? What did it mean to be RLDS?” This question led to a fascinating discussion with our interviewee Carolyn Brock, a young adult in the 1980s.
Carolyn Brock: By the time ordination things came along. I think the church leaders anyway were leading us in a process of deconstruction about our history. But I think growing up in a conservative RLDS home, my dad was a lay pastor or leader, and I think that usually we were still in the mode of believing in or promoting the idea of the one true church restored through Joseph Smith. Somehow that there was a restoration of key New Testament principles and priesthood offices and structures and sacraments, so that it would be a more explanatory approach to help people see the truth of that.
Sophia: Another interviewee, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, provided more context for what it meant to be a member of the RLDS Church in the 1980s. You’ll note that the “R” in the name “RLDS” meant a lot to RLDS members, but their name also resulted in them being confused with a much larger church. Charmaine told us,
Charmaine Chvala-Smith: One of the things that we would typically do, if we were meeting someone who was not familiar with the church is that we would—if we were in a neighborhood and inviting families to bring their children to Sunday school, or a Sunday school program or a vacation Bible school program or whatever—we would knock at doors and tell them the name of the church. “We’re members of the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints.” And then we’d probably pretty quickly say: “Not the Mormons.” It was almost like it was part of our name to say “Not the Mormons.” Because Latter-day Saint[s] was in our name, we often had to explain that. So that would be a big part of our identity at that point, distinguishing ourselves as being separate from Mormons, and then identifying those things as we saw as being unique in our church—different from Mormons, but also different from other Protestants. So that was very important, to talk about our uniqueness.
Sophia: Marge Troeh was head of the RLDS women’s department in the 1970s and early 1980s. She was an important advocate for women’s ordination, and she had extensive experience working with mainline Protestant groups in the era before women’s ordination. She told us the following:
Marge Troeh: But having to explain about the church, I would say that it is a- a community is the word that I use now and that would not be what I would have used then, but a group that is committed to Christ, it believes in modern day revelation, yet believes that all called, according to the gifts of God unto them. It believes in stewardship as a response to Christ’s ministry nowadays, I would say things about commitment to peace, and inclusion, but to me the principle of ongoing revelation is important and the being participants in God’s world, following the leadership of Christ.
Sophia: Marge highlighted the progressive ideas that RLDS leaders advocated in the early 1980s, but the responses from our other interviewees helped us understand that the RLDS church was undergoing a seismic shift towards those values in the 1970s and early 1980s. In future episodes, we’ll dig deeper into that shift when we talk about the controversy over women’s ordination.
Sophia: We knew that ordination in Community of Christ meant something different than what it means in either a Protestant, Catholic, or LDS setting, but wanted further clarification about that. So, we asked, , “What does it mean to be ordained in the RLDS church/Community of Christ?” The responses we received ranged from personal and reflective to offering a specific definition. Linda Booth recently retired as the President of the Council of Twelve Apostles in Community of Christ, one of the church’s highest leadership positions. She explained,
Linda Booth: What it means to me to be ordained in Community of Christ is that I have the obligation and responsibility to provide sacraments to the people to be spiritually attuned to God’s direction. I was raised all through my life to believe that all people have worth and are called and that God calls them for specific purposes, but in ordination that specific purpose is the care and, quote, “spiritual feeding” of God’s people in a unique way.
Sophia: Additionally, Charmaine Chvala-Smith reflected on the differences in the meaning of ordination through time:
Charmaine: So, very much different in that time than this time, I would say. In that time, so I’m talking, pre-1985, there was very much the sense that—the term was often used, “the holy priesthood”—so there was the sense, though it would’ve been denied by some, but that somehow being a priesthood member made you closer to God. And you had different kinds of authority if you were ordained. You had authority that was granted to you by the institution. But people tended to look up to you, too, as having a validated ministry within the church that could be trusted. It was all men. It was not unusual for young men, usually sixteen or older, they might be ordained to a deacon or teacher or priest. Deacons and teachers didn’t have any sacramental ministry in the church, but priests did. Priests could baptize and serve communion. It wasn’t unusual for those sixteen or older young men who were very active in a congregation, who looked as though they might be able to get past their own ego needs [laughs] and serve in some ways, that they might be called to priesthood. And typically, people started out in one of those first three, they’re called Aaronic priesthood. They’re particularly ministries in congregational life. So, deacon, teacher, and priest, would typically be what someone would be ordained to initially. And then as they matured, or as they became active in the congregation in other ways, they might then be ordained to an elder, was typically a next ordination. And those four offices are the offices that bring ministry in local congregations.”
Sophia: Beyond these congregational ministers, there were higher offices with regional duties or denomination-wide responsibilities.
Charmaine: There are other offices, but they tended to be for more regional, or for the whole church, bringing those kinds of ministry that would be outside of a congregation or within a congregation but among several congregations. Like the seventies, who were missionaries. That would be for ministry in a particular congregation, but also for a set of congregations in their area. Those four ordinations, teacher, deacon, priest, and elder, were congregational ministry. You might then have high priests, who were often administrators of a region or a stake, which is a grouping of congregations, and you would also have the seventies I mentioned, bishops, who deal more with the financial elements, the temporal elements, the buildings and those kinds of things too. So there’s a kind of hierarchy, though by the 80s and 90s we were very uncomfortable with the idea of there being different levels of priesthood, and talked about it not being like this [puts one hand over the other] but more like this [puts hands opposite each other], serving side by side. That was already something that was happening before women were ordained, moving from a hierarchical understanding of the ministries, the different ordinations, to a more horizontal, mutualistic understanding of priesthood. So we were right in the middle of that happening.”
Sophia: The mid-1980s was the era in which women were first ordained, and as Charmaine (last name) sums up for us, it was a time of great change in how priesthood was understood in Community of Christ.
