Narrating the Church: Protestant Women Pastors Challenge

Nostalgic Desire

Gaye M. Bammert

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Volume 26, Number 2, Fall 2010,

pp. 153-174 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/394798

Access provided by McGill University Libraries (21 Mar 2018 20:38 GMT)
 JFSR 26.2 (2010) 153–174

Narrating the Church

Protestant Women Pastors Challenge Nostalgic Desire

Gaye M. Bammert

During the women’s liberation movement of the sixties, evan-

gelical (also called biblical or Christian) feminists began to ex-
plore what “liberation” meant within their faith traditions. In this
paper, Bammert situates the voices of contemporary Christian
women pastors within American evangelical feminism. Over the
course of two years, she interviewed twenty women pastors from
diverse Christian communities and discovered rhetorically nu-
anced ways for understanding and living a complex faith tradi-
tion. Consequently, women pastors occupying spaces, places,
and roles traditionally gendered male exposes new ways of think-
ing about the female subject-in-relation. Additionally, women
pastors counter contemporary desires to sediment Christian
theology and practices in warmly remembered pasts or in defer-
ring life to idealized futures through the creative crafting of the
present. The results are rhetorical resources for integrating tran-
scendence and immanence within the lived moment and new
ways of thinking about feminist rhetoric, cultural practices, and
social change.

If she is to be able to contain, to envelop, she must have her own enve-
lope. Not only her clothing and ornaments of seduction, but her skin.
—Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference

Roxanne Mountford recently completed a study of the way Protestant

women pastors occupy the rhetorical space of their church pulpits. She describes
the physical space of these pulpits as both a location that carries connotations of
masculine authority as well as rhetorical possibilities to disrupt and reshape this
authority. In order to understand what women pastors take on when they step
154 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

into these gendered spaces, Mountford spends time defining what she calls the
“manly” art of preaching. She deduces through her analysis of preaching manu-
als that as a “cult of manhood” gave way to a more virile “‘muscular Christian-
ity’ of the late nineteenth century, these preaching manuals reflect a national
anxiety over the status of white men as well as institutional anxiety within main-
line Protestant denominations over the declining status of the minister.” Gail
Bederman makes the same claim more generally in her book Manliness and
Civilization, as she discusses a confluence of cultural forces challenging tradi-
tional masculinity at the turn of the nineteenth century. “These challenges from
women, workers, and the changing economy not only affected men’s sense of
identity and authority, they even affected men’s view of the male body.” Mount-
ford argues that this supposed crisis of masculinity is what shifted attention in
homiletics from persuasion of one’s congregation to recasting the “character” of
the preacher into a true “man.” She notes this shift with solemnity:
While it is tempting to view the treatises of these preacher-scholars as
quaint relics of the Victorian era, they are part of a larger trend in Amer-
ican culture of investing in national manhood, with the character traits
attributed to leader-heroes (primarily white, but increasingly extended
to heterosexual men of other races) modeled after the ideal man of the
late Victorian period. Character training for men and boys is still a na-
tional calling for Boy Scout leaders, Promise Keepers, and Pop Warner
coaches.

Mountford quotes Dana Nelson’s National Manhood and her assessment that
American investment in masculinity culminates in expectations surrounding the
office of president. “‘The president . . . embodies democracy as a paradigm of
national manhood’s unhealthy desires for unity, wholeness, and self-sameness.’
. . . That is, we hold onto this deeply strange cultural commitment to white male
heroes because of a desire for their imagined qualities.” One may also note
that Barack Obama’s 2008 election was in large part due to one of his central
campaign themes: America is in need of change, and Americans—unified—are
up to the challenge to create this change. As Robert Rowland and John Jones
argue in their article about Obama and the American dream, Obama invites the
audience back into participation with government leaders, and suggests that
government officials have not upheld their part of the democratic bargain. Ana-
lyzing Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention address, Rowland and

 Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Car-
bondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 40.
 Ibid., 41.
 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
 Mountford, Gendered Pulpit, 42.
 Ibid., 43.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 155

Jones state, “Obama was able to create a strong sense of identification, not only
because of his own personal identity but also because he chose to emphasize the
interconnectedness of values shared by all Americans, including faith, freedom,
family, tolerance, and patriotism.” When Obama seemingly steps away from
this message of investment in American values, anxieties emerge, as many inci-
dents along his campaign trail and his choices as president reveal (for example,
outrage over his associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright). Ultimately,
Mountford argues that the values implicit in an audience’s acceptance of white,
male, heterosexual authority persists in Protestant culture.
Even though many feminist activists within diverse religious traditions are
today challenging androcentrism on all fronts (biblical interpretation, religious
ritual, and pastoral care, just to name a few), I argue that preponderance of
masculine authority continues through subtle longings for an imagined past or
idealized future. Greg Dickinson in his discussion of memory notes why these
longings exist: “Contemporary urban experience combined with the growth of
consumer culture makes the maintenance of stable coherent identities difficult.
Memory offers to consumers the possibility of coherent identities firmly situated
within a warmly remembered past.” Ann Burlein argues this point in relation to
James Dobson’s Focus on the Family with a mailing list of 3.5 million and a bud-
get of over $100 million: “Dobson generates this tremendous appeal by casting
the conservative politics of Bible-based family values as a countermemory to
modern life.” The success of groups like Focus on the Family lies within their
capacity to diminish fears surrounding the seemingly violent, conflict-laden,
and turbulent times we live in, while creating a world that coherently orders
the narrative fragments of daily life. “By exploiting the gaps among identity,
memory, and desire, nostalgic invocations of the traditional Bible-based family
construct people against themselves, pitting the way we are against the way we
wish we were.”10
While the appeal of memory is the way it orders and stabilizes the chaos of
the present, memory “places” may also colonize individuals’ lives within an over-

 Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American
Politics: Barack Obama’s Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quar-
terly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 425–48, quotation on 437.
 Mountford, Gendered Pulpit, 42.
 Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pas-
adena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1–27, quotation on 1–2. For more on nostalgia, see
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday (New York: Free Press, 1979); Mario Jacoby, The Longing for
Paradise, trans. Myron B. Gubitz (Boston: Sigo Press, 1985); and Christopher Shaw and Malcolm
Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1989).
 Ann Burlein, “Countermemory on the Right: The Case of Focus on the Family,” in Acts of
Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 208.
10 Ibid.
156 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

arching cultural agenda, ultimately limiting and confining self and community.11
One implication of this colonization is suppression of dissent and tempering the
critical disposition of the audience, necessary to guard against manipulation and
demagoguery. However, memory “places” are also inventive. Dickinson argues
that memory operates as a “grammar or set of resources and structures, with
which, through rhetorical turns, individuals invent rhetorical performances of
themselves.”12 Feminist theologians adopt this “grammar” through challenges
to traditional interpretations of scripture. Additionally, I argue that women pas-
tors use this grammar to encourage their faith communities to reorient toward
the messiness of daily life, and in the process, create space for novel expressions
of self and community. In this paper, I investigate evangelical and mainline
Protestant women pastors’ understanding of faith and its practice as a means
to understand the workings of nostalgic desire and the rhetorical crafting of a
viable feminist posture and politics of change.

