No surprise here: Clergywomen have a hard time moving up in religious organizations because of their gender.
Women now make up 51 percent of the students in divinity school. But in the mainline Protestant churches that have been ordaining women for decades, women account for only a small percentage — about 3 percent, according to one survey by a professor at Duke University — of pastors who lead large congregations, those with average Sunday attendance over 350. In evangelical churches, most of which do not ordain women, some women opt to leave for other denominations that will accept them as ministers. Women from historically black churches who want to ascend to the pulpit often start their own congregations.
I’m still unclear on how having a vagina automatically makes you less able to work as a religious leader. And it seems to me that the problem lays with the individuals who have trouble recognizing authority when it comes from women, not from the women themselves:
The Rev. Dottie Escobedo-Frank, pastor of Crossroads United Methodist Church in Phoenix, said that at every church where she has served, people have told her they were leaving because she is a woman.
At a large church where she was an associate pastor, a colleague told her that when she was in the pulpit, he could not focus on what she was saying because she is a woman. A man in the congregation covered his eyes whenever she preached.
So because these guys have issues with women, we’ll disallow women from attaining higher positions. And then there’s the Biblical authority:
Conflicting interpretations of the Bible underlie debates over women’s authority and ordination. Opponents of their ordination cite St. Paul’s words in I Timothy 2:12, in which he says, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” But proponents point to St. Paul again in Galatians 3:28, which says, “There is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The Bible says a whole lot of conflicting things, and sensitive social issues like this one often come down to which quotes one selectively chooses to support their position. But if we choose the Timothy quote, then we should further recognize that it wasn’t relegated simply to preaching — if we believe that no women should teach or have authority over men, then every female teacher should quit her job. Every female writer and blogger should drop her pen or take her hands off the keyboard, especially if they’re writing with the hope of informing their audience.
The country’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, does not encourage the ordination of women, although some individual congregations and other Baptist groups do.
Dr. Kenyn M. Cureton, vice president for convention relations at the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “The biblical passages that restrict the office of pastor to men do not negate the inherent worth and equal value of both women and men before God, but rather focus on the assignment of different roles and responsibilities to the genders.”
Men are valuable for working, teaching, informing and preaching. Women are valuable for staying silent and letting them do their jobs. Who says that’s not equality?