Women Clergy

This paper cannot test the correctness of the widely noted gender distinctions often described as typical of males and females in U.S. culture. It seeks to avoid either simplistic acceptance or dismissal of such comparisons by searching in the deep structure of biographical data from women clergy for indications of how religious institutions may be affected by female leadership. Empirical evidence for the broader significance of my findings must come from other procedures in other studies.

In Western history, as males have devised intentional communities, they have tended to impose an abstract organizational design on existential phenomena, either as a logical extension of philosophic ideals or as a rational progression toward some goal. Churches could hardly escape at least some structural revision due to the leadership of women clergy with a contrasting disposition to order communal life according to consideration for ecological factors and anticipated individual/personal consequences.

As black people in the United States found out in the 1960s, churches can be strategic places for certain social interest groups to promote change, both by investing in political-prophetic stands and by offering revised worldviews. The social location of women ministers forces them to encounter attitudes (within and around themselves) that specially alert them both to the community changes they themselves represent and to the cost/benefit balance of becoming vocal advocates and interpreters of the change momentum. They are in a key spot to image and facilitate experimental models of religious community. We should expect such models to point in the direction of more equalitarian relationships, more androgynous identities and roles, and "more flat" institutional organization (i.e., networks rather than hierarchies).

There are some probable areas of conflict between existing congregations and female ministers. Insofar as membership needs are interpreted and felt as needs for external authority regarding correctness about cognitive and normative principles, women clergy may be disorienting and offensive, both symbolically and stylistically. For persons expecting disagreements to be settled through assertion of rationally superior arguments or through strategic application of social sanctions, interpersonal process (which is the more characteristic female mode) may seem exceedingly insecure, muddled, hazardous, and interminable.

Effective conflict resolution most creatively involves the modal techniques of both genders in a developmental counterpoint. That is, on one level, rational analysis and contractual agreements may facilitate specific strategies of short-term cooperation; on another level, good faith exchanges of information may foster mutual sensitivity, empathy, and support for long-term trust. As religious institutions distribute the clergy role among male and female ministers, the usual ways of building nurturant solidarity must undergo change of some sort. It remains to be seen what kind of change is indeed occurring. I am interested in what type of religious community is coming into being and how it accommodates and expresses the presence of women clergy.

Research is just beginning to address such questions. Important insights await (1) comparisons of female and male clergy (e.g., as to self-perception, institutional functions, or macrostructural influences); (2) comparisons of levels of orthodoxy among denominations with ease of access (for women) to ordained status; (3) assessment of effect, over time, of women clergy on both official and popular versions of theology.