Nostalgia and Biblical Feminism

In recent years, the concept of memory as a cultural location or “site” has
taken on salience. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith note the importance of
cultural memory in feminist studies in their introduction to the concept for
a symposium in the journal Signs. Hirsch and Smith argue that the notion of
cultural memory has always been important for feminists, since their project is
inherently one of reclamation of histories, bodies, experiences, and narratives.13
Admittedly, bringing the past into the present or silenced voices into being is
only one aspect of the heterogeneity of memory. Nostalgia adds another dimen-
sion to notions of cultural and collective memory as it is less about product and
more about process; yearnings for a different time and place. Janice Doane and
Devon Hodges argue that nostalgic longings for less turbulent times actually
fueled the American antifeminist backlash in the 1980s. “Nostalgia: nostos: the
return home. Nostalgia permeates American politics and mass culture. . . . As
feminists, we argue that nostalgic writers construct their visions of a golden past
to authenticate women’s traditional place and to challenge the outspoken femi-
nist criticisms of it.”14 Dickinson argues that “memories place both landscapes
and individuals within a stabilizing and authenticating past,” helping people feel
safe and secure in a seemingly chaotic world.15

11 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 2.

12 Ibid.
13 Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction,”
Signs 28 (2002): 1–19.
14 Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference (New York: Methuen,
1987), 3.
15 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 1.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 157

Made tenuous by postmodern consumer culture, contemporary identi-

ties are performances that utilize the resources of memory; these per-
formances occur in and are structured by landscapes of consumption.
These performative identities, while structured, are not determined.
Rather, memory—encoded, invoked and materialized in urban land-
scapes—serves as a grammar or set of resources and structures, with
which, through rhetorical turns, individuals invent rhetorical perfor-
mances of themselves.16

Two elements are important to highlight here: memory is implicitly relational—

both individual and communal—in that it involves individual performances of
identity for others, and memory “places” are stabilizing sites where people are
more likely to consume.
The notion of memory is particularly provocative in relation to commu-
nities that maintain strict gender and racial hierarchies, privileging some and
oppressing others. For example, Margaret Bendroth, somewhat baffled at what
brings women to some of the more extreme Christian fundamentalist sects and,
consequently, what keeps them there, suggests:
Women, like men, found in the fundamentalist movement a clear,
though perhaps narrow, call to Christian vocation and a language of cul-
tural critique that simplified the daunting range of choices in a secular
lifestyle. Women perhaps especially appreciated the movement’s high
standards for family life, still the primary area of concern for most mid-
twentieth-century women. Fundamentalist churches upheld women’s
role in the family and, even more important, provided a forum for like-
minded women to air common fears and hopes for their children. In
short, women’s stake in the success of the fundamentalist movement was
at least as strong as the ambitions that drove its masculine leadership.17

It seems that women are drawn to Christian fundamentalism due to its simul-
taneous ability to order realities while allowing for complex performances of
individuality. Dickinson, noting the power of gardens in Renaissance Rome to
trigger memories, states that “these memories served the rhetorical purpose of
creating and maintaining individuals’ sense of themselves within a larger cul-
tural network.”18 Although the world may be ordered through these collective
memory sites, in the case of Christian fundamentalism, I believe the price to
be intractably high. Many evangelical and ecumenical feminists would agree,
and have fought evangelical masculinity’s hegemonic influence for at least two
centuries.
Biblical feminist (also known as evangelical feminist) concerns evoke desire

16 Ibid., 2.
17 Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1993), 11.
18 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 3.
158 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

to be deemed worthy, considered whole, and fully accepted as women in rela-

tion to God, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Their interpretation of biblical scriptures,
their investigation of feminine images of the Divine such as Sophia, the wisdom
of God, and their challenge to church traditions emerge from a refusal to be-
lieve that there is a divine mandate for women’s subordination. As one biblical
feminist poetically explains, “I am a Christian feminist because the organized
church has carelessly thrust women into a soul-bending, spirit-crushing, ungodly
mold that makes it nigh impossible to dream the dreams and see the visions that
God has for us all.”19 In the process of this demand for value, biblical feminists
narratively reorient to God’s individual and social materialization in the world.
Biblical feminism is therefore inclusive of a wide range of faith orientations.
Biblical feminism as a social movement may be tracked through a reinvigo-
rated human agency cultivated by the 1960s “secular” feminist movement in
America. Initially defining evangelical feminism was their support for the Equal
Rights Amendment and liberal feminist advocacy for equality in rule and role.
Before their first meeting in Washington, D.C., a small group of women and
men drafted several affirmations, including the statement that all persons, male
and female, are created in the image of God (Gal 3:28 niv), a call for mutual
submission between men and women, and equality in family roles, business
employment, education, and church positions. These affirmations eventually
coalesced into what was called the “Chicago Declaration,” which stated, “We
acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women
to irresponsible passivity. So we call men and women to mutual submission
and active discipleship.”20 This affirmation circulated among evangelicals, gath-
ering endorsement and providing an audience for an initial meeting of up to
thirty men and women in 1974. Among these women were Letha Scanzoni,
Nancy Hardesty, Virginia Mollenkott, and Cheryl Forbes, an editorial assistant
at Christianity Today. By the time the Evangelical Women’s Caucus (today the
Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus) conference rolled around in
1975, three hundred and fifty women were in attendance. Conference attend-
ees were energized by a book published the previous year, All We’re Meant to
Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, by Nancy Hardesty and Letha
Scanzoni, which voiced many evangelical women’s perspectives and concerns.
All We’re Meant to Be played a pivotal role in the early evangelical feminist
movement as a consciousness-raising tool. The book received acclaim among
evangelicals for the way it addressed issues of gender in relation to Christian
thought and practice. Scanzoni and Hardesty relied upon historical-cultural
criticism to help place traditional passages of scripture that limited women’s

