I was 6 years old the first time I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. I could be a teacher or a nurse when I grew up, but I couldn’t play on that team and I couldn’t do that thing because those things were for boys, silly.
I was 15 years old the first time I was told I couldn’t be something in the church because I was a girl. Even though I’d grown up in a denomination that promoted, affirmed and celebrated women at all levels of leadership, I’d gotten involved with a ministry organization and then with more conservative branches of the church that didn’t necessarily believe women were called to be pastors or priests. Directors and teachers and youth leaders, sure. But over the menfolk in the congregation? Certainly not.
Cara Meredith
I was 27 years old the first time I ever stood up to a seminary professor and to a majority of my male classmates who spouted off singular Scriptures and clung to conservative values of manhood and womanhood, reminding me (and all the women in that room), with an entitled arrogance all their own, that we couldn’t do what they were allowed to do because of how God designed both sexes to operate in this world.
“Women are designed to complement men,” they said. “To walk alongside men, you see.”
Within the umbrella of authority, they begged me to believe what they believed: “If the head of every man is Christ, then the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.”
I remember how my voice shook and my heart thumped with rapid, wild beats inside my chest and my cheeks turned red, and then redder still, as I spoke, because even though I didn’t agree with what they were saying, I didn’t exactly know how to disagree with what they were saying — at least not in a language that worked for them or with the words they needed to hear, so they might actually receive what I was saying.
Like they would have received what I was saying, I now chuckle to myself.
“Within the umbrella of authority, they begged me believe what they believed.”
But I was 33 years old the first time I really figured out how to say and speak with confidence an argument that came without deference to them, that spoke to the fulness of my humanity, yes, as a woman, but even more as a human being, made in the image of the one we both called God. It was an argument that came with a pocket full of rebuttal verses, but with a fair amount of confidence and without apology and perhaps even a little holy insistence, too.
I could play their game. I could meet their match. I could say what needed to be said, had I the opportunity and the chance and the need.
But something funny happened along the way, as often seems the case, because eventually, I stopped playing their game.
I was 41 years old when I fully accepted my calling and stopped letting them limit me, which is to say, I stopped fighting the good fight of my inherent worth. I left those places that made me feel like a square peg in a round hole, that begged me to fight and plea and ask them for a seat at the table.
Did I just get tired of fighting already? Maybe. Did I not have the fight in me to keep on fighting anymore? Maybe. But maybe, also, a spiritual evolution of sorts began to crank and churn and change inside me: If I was just as equal and just as called and just as beloved by the ones we call Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and sometimes Majesty, Mercy and Mystery, too, then there just wasn’t anything to fight or prove or argue anymore.
It didn’t matter what they thought of me, because I was already in — my worth more than sealed, the argument indeterminately, exhaustively, already won.
What was there left to argue?
“I didn’t need them to affirm, appoint or endorse me as a woman in church leadership.”
I didn’t need them to affirm, appoint or endorse me as a woman in church leadership. This trifecta of words was used as a bloodied sword within the Southern Baptist Convention this week when 75% of the voting body elected to further prohibit women from serving as church leaders and preachers. This, of course, happened against upward of 54% of SBC members who identify as women.
“What better way to express our countercultural commitment to the goodness of God’s word than to affirm God’s creation order related to the office of pastor?” one pastor noted, I imagine with a fair amount of haughty smugness and glee.
To which I drink, with my sisters and brothers and nonbinary humans beside me, and then ask him in reply, “What better way to express our countercultural commitment to the goodness of ancient Scripture and holy mystery today than to affirm the belovedness of all God’s created order, in every position of leadership, including the office of pastor?”
Because to him, to them, I no longer put up a fight.
Nor should you have to as well.
Cara Meredith was raised in the American Baptist Churches in the USA but currently worships as an Episcopalian and recently was ordained there as a deacon. She is a freelance author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.