Still standing at the edge

Seventy years ago, this spring, the Methodist Church voted to grant women full clergy rights, the same rights, the same pension, the same voice as their male colleagues. It was a hard-won moment, arriving only after decades of organizing, petitioning and perseverance by laywomen and clergywomen alike who refused to let the church’s practice fall short of its theology.

By the time the General Conference convened in Minneapolis in 1956, it was no longer a question of whether women were capable of ministry; 50 ordained women preachers were already serving. The question was whether the Church would formally recognize and bless what was already happening in practice.

In the Pacific Northwest Conference, that recognition shows up in the numbers. Today, 79 women serve in pastoral leadership across our conference, compared to 74 men, a majority that reflects decades of doors opening wider.

Female pastoral leaders in the PNW earn an average salary of $66,666, outpacing their male colleagues’ average of $63,393 (both figures include full and part-time positions). Of the ten highest-compensated pastoral positions in our local churches, five are held by women.

The Promised Land Is Not Yet

While these statistics are evidence of a conference striving to align its appointments with its convictions, they don’t mean we have arrived at gender equity. Seventy years later, some churches in the PNW Conference have never had a female pastor. And even in churches where they have served, female pastors can run into attitudes shaped as much by culture as by theology; unspoken expectations, decisions second-guessed that would go unquestioned by a male colleague, a sense that a woman must prove her call in ways men simply are not asked to.

These statistics reflect real progress, but numbers don’t capture the lived experience of clergywomen. Pay equity isn’t universal, and no salary figure accounts for the sexist remarks and microaggressions they endure, or the ongoing burden of having to prove a call that was never in question. There is danger in believing we have arrived in the Promised Land when some of us are still standing at the edge of the Jordan.

The United Methodist Church does not exist outside the world, and the world has not finished its own reckoning with gender equity. Even as the husband of a female pastor, I know I still have work to do and that God is at work in all of us who remain willing.

As we celebrate 70 years of progress, may we be as committed to protecting equal rights for women within the Church as we are to demanding them in our communities and across the world.