19 Juanita W. Potter, “Why Am I a Feminist?” in Wisdom of the Daughters, ed. Reta H. Finger
and Kari Sandhaas (Philadelphia: Innisfree, 2001), xvii.
20 Pamela Cochran. “Evangelical Boundaries and the Threat of Biblical Feminism, 1973–Pres-
ent: A Theological and Institutional History” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2001), 42.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 159

role in church, family, and society in context. Pam Cochran concludes that this
contextual biblical hermeneutic helped Scanzoni and Hardesty create new
precedent for gender roles and relations. “For a text to be situationally limited
meant that its teachings were not intended to be normative commands for all
people at all times, but were provisional principles given to a specific church to
deal with a particular situation.”21 Hardesty and Scanzoni’s provisional versus
normative principles are notable in their interpretation of the creation story,
where Adam is made from the dust of the ground and Eve is made from Adam’s
rib (Genesis 1, 2 niv). They refute the notion that Eve is Adam’s whole or an-
drogynous other half and affirm that she is his equal, “taken from his side,” as
well as his beloved, “taken from his heart.”22 Additionally, they reorient toward
the notion of “helper,” reading the Genesis scripture that states Eve’s creation as
Adam’s helpmate, by extending the meaning of helper to superordinate rather
than subordinate.23 They glean this meaning from the many uses of helper in the
Bible referring to God’s help for those in time of need, such as Ps 121:1,2 niv:
“From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord.” Hardesty
and Scanzoni continue to problematize women’s subordinate status to men by
noting Jesus’s affirmation of women and silence concerning marital and sexual
roles. Also, they challenge Paul’s (whose writings are traditionally used to justify
male-female hierarchy) demarcation of women’s subjugation to men by noting
the discontinuity of his claims. For example, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul
states that there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for
all are one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28 niv). Yet in 1 Cor 11:3–10 niv, Paul com-
mands women to pray and prophesy with their heads covered: “A man ought
not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is
the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.” Hardesty and Scan-
zoni thoroughly temper traditional interpretations of scripture by raising dis-
continuities of its meaning and reliability. Through this they demonstrate how
conservative orthodox positions on the role of women are value laden rather
than objective, promoting an epistemic skepticism that lays the groundwork for
their feminist activism.
After the first meeting in 1975, the evangelical feminist movement gained
momentum over the next ten years, publishing and organizing nationally with
local chapters. One publication (although separate from the Evangelical Wom-
en’s Caucus [EWC]) was the theological journal Daughters of Sarah (DOS),
which had twelve hundred subscribers by 1978. The journal’s format included
biblical interpretations, book reviews, poetry, and biographies of “foremothers”

21 Ibid., 44.
22 Letha D. Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to
Women’s Liberation (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1974), 26.
23 Ibid., 26.
160 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

in ministry.24 Daughters of Sarah initially started with a budget of thirty dollars

and charged subscribers one dollar per issue as the editors assumed they would
have exhausted the discussion of women’s issues in one year. The result of two
hundred initial subscribers with two-year subscriptions, however, was that the
journal continued to publish. Cochran notes that most of these first subscribers
to DOS were white middle-class professional women with a minimum of an un-
dergraduate education.25 These women aged with the journal, which published
its final volume in 1996. For two decades, DOS utilized women’s experiences of
faith as the fulcrum for their social critique and activism, which continues today
through the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus’ ([EEWC], EWC’s
successor) quarterly publication, Christian Feminism Today. Sue Horner, one
of the editorial board members of DOS explained that the journal’s purpose was
to provide “herstories [to] inspire others to continue to put women’s experiences
in the center and to remember that conversion to Christian feminism is both
personal and social.”26 Centering women’s experience in evangelical feminist
biblical interpretation and social critique cultivated voices in the early phases of
the movement, but ultimately led to irreconcilable differences and the caucus’s
split in 1986.
Valerie Saiving, in her 1960 groundbreaking article on feminist theology
and gender identity, claimed that women of faith value their femininity; “they
do not wish to discard their sexual identity but rather gather it up into a higher
unity. They want, in other words, to be both women and full human beings.”27
Serene Jones notes the need for this fullness in women’s material lives through
Luce Irigaray’s concept of an “envelope” in relation to Christian Reformed doc-
trines of sanctification and justification. Irigaray demonstrates in Speculum of
the Other Woman how women are defined according to masculine desire, hav-
ing no identity of their own “apart from the ‘men’ they were constructed to
define.”28 This led Irigaray to conclude in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that
women need a containing space or “envelope” that structures identity, drawing
together a coherent self without removing the self from the world or the rela-
tions that make up one’s existence. “The purpose of woman’s envelopment is
not simply to enclose her in her own desires but to give her sufficient definition
to meet and be met by ‘others’ in a play of ‘wonder.’ ”29 Irigaray also suggests

24 Cochran, “Evangelical Boundaries,” 61.

25 Ibid., 62–63.
26 Ibid., 233.
27 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (April
1960): 100–112, quotation on 108.
28 Quoted in Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: For-
tress, 2000), 42. See also Luce Irigaray’s writings prompting Jones’s analysis: Speculum of the Other
Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), and An Ethics of Sexual
Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
29 Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 43.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 161

through her enveloped woman—her means of becoming herself apart from

men’s desires—that God “authors the space of her becoming,” where the tools
to understand and critique one’s oppression are theologically conceived and
practiced in communities of faith.30
Evangelical feminists split institutionally when they could not reconcile dif-
ferences over emerging social issues in relation to Christian faith and practice,
such as homosexuality, abortion, and feminist activism. However, their unity of
voice in the early stages of the movement whittled away at a masculine persona
that characterized the evangelical experience. Additionally, their critical herme-
neutics mapped out novel means of narrating salvation connected to the reali-
ties of human existence. Jones explains this perspective through a rhetorical re-
ordering of the Christian doctrines of sanctification and justification that, rather
than start with interpretation, tradition, or text, begin with women’s concrete,
material, lived experience. This reordering consequently challenges distorted
power relationships between men and women, encouraging both to see the way
constructions of faith condition perspectives of the “other.” It is in this recon-
struction of faith that I turn to my interviews with women pastors to see how
they continue the work of Christian feminist activists.31 The themes I discov-
ered through our interviews surrounded notions of community and the function
of the church: “calling,” narrative concepts of “community,” and descriptions of
“ministry” or how the church reaches out to the world. For this paper, I focus
on the first theme, “calling.”

