Rising Above The Stained-Glass Ceiling

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Joanna Adams almost pulled it off. In 2001, John Buchanan, the pastor of Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church, announced that the congregation had chosen the Rev. Adams as co-pastor, with the understanding that she would eventually succeed him. The news raised hopes, and eyebrows. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), like most of the old mainline Protestant communions, has ordained women for decades. But none had yet achieved any of the denomination's flagship pulpits, the senior pastorships in what are sometimes called "tall-steeple churches." Fourth Presbyterian, with its hefty 5,300-member-and-still-growing congregation, certainly fit that bill, and Adams appeared poised to ascend. At the same time, observers were bemused by what seemed her unusual acclimation period. "Fourth Presbee is one of the great beauty-pageant churches of American Christianity," noted the Rev. Eileen Lindner, deputy secretary of the National Council of Churches, last fall. "But prospective pastors at tall-steeple churches don't usually get training wheels."

And then last December, the wheels fell off, with a vengeance. Adams suddenly left the job and moved back home to Atlanta. "Co-leadership is difficult," Adams, 59, told TIME. "There are genuine issues of power and authority." And whereas the congregation regarded Buchanan as a great man, "a Moses," she says, she "had no credibility or right to respect of the sort I had earned in Atlanta ... Men newly introduced are given that respect. But it's harder for women."

Adams' high-profile disappointment mirrors a larger-scale feminist frustration. The percentage of female seminary students has exploded in the past 35 years, from 4.7% in 1972 to 31% (or roughly 10,470 women) in 2003, and it continues to accelerate 1 to 2 percentage points a year. Yet women make up only about 11% of the nation's clergy. This is not totally unexpected, since more conservative denominations do not ordain women and are exempt on First Amendment grounds from equal-opportunity laws. More startling, however, was a set of data on 15 Protestant denominations in a 1998 study called Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling. It showed that even in more liberal fellowships, female clergy tended to be relegated to specialized ministries like music, youth or Bible studies. Those who did achieve pastorhood found it difficult to rise above associate positions, and the lucky few who achieved their own churches frequently had to make do with smaller or financially iffy congregations. Regardless of title, women clergy earned on average 9% less than identically trained men in the same positions.

Adair T. Lummis of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, one of Clergy Women's co-authors, says recent, less comprehensive studies suggest that there has been "very little" change since '98, and perhaps even regress, because of what some of her colleagues describe as male backlash. Moreover, female pastors continue to face the same family-juggling issues as their ambitious sisters in other fields, the barbs of conservatives who feel that the Bible abhors their preaching, and the misgivings of a different set of critics who fear that the clergy's feminization will lead to men's evaporation from the pews. The stained-glass ceiling, as it is known, still looms above most of them. Even so, some women in the mainline, and even a few in the evangelical world, have managed to break through to bluer pastoral skies. Here is how four of them did it:

VASHTI MCKENZIE Be Better Than the Men

There is no feminine for the word bishop in the Sesotho language. The word literally means "father." This was a bit dismaying to Vashti McKenzie when she arrived in Africa four years ago. After all, McKenzie, now 57, had just been elected the first female bishop in the history of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church and been posted to its 18th district, which includes the churches of Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and Mozambique. Friends had warned that the African church was particularly patriarchal, and here was linguistic proof.

But Bishop McKenzie has a time-tested philosophy on combatting patriarchy. "For women, especially for African-American women," she says, "you always have to be better than men to get ahead." Assigned a 300-member church in a depressed part of Baltimore in 1990, she not only built the congregation to 1,700 but also worked with the state of Maryland to get 600 area people off welfare, save a public school and renovate a key local building. Her election campaign for bishop in 2000, following another woman's 1996 defeat, was unapologetically aggressive, featuring T shirts, buttons and campaign visits to dozens of churches. Her victory was a milestone for a church whose membership is 70% female.

