A couple of weeks back I shared a popular Atlantic article about the decline in church attendance with our church council. The next day our church administrator said to me, “You know what’s missing from that Atlantic article? Women’s work!”
I’ll admit to a certain level of blindness on this front. I’m a man and so I always have to be intentional, or be called out, so as not to overlook the issue of gender in institutional contexts.
I’m also a progressive, and progressives, for all that they in fact do focus on gender issues, tend to do so at the front edge of what I guess we’d call “third-wave” feminism, prioritizing issues of trans-feminism, intersectionality, sex positivity, etc.
We’re collectively guilty, I think, of having blown past the first few waves of feminism assuming erroneously those are passé or fully addressed, when in fact they are not. Not at all.
But not all prognosticators on church-life post-pandemic are as blind to the impact of women’s work on the shifts in church culture as that Atlantic article. Eileen Campbell-Reed published the #PandemicPastoringReport in 2022, surveying a broad cross-section of church leadership across the U.S., and in her report, a top finding among findings like “recognize that things have changed” and “embrace hybrid options” was this one:
Listen to women.
She writes, “Churches and medical chaplaincy have lost women’s leadership in the last three years. Globally, 54 million women stepped out of the workforce in 2020 alone. Stories from my research point out how churches continue to harbor unfair expectations for parents, especially mothers. During the lockdown, untold millions of mothers juggled home-schooling, elder care, and meal and household management — and still did their paying jobs, including ministry. Churches need to reengage women’s leadership, listen to the reasons they departed, and envision ways to make ministry more sustainable.”
In our local progressive congregation, even though our collective nostalgia for the ways church “used-to-be” may impact how we feel about church life today, and our assumptions about how the institution of church should be shaped is certainly impacted by the embodied memory of how many churches in our culture have functioned, nevertheless if we’re really honest and clear about the why and how of church, it’s because of women’s work.
Funeral luncheons. Altar guild. Quilting. Sunday school. Bulletin folding.
I can still remember when serving at rural parishes in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 90s and aughts the three biggest attendance Sundays of the church year: Christmas, Easter, and… Mother’s Day. Because all the grandmas and mothers would ask their otherwise reluctant family members to attend church with them in honor of the day.
I raise this issue not because I’ve entirely succeeded at an equalitarian relationship in my own marriage. We are still always noticing the many ways in which even when I’m trying to do my part in our aim for equality, nevertheless there are parts of women’s work my spouse simply notices better, stewards more carefully, does the labor. There’s still a basic inequality in “recognition” for the times when I pick up what would normally be women’s work. I get congratulated, whereas if my spouse does it it’s simply assumed that’s what a woman does.
Now, take all of this and think about it in the church context. Women were the driving force of the church (and church growth) in the 20th century. They had the babies (most church growth last century was related to birth rates). They took the family to church (even if the dads drove). They were the main volunteer force (except for the few roles in church spaces that were the male responsibilities).
Then think about everything that has shifted since that era. Almost all women work now. Very few stay home. Many mothers are single and have primary responsibility for the kids. Many women have taken up the roles reserved for men last century—serving on non-profit boards, getting elected to public office, writing books, podcasting, etc.
How could this shift not starkly impact the life of the church? How could it not be related to church decline? And if we truly believe that women gaining equality with men is “progress,” then if church changes as a result of that progress why do we construe it as “decline”?
This was a huge “aha” moment for me as a pastor, and I’m sorry to everyone for being so slow. I’ve been yearning for a return to church, for movement building. I deeply desire for progressive Christians to know one another, to advocate and strive together in the way of Jesus.
I haven’t at all adequately accounted for the reality that calls for the church to “return” to the level of participation we saw last century is essentially regressive. It ignores the progress women have made.
It’s also then not surprising at all that many conservative churches are fighting tooth and nail to take us back to “traditional” gender roles, because not only is it a way to control women, it’s also a way to maintain the energizing pool of volunteers they need to do “church the way it’s always been.”