Calling
One of the first questions I asked women pastors in our interviews was,
“How did you come to this position? Tell me a little about your journey to the
position of pastor.” These women loved telling their stories, each markedly dif-
ferent. From the very beginning of the interviews, I noticed that they used the
term calling when they talked about their process of ordination as well as com-
ing to their current position of pastor. As each woman talked about her decision
to become a pastor she articulated different kinds of struggles. Some struggles
were profound. One pastor was forced to get extra seminary education after she
completed her Master of Divinity at one school in order to persuade her board
for her ordination. “I was allowed to be ordained in this class, but they, even
though I had my MDiv, they made me go back to Calvin Seminary and finish
another sem[ester], do some more work there. . . . And the spring of that year

30 Ibid.
31 Over the course of two years, I interviewed many women pastors from diverse Christian
denominations: Presbyterian USA, Community Church, Bible Church, Disciples of Christ, United
Church of Christ, United Methodist, Cooperative Baptist, Southern Baptist, Ecumenical, Assem-
blies of God, and one Catholic nun.
162 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

they tried to rescind their decision.”32 They ordained her that year, however,
and she became the fourth woman within the Christian Reformed tradition
and the first woman west of Michigan within her faith tradition to be ordained.
Her struggle was lengthy—her education and ordination process took twelve
years—and included many debates with church boards, district and regional,
about her qualification for the role of pastor. I asked her why she persevered,
and she answered: “The call was so clear. And I have my whole life been so
grateful for that because otherwise I would have quit so long ago. . . . My deci-
sion was whether to remain in the denomination; it was never to abandon the
idea of being a minister.”33
The struggles that women pastors go through seem to involve their identi-
ties: who they are in relation to God, what their purpose is in the world, and
what strategies to employ when determining whether and how to continue the
process, which is exactly how one of the ecumenical pastors defined “calling.”
“I mean it’s about timing and about need presenting itself, and God’s drawing
me, which I believe actually manifests itself as that desire. So it wasn’t a voice.
It was a process.”34
The decision to pursue the vocation of pastor was not easy for many of the
women. One pastor moved into a position titled “Pastor to Women” because,
in her terms, “our church was ready to add a woman to staff and they had a
director of women’s ministries prior to my coming on, but it had been like ten
years.”35 Yet her case is the exception, not the rule. R.N. pursued ordination
because she had grown up in a church that encouraged her pastoral care gifts
and gave her plenty of opportunity to lead, encourage, and inspire. Her ministry
experiences as well as her love of theology took her to seminary at Regent Col-
lege in Canada. However, seminary offered her a very different experience. She
tells a story of a colleague who found out about her pursuit of ordination and at
the time borrowed her computer.
And um, I’ll never forget he comes knocking on my door, this ashen
white face and says: “I can’t borrow your computer anymore.” And I
thought, “okay that’s fine,” and I found out later that he told a friend that
for me to become a pastor was like becoming a whore. I am not kidding,
that was his language. . . . I was accused of seeking professor’s attentions
and um, I kind of blocked it, but it was just this sense that I was too

32 E.R., interview with author, January 21, 2003, Mill Creek Community Church, Seattle,
Washington. In order to conduct each interview, I had to gain human subjects clearance through my
university. Part of the package for human subject clearance included a contract assuring anonym-
ity to each interviewee. For this reason, I use the initials of the pastors interviewed throughout my
paper. In some cases, exact dates have been omitted.
33 Ibid.
34 P.S., interview with author, November 7, 2002, Church of Mary Magdalene, Seattle,
Washington.
35 M.K., interview with author, June 5, 2002, Cedar Mill Bible Church, Portland, Oregon.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 163

needy for male attention; I was too friendly. When I look back on whom
that came from was also a needy man as well, but that shut me down, it
really shut me down. I went through a period where I didn’t wear any
makeup, I wore my hair back, and I wore plain clothes. But I withdrew,
I withdrew, I withdrew.36

R.N.’s seminary experience located her calling in her gendered body. Indeed
her pursuit of God could not be abstracted from her body. In response to these
attacks, she moved toward a more androgynous performance of self—one might
even argue “masculine” performance—in order to reconcile apparent tensions
between her body and her vocation. She notes now that she looks on those
struggles as seemingly innocuous, but these forms of oppression were the be-
ginning of her pursuit of a deeper relationship with God and in the process a
more holistic sense of self. The option to just believe in God was not left open
to her.
In fact, R.N. talks about questioning God in the midst of these challenges.
She asked God, “If for some reason you are a God who doesn’t want women to
do this, to have these gifts, then you have to show me. . . . You have to show me,
you have to help me, and I’m willing to still believe in you . . . , but you have got
to show me why because it makes no sense to me.”37 Every time she would get
to this point she felt God’s voice, “‘No, this is good. Keep walking through this.’
And as I’d read scripture and as I would look at the different perspectives on the
scripture the perspective that God is for women and has been for women since
the beginning is the only message that came through to me.”38 An interesting
interplay of meaning moved R.N. back and forth between her experience, her
studies, and interaction with God. Meaning was not understood as a disembod-
ied interpretation of the text, but inclusive of her identity struggle as she sorted
through ways to reconcile her gifts, her goals, her experience, and theology. In
Kenneth Burke’s terms, this interplay of meaning became the “sub-stance,” or
that which stands under and supports her sense of self, making possible her
continuance toward her divinity degree.39 Dickinson makes this point another
way when he claims that memory sites “are themselves fragmented, making
the apparent coherence illusory and opening the possibilities for a wide range
of identities.”40 However, what is missing from this formula is the “reunifying
voice of memory,” casting a God of love and acceptance in relation to R.N.41
Instead, the characterological coherence of God is taken up in R.N.’s desire to

