Women's Day in Church

Yesterday in our church, we celebrated International Women's Day.  I was one of three women who spoke in our late service about women in the Bible or the early church who meant something to me.  I chose St. Brigid and St. Hildegard of Bingen.  I wrote about their importance as women who needed to perform quite a balancing act between creative life and administrative life and spiritual life.

But I was more interested in our interactive service.  We read the passage in Matthew that talked about the command upon which balances the law and the prophets:  love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  Then we talked about what that would look like in church.  We talked about the ways our church shows love with the food bank and raising money for camp and such.

Then we did graffiti, writing ideas on large pieces of paper:

Here's the one I worked on--the words are mine:

I was struck by one conversation I had with a 10 year old girl.  I told her that when I was her age, if I had wanted to be a pastor, I couldn't have been, since the church didn't let women become pastors.  She looked at me as if I had lost my mind and was making up outrageous stories.

I hope she continues to find that idea outrageous that we would restrict jobs because of something like gender.  I hope that in 40 years, we realize we've made similar progress.