Don’t flay the sheep.

Could this be the most subversive thing I’ve ever done?

If you’re in the ministry world, it’s not too long before you encounter a fine black and white photo of a group of distinguished gentlemen in the their fine suits, perhaps with cigars and pipes, gathered on the steps of a venerable building to record an “event”: denominational meetings, men’s organizations, clergy clubs, seminary faculties.

My seminary had a wall of just such venerable fellows, the retired and expired professors, who looked down on us as we presented sermons in preaching class. They held a special place in my heart because they taught my dad and my grandpa. (And, true confession, also held one of them in particular dear, since liberated his portrait from the wall for a week and allowed it to live in my living room and took it on a few little field trips to interesting places…like our rival seminary.) But, it did kind of stink that the “theys” on the wall were all “hes”.

This week, I’ve been participating in one of the more subversive things I’ve ever done. (And, yes, I know, this does not make me particularly subversive.) I’ve been at a conference at the Cathedral College of Preachers in Washington, DC. This is a place that was founded to be filled with the men in those venerable pictures: nice suits, serious faces, a few pipes here and there, gathered on the steps of an Oxford-esque building for their photo.

But this week, the halls of that building have been filled with woman preachers. And, young woman preachers at that. I’ve never been here before, but there were a few times I when I knew that our presence made this a very different place:

• Standing in an atrium space for cocktail hour and making an incredible amount of ear-splitting noise as we  talked and talked (and then yelled and yelled, because otherwise we couldn’t hear the person next to us). We were noisy because we were so excited to meet other people like us. People we had never met but already knew!
• Eating in a dining hall filled with women and only one man. Probably the first time that has happened in these halls.
• Talking openly about some rather “womanly” topics.
• Feeling free to walk from the bathroom to our bedrooms in jammies.
• Writing sermons in the library and computer area, with people comfortable enough with each other to sit on the floor, sprawl on a bench, and write up a storm without worrying that anyone else was more of a rock-star preacher than we were.
• Singing full voice in chapels, full, healthy female voice.

It’s been a very good week.

This entry is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.