36 R.N., interview with author, 2003, University Presbyterian Church, Seattle, Washington.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1969), 22–24.
40 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 2.
41 Ibid.
164 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

reconcile her belief in a God who is for her in the midst of violence against her
own body.42 Through her mundane account of sexism at Regent College, she
opens her audience to a process in which her subjectivity is at play, and “who
she is” begins to unfold as a confluence of experiences, meanings, and textual
interpretations. The subject is always a subject-in-relation.
Consequently, this subject-in-relation, or in Burke’s term, identification,
builds on past interactions to the extent that each new interaction pulls on the
past while creating possibilities for the future. Any particular rhetorical moment
thus is a mixture of orientations ordered through present motives and needs.
Ordering the present through past interactions becomes evident in the way pas-
tors claim that their perseverance in times of struggle builds on previous ques-
tioning of faith and its meaning. L.L. remembers coming home with her family
after church one Sunday when the pastor preached on “real faith,” and her
mom literally wept because she was not sure she had the right kind of faith.
So I got my Bible in the book of Romans, at age twelve, not understand-
ing it, and it just so happened that night I opened my Bible to Romans
10, verses 9 and 10, which says “if you confess with your mouth that
Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from
the dead, then you are saved,” or you will be saved. And I thought this is
what I believed my whole life. We’re saved. This is what mom believes.
I remember going into her room and actually saying to her: “Mom, you
don’t have anything to worry about, this is what you believe.” And that
was the moment when it occurred to me that, yes, I was really one of
God’s children. I didn’t have to worry about that.43

As L.L. describes her struggle to respond to what she claims was God’s direct
“call” on her life to become a pastor—“there was always this nagging sense that
God was calling me to something more,” “I was being pulled”—she builds on her
professed assurance that she is God’s “child.” Her questioning of faith and “call”
become the very substance upon which she perseveres in her role as pastor. In
light of this critical questioning, Timothy Crusius adds to Burke’s insight, noting
that “It [rhetoric] ‘stands under,’ supports, makes possible not only the per-
suasiveness of its ‘betters’ but also all human made order itself. For, in Burke’s

42 Walter Fisher describes “characterological coherence” as a concept within a larger “nar-

rative paradigm.” According to Fisher, an audience has the capacity to critically judge whether the
traits of a character make sense in the overall coherence of a story, thus giving the audience ability
to reason in relation to narrative pleasure. Walter R. Fisher, “Narration, Reason, and Community,”
in Memory, Identity, Community, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2001), 316. See also Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human
Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51
(1984): 1–22.
43 L.L., interview with author, November 5, 2002, Mill Creek Community Church, Seattle,
Washington.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 165

vastly expanded sense, as identification, rhetoric designates the very process by

which human societies are created, maintained, transformed, destroyed, and
recreated.”44 Thus, the critical process of coming to a sense of self-as-pastor,
when analyzed through Burke’s conceptual lens, is a sharpening, if you will, or
a honing of self-in-relation. Women’s choice to occupy supposed “masculine”
space chafes and chips away at determinedly “natural” gender norms to expose
their malleability and begin processes of transformation. Often, their struggles
are lengthy and involve body, mind, and soul, which is what renders forms of
cultural hegemony within nostalgia suspect.
Women chip away at more than social norms in their process of becoming
Christian pastors. They expose an internal makeover as well, where rhetorics of
social change are simultaneously a process of re-creating self. Lenore Langs-
dorf uses the concept of poiesis to analyze how the self is remade in the pro-
cess of interacting with others. She uses the example of Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings, where members tell and retell their stories to others, simultaneously
reconstructing self in each new narration.45 Literally, possibilities for becom-
ing new creatures exist within the realm of rhetorical interaction. Through this
interaction, one might see something about the self never before known. This
happened to C.J. as she began to pursue a seminary degree and potential career
of pastor. She thought she would conduct an internship with her current pas-
tor and sought his counsel. “So I met with the pastor, we had a conversation. I
suggested some ways that women’s voices could be better integrated with the
church, and he was very curious. And he said, ‘those are some great practical
suggestions, I don’t see why those things would be hard to put in place at all.’”46
After a week of excitement at this news, C.J. met with him again to discover that
he did not follow up on any of her suggestions, and in fact, wanted to delay her
internship six months. When she asked him about having women up front to
lead liturgical prayer he dismissed her request in this way:
So he said to me, “well, it’s really important that we um, the elders are
in such a weak spot right now. They are new. They’ve only been in place
nine months. I really want to affirm their authority, so I want an elder

44 Timothy Crusius, Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 121.
45 Lenore Langsdorf, “In Defense of Poiesis: The Performance of Self in Communicative
Praxis,” in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, ed. Martin Beck Ma-
tustik and William McBride (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002). Langsdorf also
addresses the performative nature of rhetorical reasoning in other work, such as “The Performative
Site of Rhetorical Reasoning, Performance and Rhetoric as Nonfoundationalist Inquiry: Exploring
and Affirming a Conceptual Connection” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the National
Communication Association, New York, 1998) and “Refusing Individuality: How Human Beings Are
Made into Subjects,” Communication Theory 7 (1997): 321–42.
46 C.J., interview with author, 2002, Seattle, Washington.
166 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

to read in this part of the service. If an elder is not available I want a

deacon to read, and if a deacon is not available then I want any other
leader—which could be a woman, any other leader.” So I said what
other leaders are there? And what are they? He said, “oh, well com-
munity group leader,” then he caught himself because he realized we
don’t have any women community group leaders. Nobody knows why,
they don’t know why the women stopped leading. They are not quite
sure. “But the Sunday school teachers and the nursery leaders,” and I
just . . . “yeah, great, that’s good, that’s really good. So that felt like a kick
in the stomach.”47

C.J.’s belief of women’s inclusion in her faith community began to melt away as
she dialogued with her pastor. All of a sudden, what came into view for C.J. was
a clash between belief and performance to which she remarked: “so that felt
like a kick in the stomach.” At the end of their conversation, she recognized that
this pastor was going to do nothing to encourage women’s wholeness in their
faith community. He even stated that to include women up front to pray with
other women would be too much work: “Well, you know, there are just so many
people that have to be arranged to be present on a Sunday morning, to have one
more person that we have to fill a time slot to have somebody present is just too
much.” The value of expediency in C.J.’s narrative exposes what she thought to
be “right” and “true” about her faith as mere fabrications, illusory.
Katherine Henry writes provocatively of the notion of “rhetorics of ex-
posure” in her 1997 dissertation. Noting traditional separation of public and
private spheres in American nineteenth-century white bourgeois culture, she
theorizes about the notion of “exposure” in public speeches and lectures and
a supposed “rhetoric of protection” in the private sphere. Working with Ralph
Waldo Emerson, among others, and the notion of integrity as a private or public
virtue, that is, a virtue created in the mind of an audience, Henry claims:
First, it moves from the inside out, firmly grounding its truth in the
depths of the private self and defining itself from within. But the final
standard of this private truth, paradoxically, is its public acceptability;
the passage ends up on the outside looking in. Repeatedly in Emerson
the external gaze turns up when it is least expected: it is there that we
find ourselves considering the public face of our “secretest presenti-
ment,” and it is there when our discussion of Emerson’s integrity as a
public speaker turns unavoidably to the experience of his audience.48

Consequently, this exposure is where we find C.J., on the outside of her faith
looking in at what she assumed to be true, what she assumed to be acceptable.

