(Image: The “Quilt of Belonging” on display at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Toronto, Canada, 2018. Photo courtesy of John Hamer.)
This episode features women reflecting on their interactions across denominational lines. They relate stories of working with other women clergy, sharing with women in denominations that do not ordain women, attending ecumenical conferences, and serving on local interfaith alliances.
Featured interviewees: Jane Gardner, Marge Troeh, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Becky Savage, Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue, and Carolyn Brock
Written and produced by: Lily McGartland, C’20; Annalie Gilbert Keith, C’22; Svetlana Roth, C’22
Duration: 17:00
Transcript
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ANNALIE: This is Women’s Rites: A Podcast about Women’s Ordination, written and produced by students at Smith College!
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LILY: Hi, I’m Lily.
ANNALIE: I’m Annalie.
SVETLANA: And I’m Svetlana. 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, 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 important ordinations, we’re taking a look back on the journey towards women’s ordination in Community of Christ. To do so, we’ve interviewed some of the first women ordained—women who went on to be leaders in Community of Christ.
LILY: Each episode in this series investigates a different topic, and today, in our sixth episode, we’re going to look at issues of interfaith ministry. We asked these women to reflect back on their experiences across denominational lines, with other women clergy, and with denominations that do not permit women to be ordained.
SVETLANA: We initially asked our interviewees how they have served in ecumenical or interfaith spaces, and how have people reacted in those spaces to their ordination. Many religions and Christian denominations do not ordain women. However, despite these differences between Community of Christ and other faiths, a variety of ecumenical relationships, connections, and interactions exist between them. We wondered what these interactions were like for the ordained women we interviewed and whether or not they felt accepted and respected by those they connected with.
JANE GARDNER: I serve often for the Church in ecumenical ways. So for example, when 9/11 happened, the Presidency of the Church decided to open up our auditorium in Kansas City to the community and said to me and one of the Apostles, [they] asked if we would work with the Ministerial Alliance to plan something while that space was open for people to come in because people were really upset and searching for answers after 9/11, and so I helped lead that effort and it was quite interesting. The Catholic Church, of course, was very present and I had really good relationships with the liturgists and people involved in that community, and I really think it boils down to relationships, because I had good relationships with them, they were not opposed to me being a minister even though in their own church, women are not ordained. [c. 49:30]
SVETLANA: Jane Gardner is the first woman to serve as Presiding Evangelist in Community of Christ. Marge Troeh, one of the most important figures in the fight for women’s ordination in the Church, also spoke about her interfaith interactions in the 70s and early 80s.
MARGE TROEH: Well, I said I was on the national board of church women United, I was on their ecumenical development team, and we were having a team meeting…Went up to the airport to pick them up and they said, “You know, we got talking on the plane and we realized we have never worshiped in a church of your faith. Would it be possible for us to come and worship at your church On Sunday?” And so, there was the one time when there was an intersection between women of my interfaith community, and members of my Community of Christ community were there together. [36:01]
SVETLANA: Charmaine Chvala-Smith, who was among the first women ordained by the church in 1985, and now serves as the Community of Christ Seminary’s chaplain, described her experiences serving among members of other faiths.
CHARMAINE CHVALA-SMITH: So, one of my probably earliest involvements in an ecumenical setting once I was ordained was in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and in the hospital there, they didn’t have a full-time chaplain, and so various denominations in the area had banded together, and they had a training program so that basically they had the hospital covered all the time, with ministers from one denomination or another. And we had several in our congregation who were involved in that hospital chaplain program. And so that was one of the first opportunities I had as an ordained person to be involved in ecumenical and community ministry…There was the ecumenical part as far as the fellow chaplains, but then there was also the ecumenical part within the visits to patients. And, of course, the main thing there was that we were not promoting our own denominations; we were present for the people and the need to pray with them or just be present with them. [1:34:20]
LILY: And moving onto our second question, we asked Community of Christ ordained women if being ordained had changed their perspective on other religions or denominations’ choices and opinions on women’s ordination. In regard to the question, Jane Gardner responded:
JANE: When I look at other denominations, I think it’s important to offer to share our experience with other denominations and I, I don’t know, I continue to have really interesting insights. So, I went to an SDI, which is Spiritual Directors International conference, near Omaha and almost everybody there were women—there were almost no men—and you know spiritual direction has kind of grown up through the Catholic faith, the Catholic Church, but has become more and more ecumenical. Well I was so interested in hearing the women, the Catholic women, talk about being spiritual directors. And the more I got to thinking about it in my own perspective I could not understand how women in the Catholic Church could, justify is probably not the right word, but live with the fact that they could never be in the priesthood—they could never be ordained. But going to this conference, I’m listening to these Catholic women, and I realized that, through this spiritual direction avenue, they were expressing their calling, their sense of ministry, and they were just doing it differently than I was. And even though their denomination doesn’t allow women to be ordained, they were still finding ways to offer ministry. So, to me, that was really has been eye-opening, so that it isn’t, “You have to be Priesthood for any ministry to happen,”—that’s not true!
LILY: Ordained in 1992, Becky Savage was the first woman to serve in the First Presidency in the church’s history. She shared her perspective on women’s ordination with us.
