A Church of Her Own: What Happens
When a Woman Takes the Pulpit
Sarah Sentilles
Reviewed by Charity R. Bartley Howard
Women have entered many professions once dominated by men over the last
decades. Sarah Sentilles has written a 352-page book bringing insight
to what happens when a woman takes the pulpit.
She emphasizes, “ordained ministry continues to be one of the most
male-dominated of all professions. Even though the ministry was one of
the first professions to encounter proposals to admit women, it was one
of the last actually to do so, and the acceptance of women clearly is
far from universal or uncontested today.” Her thoughts in this book
focus on, “churches as communities, as denominations, as institutions,
as Christians must be actively antisexist.” She explains it is “time to
realize that radical notion that women are human beings.”
The book gives an inside look at what these women from a range of ages,
races and churches have endured during their journey to what they feel
is their calling. Obstacles and tears as well as laughter and triumphs
are displayed in this book with true stories and experiences. She
provides details through interviews from ordination to serving in
church for these women. Sentilles writes, “When ‘Minister’ and ‘woman’
collide, it is a kind of explosion, and, as in any explosion, the
person standing closest gets most of the shrapnel lodged in her body.”
When women entered the work force, they met challenges at every turn.
Women ministers have also been treated poorly, disrespected and paid
less for the same work as men. Sentilles was inspired to research and
write this book because of her own desire to be ordained into ministry
within the Episcopal Church. She writes that, “either they struggled
through the ordination process in mainline Protestant denominations
like I did, or, once ordained and working in churches, they were
silenced, humiliated, and abused.” She explains that this book began as
her attempt to answer what was happening. She wondered why women, “who
were brilliant and capable and loved Jesus, who were faithful, who
brought down the house when they preached, who had dedicated their
lives to serving God were being driven out of church or were leaving
the ministry altogether.”
The author wishes she, “could write that things have changed, that
congregations actively seek women priests, that women are sent to
thriving churches, but I can’t. We may have changed the rules, but we
haven’t changed people’s minds.” She emphasizes that this
discrimination, “results from the embedded values of individual members
of congregations. Although several mainline Protestant denominations
are now celebrating decades of ordaining women, putting on display the
few women who have made it to bishop, desperately wanting to believe
things have changed, statistics tell otherwise. Across denominations,
women’s job searches are longer than men’s and are even longer when
they are women of color. This should come as no surprise. Survey after
survey shows that congregations remain resistant to female ministers.
And congregations who are resistant to female ministers, are of course,
not willing to hire them.”
The first women were ordained by the Episcopal Church 30 years ago. It
was more than a 100 years ago that other churches ordained women. Yet
according to Sentilles research, “some Christian groups—the Roman
Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod, to name a few—still refuse to ordain women.” She mentions the
thought that many still feel women are to remain silent and are not to
be in positions of authority.
Sentilles also mentions the debate on gender in the Bible such as using
Our Creator instead of Our Father. It was discussed in one of her
interviews that, “Inclusive language—language that does not exclude or
demean on the basis of gender, race, religion, ability, age, sexual
orientation or any other factors—does not mean that church stop calling
God ‘He’ and start calling God ‘She’. Replacing one form of
gender--exclusive language with another does not solve the problem.
Inclusive language is more expansive than that. It requires that we use
multiple images, metaphors and analogies for talking about God. It
requires that we believe God is bigger than anything we can say about
God. God is not only Father, Lord or King. God is Mother. God is
breath. God is rock and tree and wind. God is mystery. God is
creativity. God is light. And God is darkness, deep infinite. We have
to trust that God is bigger than anything we can say or write --- about
God. We will have to have faith in God.”
Sentilles also wrote “Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope
in Compton” and she lives in Camarillo, Calif. She earned a master of
divinity degree from Harvard.