47 Ibid.
48 Katherine C. Henry, “Rhetorics of Exposure: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-
Century America” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1997), 7–8.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 167

Her access to freedom is severely limited by a pastor who does not believe in
women’s inclusion in the church.
Interestingly, as C.J.’s external performance of faith unravels, she simulta-
neously begins to come to new awareness of self and sees a space for Irigaray’s
envelope of female desire to come into view. In the same moment, she is un-
done and remade.
And I just got in my car and cried and cried and cried, I felt like I en-
tered the grieving work for every woman who’s ever had to hear that
question [Am I asking too much?]. It’s just . . . it was so strange. I felt
so sad, and so angry and so frightened by those emotions. And yet there
was a weird kind of kinship in that moment. It just, I really did feel my-
self standing beside so many women. So somewhere in the midst of that,
I went, “Why is he so important to you? Why, why does this matter?” So
I sat with that and I thought what if it matters because it’s connected to
calling? What if that’s part of your passion? And you’re being asked to
wrestle with this, not just because it’s an interesting intellectual dilemma
or an interesting question for the church, but because it cuts to the core
of how you’ve been made?49

C.J.’s “calling” to the role of pastor becomes a space where she can work out
female desire for power, for hope, and for freedom. Her interaction with her
pastor evokes an “antithetical movement,” where she moves from the inside out
and ends up on the outside looking in.50 According to Henry, this antithesis or
persistent contradiction is actually a creative tension, and C.J.’s performance
of faith is simultaneously an exposé of its fabrications.51 Once she realized that
women in the practice of her church were somewhat estranged, the “construct-
edness” of her Christian faith surfaced. At the same time, her proposed kinship
with many women before her alludes to a supposed interiority of faith, a faith
not yet known or realized. “Although the goal of exposure is to break apart pri-
vacy, to evacuate interiority, to peel away the ‘dry husk’ and reveal the secrets
beneath, the appeal of the expose is in the belief that there are still secrets yet to
be revealed.”52 Even as faith comes to the surface it may then again be appropri-
ated into public performance for the external gaze of an audience. Clearly, the
subject is made and remade through creative tension between hidden depths
and performances for the pleasure of others. The rhetorical efficacy of this mak-
ing of the subject exists in the present lived moment in contrast to nostalgic
deferral of fulfillment to the past or the future. In David Carr’s words, “I am
the subject of a life-story which is constantly being told and retold in the pro-

49 C.J., interview.
50 Henry, “Rhetorics of Exposure,” 7.
51 Ibid., 8.
52 Ibid.
168 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

cess of being lived.”53 Thus, “call,” for C.J., sets in motion a paradox of becom-
ing that resists the hegemonic tendencies of memory sites, opens up space for
the expression of female desire, and suggests new routes for movement toward
wholeness.
Ambiguity is particularly germane to female subjectivity and defines the
critical power within it. C.J.’s discovery of kinship with women leans on the
synthetic character of the female subject, always poised to change. In The Sec-
ond Sex, Simone de Beauvoir noted this mutability, saying, “she stands before
man not as a subject but as an object paradoxically endued with subjectivity;
she stakes herself simultaneously as self and as other.”54 Because woman lives
in between her own inner depths and that which is performed for the gaze of
another, she accesses, according to de Beauvoir, both immanence and transcen-
dence, both the poetic and the real.55 Feminine metaphysics “entails a deep
inwardness that opens out into infinity, a sense of the spiritual, of otherworldli-
ness, and yet one that is within reach ‘incarnate’ and tangible.”56 Additionally,
as woman exposes herself to the gaze of masculine desire, she simultaneously
retracts from this gaze, hidden and invisible. De Beauvoir claims that the femi-
nine belly symbolizes deep immanence: “it gives up its secrets in part, as when
pleasure is revealed in the expression of a woman’s face; but it also holds them
back.”57 Incongruity between revealing and hiding counters traditional mas-
culine notions of public performance as supposedly revealing all that is to be
known to an audience traditionally predisposed to belief rather than disbelief.
R.S. notes this contrast in her struggle over whether or not to preach using
feminine imagery:
Maybe it’s easier for some, a man that feels very confident of this and
is able to do this and women, you do it and you think . . . oh great she’s
trying to . . . push her agenda. But the last sermon I preached, I got
assigned the annunciation and I really talked about Mary being the
God-bearer. And talked about how we’re all called to be God bearers
in this world. And challenged people to say: what is God forming and
fashioning in you? What’s being birthed and reborn in you? I felt really
comfortable using those images, where . . . and it felt very true to who I
was, where in the past I think I might of, I might of strayed from them
or been more afraid, but realizing that voice is very important. And I’m

53 David Carr, “Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity,” in Hinchman and
Hinchman, Memory, Identity, Community, 17.
54 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. in Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers
(New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 691.
55 Ibid., 690.
56 Henry, “Rhetorics of Exposure,” 9.
57 Quoted in ibid., 10.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 169

not quite even sure what I’m bringing, but I’ve had a lot of people say:
this has been missing.58