She reports similar success in Africa, from which she returned just last month to take her turn as president of the A.M.E.'s Council of Bishops. Some of the African diplomats, politicians and clerics, she says, "would have preferred a man, because a man knows the rules, how to play the game. With a woman, it was like, 'If I push her, is she going to cry?'" Instead, she established a program to build group homes for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. Her African work impressed the home church enough that at least one current female candidate for bishop is using it as an argument for women's efficacy.

And that pesky language problem got solved. Instead of "father," McKenzie says, her flock began describing her as "the mother who holds the sharp end of the knife," a reference to the Bible's Solomon-and-the-disputed-baby story, in which the child's authentic mother elects to give up the child rather than see it cut in half. "They were telling me that I was their real mother, come to care for them," she says. Lest a listener miss the point, she elaborates, "When children come to the father, he looks down and doesn't know what to do. But when they come to the mother, she looks up and sees to their needs."

SARAH JACKSON SHELTON Find a Supportive Church

It did not take long for Sarah Jackson Shelton to find out how certain parties felt about her 2002 appointment as senior pastor of the Baptist Church of the Covenant in Birmingham--and thus one of the few female Southern Baptist pastors in Alabama. She had been on the job about a week when the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (S.B.C.) rejected two of her congregants' applications to do missionary work in Swaziland. The convention's grounds: their refusal to sign a belief statement that says women should not serve as pastors, a view rooted in such biblical verses as Paul's observation that "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence." Technically, admits S.B.C. official Richard Land, "we can't tell a church who to hire." But by the same token, he says, "that woman's church cannot tell the International Mission Board who it can send on its missions."

If S.B.C. leaders hoped that the sanction would shame "that woman," however, they were wrong. "Paul did have some pretty rigid things to say" about women, the Rev. Shelton admits. "But you have to consider it in historical context. Paul also said in Galatians, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.'"

The daughter of a renowned pastor, Shelton, 47, was encouraged by a professor to preach at one of the S.B.C.'s seminaries before its hard rightward turn starting in 1979. After long stints in such typical "women's jobs" as education minister and associate pastor, she had a difficult conversation with God in 1999. "I'd been in the ministry for about 20 years, and I still didn't have a pulpit," says the mother of two sons. "I expressed to the Lord that I was going to retire early and let another generation be called." But the following year, Covenant Baptist offered her an interim post that she later lobbied to be made permanent.

It was a good match. Covenant was founded in 1970 during an earlier inclusion controversy, when 250 members of Birmingham's First Baptist Church walked out to protest its denial of membership to a black applicant. Shelton, says deacon Orbie Medders, is "an outstanding preacher and pastor. And she has a nurturing side to her that is stronger than anything I have ever seen in a man. She sets a tremendous example in terms of a broader spectrum of unconditional love, in the way she loves all who come seeking Christ."

Shelton likes her job, although she says it is not without its sorrows. She mentions the illness and death of congregants: "You get close to it," she says. And then there is what she calls her "professional sadness," to "realize the slow changes that occur in churches, the lack of openness to accept those who may be different, when we could focus on sharing what we have in common."

CAROL ANDERSON Put Faith Before Politics

A few years ago, when Carol Anderson, rector of the wealthy and prestigious All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, Calif., needed to fill an associate pastor opening, she chose a woman. It is telling that the move shocked some of the denomination's feminists, who do not count her in their number. This in turn shocks Anderson, who replies, "I'm not an antifeminist. But I'm not in the movement for the sake of the movement. I just move on, not from a position of getting ahead as a woman but getting ahead because I'm on a mission of Jesus."

In the 1970s, the Rev. Anderson, already established as a civil-rights activist, took naturally to the fight for female priesthood in Episcopalianism. "A few of us moved things along," she says. "It wasn't unlike the struggle for gays and lesbians today." But with that goal achieved (and her ordination shortly thereafter), her energies turned toward the church's charismatic renewal movement, which valued theological conservatism and belief in the gifts of the Holy Spirit alongside social activism. The trend attracted relatively little Episcopal attention in the U.S. at the time but exerted a greater fascination on the denomination's Anglican mother church. Anderson was one of just six Americans invited to the 1991 enthronement of George Carey, the evangelically minded former Archbishop of Canterbury.