Charmaine: And there’s this distinction being made, in the 1980s, between ordained ministry and other kinds of ministry, and a lifting up of the idea that we are all ministers, that children minister to people in a congregation, not just when they’re taking up the offering, or offering music, but that those who are unordained also have ministries that they bring to the congregation. So we’re right in the midst, at that point, of this—the Church trying to expand the meaning of what ministry is. So, yes, there’s the distinction between ordained and unordained, but there’s a trying to lift up the unordained ministry as being valuable as well.
Sophia: Carolyn Brock had a very different context for thinking about women’s ordination in the 1980s. While most of our interviewees lived in the American Midwest, Carolyn and her husband worked as missionaries for Community of Christ in Kenya during the 1980s. She related the following experiences to us about what ordination meant for her church in rural Kenya:
Carolyn: So kind of you found a lot of difference from folks still particularly in village areas but I was speaking with a group of women actually men and women. And we had questions from the crowd and she asked well when will women be ordained in, in our church. And I’m going like this was like, probably a couple of years before it came up as a thing in our body but that just kind of stopped me like I had been raised quite. Oh, more took on a more demure kind of had my own thoughts but I think that I just sort of accepted all of that, that the men were the ones who were supposed to be in charge of these things and speak and do all the priesthood roles. So that, that woke me somewhat. And I think that allowed me– I was listening to other deconstructive voices about our history and the truth of everything that we had.
Sophia: So, Carolyn’s experience in Kenya allowed her to begin to rethink what it meant to have ordained ministers in her church, part of an evolution in perspective that would continue throughout her life, as we’ll see in later episodes.
Sophia: In the third question, we focused on roles and expectations women and men within their church before women’s ordination. Here, our interviewees provided stories about the church in general, as well as their own personal experiences. Linda Booth told us about the general context. She shared . . .:
Linda: Before ordination typically women did “women” kind of things: they taught church school, they might have taught an adult class, they took care of women’s roles in the congregation. The congregation in which I was a member during the more recent years right before ordination was very progressive, and so they had asked me on many occasions to both give prayers during worship services and even occasionally to speak. My background was in public relations, and so speaking has always been one of the gifts I believe God has given me and so that congregation understood giftedness, and used women in a variety of roles. one role they did not use women in was in the presiding role during the services, but typically nearly any other role other than participating in the sacraments was welcomed in that congregation.
Sophia: Linda then expressed how this experience was not universal.
Linda: I believe it was quite unique. There were a few families that would complain, for example, if a woman was on the rostrum, but in general, this congregation was very, very accepting and I know that was unusual. It was in Olathe, Kansas, which is about 30 miles west of Independence, Missouri, and we were a very gifted congregation with a lot of young families and so therefore I believe we had that ability to move and minister in a way that might not have been appreciated in other congregations.
Sophia: Becky Savage grew up in the greater Kansas City area, too, She reflected on some of the gendered differences in church life before women’s ordination.
Becky Savage: Women did pretty much everything in the congregation except serve the sacraments. So they were engaged in Sunday school class, there were active women’s organizations, a women’s group, they would be engaged in preparing worship services – so I was on the worship planning committee and help put worship services together – they were engaged in music ministry, they were helping plan activities that went beyond, so if, we were in a stake in that the central area called Kansas City stake, so we were engaged with ministries in the Kansas City stake as well, that were taking our congregation members and helping them be more engaged in the bigger group, which was the Kansas City stake, a group of other congregations. Men were engaged predominantly in priesthood ministry, unless they were not ordained. Those who were not ordained, it depended on what level of commitment they wanted to provide in the congregation. If they were very active and volunteering, they could do whatever they wanted to do, up to that limitation of not performing the sacraments and, to some extent, not presiding at a Sunday service, so that was pretty much limited to those in the high priest or an elder office which were the men. And so it really – and I was in a much more, I would call, liberal, or more open congregation which was much more accepting of whatever the giftedness of the individuals were, and however much they wanted to contribute, they were more than welcome to contribute in the congregation, which was wonderful. It allows for much more diversity of giftedness and caring of the members as a whole.
Sophia: Jane Gardner serves as the Presiding Evangelist for Community of Christ, an office that functions almost like a spiritual director for the entire church. But, in the early 1980s, she was in her early 20s and was a pastor’s wife. She reflected on her involvement in the church as a pastor’s wife, as well as on what roles she held in the church in her teens.
Jane Gardner: My husband was pastor of, oh boy, 15 years maybe as a bi-vocational minister, he was a high school physics and chemistry teacher but then he was also ordained as an Elder. So, he was pastor, and pastor’s wife had its own job description in terms of, you know, if someone was sick, or if it was somebody’s birthday. There were some expectations for what the pastor’s wife should be doing which was always very interesting. So that was a role. I was always, even from high school, even before high school, junior high, involved in worship, and planning of worship, and then music because music was my major so lots of involvement in sacred music and that kind of thing.
Sophia: Today, we discussed the roles that women and men held before women’s ordination and how their personal roles in the church changed over time. In our next episode, we’ll look at the controversy surrounding women’s ordination in the 1970s and 1980s. As we’ll see, changing the policy on women’s ordination wasn’t an easy process for Community of Christ , and many of our interviewees faced significant adversity as they advocated for women’s ordination.
[Theme Music]
Sophia: That concludes our podcast for today. Special thanks to Carolyn Brock, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Linda Booth, Becky Savage, and Jane Gardner. . Also, thanks to Dan Bennett, Travis Grandy and Yasmin Eisenhauer of the Smith Learning, Research, and Technology Team. Thanks to Rachel Killebrew of Community of Christ Library Archives. And thanks to the Andrew Mellon Foundation that supports public-facing student writing at Smith College. Tune in next time on Women’s Rites!
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