What R.S. brings to the pulpit is a realization that the truth is not fully known.
There is always an excess of meaning in each moment, which reinforces the idea
that what one believes is only part of a bigger story. Consequently, this meaning
is co-constituted between speaker and audience. Belief that logics and struc-
tures are “right” or “true” depends on an audience predisposed to belief. As R.S.
uses feminine imagery in her sermon, recalcitrance surfaces, which may be “ac-
companied by doubts, suggestions of fraud, [and] manipulative tactics.”59 Thus,
the audience plays a vital role in determining the strength of meaning or the vi-
ability of an orientation. By disrupting what is thought to be true or certain, R.S.
encourages her audience to critically engage the meaning of scripture with their
own lives, fostering what Serene Jones calls “bounded openness”: “communities
need both normative principles to bind them and a healthy suspicion of norms
so as to be open to self-critique and change.”60
Paradox seems to breed contrast, contradiction, and comparison. This is the
ideal position of the subject, for Burke a predisposition to believe in one’s own
“mistakenness” rather than suppose one’s understanding is grafted into essential
nature, determined and binding. “The audience, from its vantage point, sees
the operation of errors that the characters of the play cannot see; thus seeing
from two angles at once, it is chastened by dramatic irony; it is admonished to
remember that when intelligence means wisdom . . . it requires fear, the sense
of limits, as an important ingredient.”61 The purpose of community might thus
be defined as what reminds one of a sense of limitation, of never quite access-
ing the whole picture. Consequently, accepting one’s partial view of reality re-
sists the homogenizing tendencies of memory. The appearance of unification is
what fuels the stabilizing power of memory sites; “traditionalism can cover fears
about new relations, the loss of traditional communities, and the dissolution of
the nuclear family.”62
In the process of providing stable realities, memory naturalizes the com-
plexities of daily life in monolithic representations. Countering these homog-
enizing tendencies requires education, learning how to navigate the diversity of
mundane existence. Each pastor notes the importance of community; however,
each provides different perspectives on what community looks like, both in its
ideal and “real” form. For example, two women defined their calling to the

58 R.S., interview with author, January 12, 2003, University Presbyterian Church, Seattle,
Washington.
59
Henry, “Rhetorics of Exposure,” 10.
60 Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 152.
61 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984), 41–42.
62 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 15.
170 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

pastorate as something affirmed through community. One pastor described it

simply: “a calling is primarily something that comes through community.”63 Her
particular call emerged as she practiced her spiritual gifts and her church com-
munity affirmed them. “Through the camping, through some camping experi-
ences with Young Life where adults were involved, some of the Presbyterian
lay people from our congregation began saying things to me like, ‘You should
be a minister.’ Translation was, ‘You should be a pastor who has a pulpit on
Sunday morning.’ I knew that’s what they meant, I usually tease them by saying,
‘I thought I was in ministry.’”64 Another pastor spoke of the affirmation of her
preaching gifts as what encouraged her to pursue ordination. Indeed, she was
my pastor for two years and I have yet to hear comparable preaching. When she
was a Fuller Theological Seminary student in Seattle, she won a ten thousand
dollar preaching competition. When I asked her how she came to the position
of “pastor,” she responded: “But then the other piece of it was that it was im-
portant for me in terms of ordination, to have a community confirmation; that
the way I handle scripture and the way I interact with people, that my character
could be trusted.”65
Church communities are somewhat unique in civil society. They exist as
organizations, specifically in the Protestant tradition, that rally around state-
ments of faith, whereas other organizations order themselves around mission,
purpose, and goals. This is not to say that Christian churches disavow these
characteristics, but they diverge in the belief that how they organize impacts the
faith that will lead them to a new world. In short, Protestant churches answer
God’s call to Christians to remember who God is and communicate to others
the gospel of Christ. Marjorie Suchocki describes the function of the church in
this way:
Each Christian generation expresses anew the assurance that God is for
us. The immediate catalyst for these expressions may well be the pro-
found conviction that God is a force for love, trust, and hope in a world
of diverse cultural communities. The conviction carries with it a drive
for expression and the expression itself becomes a call to the ever-new
creation of communities of love, trust, and hope. God is for us! There-
fore, we speak, creating a tradition that is continuously appropriated
and transformed within our cultural diversities, so that we might live as
a complex community called the church.66

Some of the troubles Protestants face result from an unwillingness to acknowl-

edge diversity in the creation of “communities of love, trust, and hope.” An

63 C.R., interview with author, November 20, 2002, Seattle, Washington.

64 Ibid.
65 L.W., interview with author, April 16, 2003, Seattle, Washington.
66 Marjorie Suchocki, God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York:
Crossroad, 2001), 1.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 171

extreme example is Jerry Falwell’s comment, post 9/11, that feminists and the
American Civil Liberties Union, among others, were responsible for God’s
wrath that took shape in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This
would be a “boundedness” that suffocates. However, Jones notes that “bounded
openness” is tenuous and a difficult path to follow; there must be enough unity
to identify as community, but the unity must not become uniformity.67 As one
pastor puts it, “We now believe that you can have unity without uniformity.”68
Understanding the ways in which culture influences biblical interpretation
is a priority in C.R.’s notion of community and characteristic of her own calling
to ministry; maximum critical consciousness is important if religious messages
are to remain viable to the secular world. If a faith community shuts itself off
from the outside world, its message not only loses social efficacy—no identifica-
tion—but also may potentially harm those within it. “Marginalization is perhaps
the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled
from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe
material deprivation and even extermination.”69 If one of the sins of the church
is the slow alienation and estrangement of women from God, from themselves,
and ultimately from others in the community, then part of the path to wholeness
is recognition of this oppression. L.L. uncovers this oppression by narrating af-
fective means to connect with God. She talks about one sermon in particular:
And I have an adopted daughter and I talked about the thrill of her
coming into our home and how I felt and I talked about taking, when I
first saw her, when the social worker brought her in, the first thing I did
is I smelled her. And I said this sounds so weird, but I had to smell her
hair, because there is an instinct when you have a child, without even
thinking about it, you sniff them to see if they’re like you. And I said, she
smelled like she belonged to me. And then I used that; that was part of
my sermon. I talked about how we smell to God like his own children,
you know, we are his own children. I used that image and afterwards a
man came up to me and he said: “You really caught me with that one,”
he said, “I started to get teary, you know.” And so I hear the responses
and I know E.R. does too. And so I think what we do for men is we en-
able them to get in touch with their feelings because that’s a side of us
we share. I think what we do for women is we give them a role model
and a voice in a way that they’ve never had it before.70

Change is subtle; change is a slow turning to the taken for granted things of
everyday life. L.L.’s focus on scent brings vividness to scriptural meaning as

67 Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 152.