BECKY SAVAGE: I think if anything I’m probably more sensitive to those who have a yearning for their own ordination…We walk with other denominational women who are serving in ministry and have their own obstacles and run across their own issues, and we can be collaborative with them because we are women who walk side by side with men in an interfaith or ecumenical way. So, there are very few denominations who have ordained women and so when you walk side by side with other ordained women you are colleagues and you find collaboration because you walk side-by-side in common, with common issues. So, in that sense I think it’s just more of a sensitivity and an empathy for other women, ordained women, and for those who do not have an opportunity to be ordained because of the denominations in which they have their faith.
LILY: And finally, Charmain Chvala-Smith explained her feelings on other religious groups opinions on women’s ordination.
CHARMAINE: Perhaps initially I was quite understanding of why denominations struggle with ordaining women. But I think the longer that it has become normative in my denomination, the harder it is to imagine not having ordained women allows you to treat women equally. It has been harder to imagine that not having ordained women means you can still treat women as of equal worth to men. So I probably have become less patient, less tolerant over time, with denominations that, especially those who even refuse to begin a discussion, wherever it might take them, for those who have already determined that God is male, or, you know, whatever is the block, or that women are less than, or not as spiritual, or not as good prayers, or whatever it is they might use as their justification, I’m finding myself less able to respect that. And that’s maybe not a good thing on my part, but because it’s just become so, so ingrained in our denomination to see there doesn’t need to be a distinction between men and women when it comes to bringing God’s love to the world. And so, yeah, I’m a little less tolerant than I once was.
LILY: Each of these women, in their own way, discussed the external and internal tension they face in their interactions with women—whether ordained or not—of other denominations.
ANNALIE: The third, and final, question we asked our interviewees was, “Do you think that women’s ordination has changed the relationship that Community of Christ has with the LDS Church? What about other churches?” Most of the answers we received focused primarily on the LDS church as opposed to other churches and no two responses particularly echoed each other. Some responses, such as Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue’s, the first African American woman ordained by the Church, emphasized the positive relationship between the two denominations.
GWENDOLYN HAWKS-BLUE: In very brief encounters I’ve had with some Mormon women at a… At a (oh God)…John Whitmer society event I went to. There was appreciation for…the fact that women were being used in ministry in Community of Christ. You know, so, I think that there was a positiveness about their relationship with the women who were priesthood members there. Overall, you know, it’s simply for those individuals to…to see God’s work in a faith community. I can’t speak for how it affected those–the individuals, but…I think positive.
ANNALIE: Here, Gwendolyn implies a positive coexistence, or a level of respect without a desire to change the other denomination’s structure, between the two denominations. Although we only have one perspective, from this response we can conclude that there is a great level of respect between the two denominations as they view each other’s systems of ministry, prioritizing each denomination’s relationship with God over the priesthood positions anyone can hold. Another perspective which was introduced by Charmaine Chvala-Smith is the idea that Community of Christ has become a safe exit from the LDS Church for those who are bothered by the restrictions on priesthood. Specifically:
CHARMAINE: For some LDS folks, our church has been…kind of a waystation, that we’re a place where they can come, they can recover, they can be reminded they are loved by God, there’s a bigger world out there that can and wants to recognize them as Christians and their commitments as Christian…We may not be what some LDS seekers need, permanently. But we can be a waystation that gives them a safe exit point and can help them start to adapt to a bigger Christian world. And sometimes we’ll be able to help them move onto a denomination that will be a good fit for them, or maybe if they decide not to align with another denomination, at least to know that there are people that believe that this God is a loving God, and that they can still have a relationship with God—they may have to let go of some of the images of God that they have, but that the experience of God that they’ve had is not invalid, and that they can perhaps let themselves be known as a loved person to themselves, as well as by God. So, we can give them that.
ANNALIE: Charmaine’s response implies a level of discord between the two churches that Gwendolyn did not allude to. While this quote speaks positively of the relationship between Community of Christ and those leaving the LDS Church, it indicates the fundamental differences in priesthood structure as a point of contention between the LDS Church and Community of Christ. Carolyn Brock, once active in formation of the Church’s ministries and now retired, also points to this discord in discussing her own view of the LDS Church as Community of Christ moved towards women’s ordination and the LDS Church maintained their patriarchal structure.
CAROLYN BROCK: It only strengthened my idea that they that maybe the LDS Church remained more and has remained more patriarchal, and that they took some of the things that we may be thought of as distortions that came out of the novel period, and kept those not all of those but many of those. and I, I see those as maybe distortions or patriarchal claims of movements in the tradition. So, I might even be more critical if you will, in my thinking towards them.
ANNALIE: Between these three responses, we can see that there is a wide range in women’s views of the relationship between the LDS Church and Community of Christ; some view the relationship as respectful and distant while others sense some tension between the two denominations.
SVETLANA: In our next episode, “Changes,” we’ll look at how women’s ordination has impacted these women’s lives and how it has changed the denomination as a whole.
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ANNALIE: That concludes our podcast for today. Special thanks to Jane Gardner, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Marge Troeh, Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue, Becky Savage, and Carolyn Brock. 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. See you next time on Women’s Rites!
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