(Image: Joelle Wright is ordained to the office of elder in Blue Springs, Missouri in 2018. Photo courtesy of Community of Christ Archives.)

This episode features how women’s ordination has changed our interviewees and how it has changed their denomination as a whole.

Featured interviewees: Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Jane Gardner, and Linda Booth.

Written and produced by: Clara Brill-Carlat, C’21; Esther Kerns, C’20; Zoe House, C’20

Duration: 15:38

Transcript

Music…. [“Bird Therapist”]

Clara: This is ‘Women’s Rites: A Podcast about Women’s Ordination,’ written and produced by students at Smith College!

Music….

Esther: Hi, I’m Esther Kerns

Clara: I’m Clara Brill-Carlat

Zoe: And I’m Zoe House. 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 theme of changes. How has ordination affected and changed the women who were ordained in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s? And how has women’s ordination changed Community of Christ as a whole?”

We’re going to start off by hearing from several ordained women about how their personal faith has changed since their ordination. Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue responded:

Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue: I don’t know that my faith has changed. … I think it’s–well, if anything… the feeling that I might get is that God can use anyone. Laughs. You know, so I don’t know if that’s so much my faith changing as… at a more personal level, embracing that understanding. I mean, it’s one thing to have it at a head level. And it’s another to have it at… both an emotional and spiritual level.

Zoe: Along with Gwendolyn, many of the women seemed to observe a difference between their faith “changing” completely versus their faith developing, growing, and maturing. Charmaine Chvala-Smith expressed this distinction well.

Charmaine Chvala-Smith: Well, my own faith just keeps changing. Not in the most elemental ways—I think at the foundation is still this absolute assurance that God is present and loving, and calling us to be our best selves, and offering to help us do that. So those pieces haven’t changed. But I was trying to think of a specific—and I think in regard to prayer, that’s a place where my faith has changed and is still changing.
Many of the ordained women talked about their faith journeys as them becoming more aware of and receptive to the Spirit. Gwendolyn observed this in her own life:

Gwendolyn: But I, one of the things that challenges me always (and I hope, in a sense, that never goes away) is equipping myself as much as I can spiritually to… to be open again to God’s Spirit to guide me in whatever it is I’m doing. And, that’s a work in progress.
One’s own faith is highly personal and intimate, so we are very grateful for being able to listen to these ordained women’s insights into their ever evolving spiritual journeys.

Clara: Next, let’s find out what advice and support these ordained women would give, based on their own experiences, to other women who are newly called to the priesthood. Jane Gardner explains that deciding whether to accept a call to the priesthood requires careful thought, as well as patience.

Jane Gardner: …so probably just my number one advice would be to not be in a hurry, to really give it a lot of prayer and thought and see if it’s a good fit, see if it makes sense in their life. And sometimes God calls us when it’s uncomfortable, it makes us stretch…

Charmaine Chvala-Smith agrees that becoming ordained is a serious, humbling process. At the same time, she advises women to not let their ordination status define them completely.

Charmaine: Don’t let this determine all of who you are. It’s part of who you are, and it’s part of your relationship with God, but your relationship with God needs to be outside of that, as well. So keep being open to—to being deepened spiritually beyond that call. It’s not the end-all. There was a time in our church where being ordained was a bit of an end-all. It proved that you had value. And don’t let it be that, because it can hold you back.

Clara: A final piece of advice for women who are newly called or ordained is to find a spiritual mentor. Linda Booth serves in this role and describes how she makes herself a resource for women who have been called.

Linda Booth: The first thing I do is share with them my testimony of their call. My assurance that God has divinely called them and we talked about it. We talk about their fears and we talk about their excitement and all the different feelings that they might be experiencing, and then we end with a prayer, where I pray a prayer blessing for each one. And then I continue to pray for them and they know that I’m praying for them and I always allow myself to be open to a phone call or an email from someone who says I have this experience, and this has been asked of me…what do you think I should do?

Clara: So now that we’ve heard the advice that women in the priesthood would like to give to newly ordained women, let’s find out what work still needs to be done to make Community of Christ more equitable and inclusive.

Esther: The women interviewed for this podcast series felt that while great strides had taken place to make the Community of Christ more inclusive and equitable, more steps still needed to be taken.

Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue talked about how a greater effort could have been taken by the Community of Christ to help newly ordained women, especially those with further marginalized identities, to move into leadership roles. When Hawks-Blue was first ordained, she felt that there

Gwendolyn: . . . were no particular–you know–efforts made to include me…

Esther: She suggested that the church should provide a clearer structure to help newly ordained women move into their roles.

Hawks-Blue also hopes that the Community of Christ improves in the support of marginalized identities:

Gwendolyn: If… the idea of a woman of color being in the priesthood did not say to them, ‘Hey, maybe she needs a little more help than some of the rest of us do. You know, I, I don’t know what went or did not go through their heads, but I know I was the only woman of color in the mission center.

Esther: Hawks-Blue talked about the role of spiritual training, saying that

Gwendolyn: I think there’s a lot of value in having that more formal training.

Esther: Jane Gardner feels that

Jane Gardner: We have work to do, to help women see themselves in these roles.

Esther: She talked about the importance of encouraging women to ask questions of

Jane: What does it mean to offer yourself in service and ministry? And pragmatically, “Are you able to do it?” And, I think, at the heart of it, “Do you feel the call? Do you feel like God’s asking you to move in this direction?”

Esther: Hawks-Blue also reflected on hopeful signs demonstrated by an increase in diversity in high-level church positions:

Gwendolyn: Now for many years, as I think I said in our previous conversation, when I would go to Conference, especially when I was younger, you would look up on the rostrum of leadership, and you’d see white men, and that was it. Period. That broadened to be some men of color…very slowly. And then within the last, hmmm, gosh, 10, 15 years, women appeared…in leading — as apostles…and, and as I said, this is the second — Stassi Cramm is now the second woman who has been a part of the First Presidency of the Church. So, the roles have been opened… I don’t know how rapidly that occured, but it has occurred…you know that women were seen in every role.

Esther: Hawks-Blue also talked about the importance of increasing the inclusivity of members’ opinions. One way this is being done is that . . .

Gwendolyn: . . .at Conference…when there are issues that are particularly sensitive or around which people can have pretty intense emotional reactions,…there are efforts to work toward more consensus. And by that I mean not up/down yes/no votes, but putting the question or concern there and, and having the opportunity to have full support, limited support, no support, you know, varying degrees, and that approach has been taken with regard to open communion, — was taken, rather — looking at questions about sexual orientation.

Esther: She feels that taking this type of approach will help the church become more inclusive for its members.

Charmaine Chvala-Smith talked about how second-wave feminism and women’s ordination in the 1980s began a process of revealing blind spots in the church and wider culture , and this process needs to continue.

Charmaine: I think the movement that feminism started making happen in our church needs to spread to other blind spots that we have. I say that any individual or any institution always has blind spots. We just don’t know what they are yet. And they are often limiting the ministry we can bring, or blinding us to how we see other people, and that there’s always a need to keep recognizing our blind spots.

Esther: She continued to reflect on what this meant for women in the church and American culture.

Charmaine: But I think as far as women are concerned, we’re in a time, in this culture, where we’ve been going backwards. We’ve been going backwards so quickly, as far as the rights of women. . . And right now there’s part of culture that are threatening women, threatening children, threatening people of color, immigrants, and my hope is that things like the struggle to ordain women in a denomination that was not prone towards that kind of change would give us eyes and a heart to be sensitive to what equality can look like, and what it needs to look like.

Esther: Finally, Charmaine thought this search for equality has continued in the church’s present-day inclusive policies on gender identity. However, she noted,

Charmaine: Unless we hang onto the recognition that it’s not a fair world, it’s a world in which those with power continue to make sure they have power, and that means there’s somebody who’s less than you. And if we don’t question that, then we’ve lost some of the momentum of where we’ve been.”

Zoe: As we’ve heard today, many changes have come out of the ordination of women in Community of Christ, both on a Church-wide level and on the individual level of women who were called to the priesthood in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Although the work is not complete in the Church, during the 35 years since women’s ordination began, Community of Christ has made significant strides towards inclusion and equity.

Clara: This has been our final episode in the series on women’s ordination in Community of Christ; thank you for tuning in to ‘Women’s Rites’!”

[Theme Music]

Clara: Special thanks to Gwendolyn Hawks-Blue, Charmaine Chvala-Smith, Linda Booth, 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!