68 K.G., interview with author, 2001, Carbondale, Illinois.
69 Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990), 53.
70 L.L., interview.
172 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

well as evocativeness to the way God sees her/his children. The turn to the
audience’s olfactory senses functions to redirect traditional hermeneutical un-
derstanding through the body. As meaning sifts through tangible experience it
becomes more acute, more present; “I started to get teary.” In the process of
this interaction there is simultaneously revaluation of experiences typically gen-
dered female—“we enable them [men] to get in touch with their feelings”—ex-
posing the supposed natural moorings of gender essentialist traits, and once
again setting difference in motion. This exposure simultaneously ruptures the
sedimentation process of nostalgic desire. “These constantly changing, socially
constructed forces are the workings of memory, for the sedimentation of past
actions, past proscriptions and past sanctions compose the cultural resources
people utilize in the performances of themselves. Identity, in this formulation,
is the creative performance of memory.”71 By making an audience more aware
of their interaction with the stories of scripture and encouraging them to en-
gage in critique of it—in Walter Fisher’s term, narrative fidelity—particular
religious orientations are not allowed to be reified.72 Bringing an embodied un-
derstanding of faith into the pulpit redefines the way self and God connect and
subsequently, the way self and other connect. Possibilities open up to re-create
communal relations.
However, some people may be dismissive of women’s voices and the need
to address their disenfranchisement in the church. I heard one of the men in
my Women in Ministry class at Mars Hill Graduate School—a seminary in Se-
attle, Washington—say that addressing women’s oppression is not as important
as evangelism; as spreading the gospel to those who don’t know Christ. Clearly,
for this man, a hierarchical relationship exists between social justice and Christ’s
message. Yet I don’t see how the church can alienate its own people and then
turn and supposedly offer a message of grace, hope, and redemption to oth-
ers. The message takes on a new meaning in this case: “Hey, come along and
join our oppressive and violent group. We have the key to redemption.” The
message is incongruous, and yet many adhere to it, finding resonance through
contemporary postfeminist positions. Perhaps more is being done to debunk
myths about marginalized peoples in the church than I realize. S.F., the one
male pastor I interviewed, told me about a couple of women who had an impact
on his faith. In one interaction, he recalled,
And then I met this good, down-home Baptist woman who was almost
old enough to be my mother, at least an aunt. She was just one of these
solid, good as gold people, not a heretic, not a liberal, not a bra-burning
feminist or anything. She was just a woman who felt called of God to be
a pastor. When I met her, when I was able to kind of put a face on the
idea of women in the pastorate, it really threw me for a loop. I began to

71 Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 5.

72 Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm,” 10.
 Bammert: Narrating the Church 173

think, her name was Carolyn Collins, I began to think, well, I’m not sure
I could say that Carolyn shouldn’t be a pastor. It kind of particularized it
for me; kind of put flesh to the idea. And then I began to hear that, well,
maybe some of what Paul said about, “I do not suffer women to speak
in the church or usurp authority over men.” I began to hear people say,
well maybe that had to do with the culture of his time. Maybe Paul was
speaking out of the patriarchal culture and perhaps that wasn’t what he
intended for all time, that maybe it would have been better in Paul’s
time that women not be pastors, because it would have been so contro-
versial, the Christian church would have never gotten off the ground.73

For S.F., it was through interaction with women that change occurred and pos-
sibilities for new interpretations emerged. He witnessed a different model of
“woman pastor” from the stereotype. María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman
argue that the only way to change a white imperialist gaze of the “other” is not
to represent the “other” through “voice,” but to build relationships, in effect,
friendships. “If you enter the task [white feminists collaborating with feminists
of color] out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appro-
priate reciprocity of care for our wellbeing as whole beings, you will have a stake
in us and in our world, you will be moved to satisfy the need for reciprocity of
understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able
to follow you in yours.”74

The contours of women’s faith experiences coalesce into a rhetorical way of

reading everyday life that is both engendered by the mundane and critically
reflexive of it. This perspective thus becomes an interesting way to define a vi-
able feminist politics in contemporary American society. One of my colleagues
made the argument a few years ago that we cannot do away with the political
position and term feminist until violence against women is no longer an issue. I
agree with her position that feminism today seems to be more about reorienting
men and women in relationship, and this is inclusive across mutable boundar-
ies of race, class, sexual orientation, age, religion, and so on. In this context,
Irigaray’s “envelope” of female desire, which is space for her becoming and
flourishing not disconnected from the world but in relation to it, seems to be a
viable feminist ideal. The way many pastors imagine the health of their church
communities through individual wholeness suggests the rhetorical efficacy of
Irigaray’s metaphor.
Additionally, utilizing rhetorical concepts situated in mundane experience
speaks to the power of rhetoric in the everyday to formulate a critical posture

73 S.F., interview with author, 2002, Carbondale, Illinois.

74 María C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist
Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice,’” in Feminism and Philoso-
phy, ed. Nancy Tuanna and Rosemarie Tong (New York: Routledge, 1995), 506.
174 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

predisposed to care and change. This takes on salience in light of the power of
nostalgic desire to encourage people to escape current problems in order to
occupy more stable and secure—albeit imaginary—pasts. One could arguably
say that yearnings for the imaginary make up the ethos of what today is termed
spiritual consumerism or the prosperity gospel. Perhaps what many church
communities offer is a return to the past where family values are honored, the
“home” provides nurture and comfort, basic needs are met, and there is a sense
of care among neighbors. Repercussions for living in this imagined past are
reinforcement of antiquated oppressive structures, systemic and attitudinal, re-
sulting, for example, in gender hierarchies that naturalize male dominance and
female subordination. R.N.’s colleague in seminary likening her to a “whore” or
C.J.’s pastor’s refusal to meet the needs of women in his church because it was
too much work are examples of the insidious operation of oppressive attitudes.
However, when feminist theories are submerged in the lived moment, the
presumption of a universal subject, the notion of individual choice, and belief
in natural and determined structures are dislocated. Instead of reproducing
homogenous theories and practices disconnected from women’s complex ex-
periences of oppression, local thick descriptions of women’s lives reveal subtle-
ties not given to generalizable principles. Jones believes that the character of
the “reformed” Church is such that these individual understandings should be
heard. Women pastors’ faith expressions seem to encourage this hearing. L.L.’s
example of talking about God “smelling” his children to know they are his own,
and provoking an emotional connection with one of the men in her congre-
gation, identifies how embodied understanding functions as critical capacity.
Bringing the audience into meaning production, whether in sermons or oth-
erwise, allows each individual to move from the inside out and see supposed
natural moorings as constructed and capable of transformation.