And it was her evangelical piety, in addition to her administrative talents, that won her one of Episcopalianism's prizes. In 1988, although the church as a whole was about to elect its first female bishop, Anderson was a dark-horse candidate for pastor of All Saints, which was more conservative back then. Yet as her intelligence and zeal became apparent, a search-committee member recalls, "hearts were changed," and Anderson was chosen unanimously over 10 other candidates.

In the past 15 years, Anderson has validated the decision, showing a CEO's gifts for efficient delegation and institutional vision: Sunday attendance at All Saints has nearly doubled, to 3,000, and she hopes to open a second campus in three years. Although she insists that "my male associates are better at nurturing than I am," she still manages to communicate her enthusiastic devotion to a congregation of Hollywood Christians whose average age--34--is 24 years younger than her own. Under her, say congregants, the church has become more spiritual--and more diverse and liberal on issues such as gay holy unions.

Doctrinaire critics might not admit it, but Anderson's example lends credence to her contention that in Episcopalianism, at least, some battles are already won. "A woman who really has a passion about doing ministry and doesn't have an ax to grind," she says, "can get a decent job."

SUSAN ANDREWS Build a Strong Resume

Asked a few weeks ago about her professional future, the Rev. Susan Andrews reminded an interviewer that she was committed to another year as pastor of Bradley Hills Presbyterian, a lively 700-member congregation in Bethesda, Md. But she admitted that "if a call comes forth in the next year or two that seems to build on the gifts and skills and experiences I've had, I will respond to it."

It is a bit of a loaded line, given that in addition to a stellar 15 years at Bradley Hills, Andrews has accumulated extrapastoral kudos like a valedictorian stocking up club presidencies for her Harvard application: for her, it has never been enough merely to run a church. A partial list of her achievements includes moderator of two different presbyteries (the equivalent of dioceses); trustee at the denomination's McCormick Theological Seminary; and winner of the journal Lectionary Homiletics' Preacher of the Year award for 2000. But the jewel in Andrews' extrapastoral crown came 11 months ago, when she was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As she describes the position, "You're the ambassador of the denomination for one year. You become the face, voice and heart of the church." She is the first female pastor to hold it.

Andrews, who is 55 and married to a hospital chaplain, is candid about her ambition. "I can do the organizational part of ministry as well as, if not better than, men," she says, and explains that she left an early pastoracy because "I needed a bigger arena." But she readily acknowledges that the role of wife and mother (of two) was not nearly as easy for her as ministering, and that "it has been the women in my churches who have nurtured my feminine side." Whatever her personal learning curve, her professional manner has always felicitously mixed the stereotypical feminine and masculine virtues. Or as another high-powered Presbyterian, Wisconsin's the Rev. Deborah Block, puts it admiringly, "Susan can command a room and hug it at the same time."

So what more does a woman have to do to land a tall-steeple pulpit? In the past, Andrews admits, she interviewed for two but got neither. Since her moderatorship, she has fielded feelers from four more but turned them down because of her current obligations. Moreover, she warns, "I'm very liberal. I'm very outspoken. I'm not eager to move." And the biggest churches, she says, require CEOs. "Am I a CEO kind of pastor? There are so many other things to consider beyond just climbing the ladder." Perhaps, she suggests, tall-steeplehood is a particularly male way of measuring female progress. "We're often happier in middle-to small-size churches," she says. Only time will tell whether she's truly describing herself--and whether, once the most glittering pulpits inevitably open to women, it won't seem like the answer to a prayer. --With reporting by Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Marguerite Michaels/Bethesda, Frank Sikora/Birmingham and Deirdre van Dyk/New York

With reporting by Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Marguerite Michaels/Bethesda, Frank Sikora/Birmingham and Deirdre Van Dyk/New York