Women have served in ministry throughout the history of the church even as their courage and tenacity have been mostly overlooked and forgotten, said theologian Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School.
Therefore, it is important to begin the task of archiving the stories of women who quietly sustained families and congregations — and often faith itself — through eras of intense poverty and oppression for the church and for women, Pierce said during the Baptist Women in Ministry June 18 dinner at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Jacksonville, Fla.
“I’m here tonight to tell you why women’s stories are sacred work.”
“I’m here tonight to tell you why women’s stories are sacred work, why women’s stories are important and necessary, why women’s stories are holy, why women’s stories are the work to which we are all called to do,” she said.
Those stories, she added, provide sources of theological reflection no less important and deep than the sermons of pastors whose portraits adorn many church walls.
“But this is not about the role of pastor; this is about the women who cleaned the church bathrooms. This is about the pastor’s wife who encouraged her husband to mortgage their home so they could buy the property upon which the church sits. This is about the women who, in my tradition, fried chicken in the church basement and because of that financial contribution were able to send children to college. Where are their pictures?”
But Pierce cautioned that sharing those memories often evokes difficult, complicated emotions around repression and discrimination: “How many women’s stories don’t get told because they don’t quite fit the narrative of what you think of as a Christian woman?”
Many women remain obscure in Christian and congregational histories because they operated in the background — or were simply ignored, she explained. They include the church mother who slipped $5 in a child’s hand to buy candy, or the woman who extended prayer during hard times.
“None of their names are recorded in anybody’s book. None of their stories are particularly fancy, but these ordinary women had an extraordinary thing. I invite you into the sacramental by thinking about the ordinary women in your lives, the mothers, the grandmothers, the aunties, the neighbors, the unnamed and the unknown.”
Even Jesus had a woman in his genealogy as told in the Gospel of Matthew, she said. “Create a spiritual genealogy so that we know how we are all tied to that great cloud of witnesses and to the dangerous memory of what it means to be believers in the one who not only defeated death but calls us to remember all of our stories.”
And anyone opposed to women preaching the gospel should remember where Christianity would be without women preachers, Pierce added. “There is no gospel unless the woman at the well, women at the tomb and the women at the Cross told the truth about a risen Savior.”
But beware that these truths are troubling and dangerous to many, she continued. “And so that is my invitation to you, to keep telling this dangerous story, to keep telling these sacred stories, to keep building these archives of these stories.”