One additional observation: for some time now I’ve pondered the aging of mainline Protestant churches. Back in 2016, the median age of the ELCA was 58, whereas the median age of the country as a whole was 39. I’m assuming this means we’re closer to a median of 65 today.
In other words, most ELCA members are retired. So the make-up of many comparable churches in our denomination is retired couples who, at least theoretically, have some of the same kind of availability a stay-at-home parent would have had during the 20th century.
What this means for our church is not only the struggle of whether or not to compare ourselves to how church used to be, but also the comparison with how churches are today in a mostly retired denomination.
Our church is not (retired, that is). And it would be a tremendous mis-match to try and do church today in ways that ignore the fact that we are a young congregation and most of the women live a shape-of-life profoundly impacted by the progress of first and second wave feminism (even if admittedly a lot of the gender justice we prioritize is shaped more by third-wave issues).
People are really busy, women in particular, often busy with volunteer service not all of which is done in the church space. That’s the reality.
What does this mean in practice? Well, a couple of examples:
We decided to cater Easter breakfast this year. An Easter brunch potluck style relies on already busy people (mostly women) cooking an egg bake on top of preparing meals for later in the day while also grading all the papers students turned in at the university on Friday.
We started wondering if, in addition to recruiting people to speak at municipal meetings on justice topics if perhaps we need to provide child care at the church to free up other voices to go.
So many families parent in blended or single families. Is our weekly worship schedule accommodating of the attendance patterns and needs of those households?
Do we even name the realities I’m addressing here in this post? Is it talked about from the pulpit? Are we working to make sure we don’t analyze church shifts in ways that layer on the guilt?
This weekend our church council will gather in retreat to vision. It’s become clear to me that whatever we imagine as our way of living out of the kin-dom of God together, we need to do more than say that women’s work and the shifts in it underlie our thinking.
As Jessica McClard (our church administrator and the founder of the Little Free Pantry movement) points out, “churches don’t pursue justice issue advocacy like high quality, affordable child and elder care, equal pay, maternity leave, etc. to say nothing of reproductive justice. It’s not so much even a lack of advocacy. It’s a lack. of acknowledgment that those things are real problems.”
We need to shape the life of the church in ways that celebrate and embrace the shifts in gender roles and align ourselves in solidarity (both through advocacy and acknowledgement) with women. It will take some work, especially keeping such work in relationship with the insights we have gained in moving beyond traditional binaries, but isn’t that the whole point of progressive church, to discover the gospel-centered intersections that help bring to greater integration things like third and first wave feminism?
As an 87 year old woman, I appreciate being kept in the ‘know’ by a Pastor who is so progressive and well educated. The Lutheran Confessions are a wealth of information for me and remind me how much the Lutheran church which I have loved and worshipped in my entire life has evolved especially the ELCA Synod. Good Shepherd is a Godsend for me and my husband and we feel very fortunate to be able to worship on Sunday even though we can’t be as active as we were in our church in Denver. Thank you Pastor Clint, keep writing.
Years ago, I was a single gay man, raising his teenaged straight nephew in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. It used to be called Eureka Valley, but that was long before my time living there. I resembled in color and height the working-class Irish immigrants who settled the the rolling hills a bit more than a half century earlier.
But the rest of that crew and their bars had long since pulled up their stakes and headed to pasty glens in Marin and Sonoma counties north of the City. By the time Harvey Milk and Dan White called the Castro and Mission District their respective homes in the 1950 and 60s, white flight was in full bloom.
During the 1980s, the neighborly fabric that clothed us had been woven and sewn by a large, skilled presence of lesbians who came in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, drag, spiritualities, and histories. They were our memory and comforters as HIV/AIDS paraded itself as victor over gay and bisexual men, who had been swallowed whole by the very ground of this safe haven. It was the work of lesbian women that kept us whole.
I would like to call the Castro the church of lesbian leaders during the decade or so I considered it home for my nephew and me in the City, named for the mendicant friar Francesco. As a doctoral student and post-doc fellow at UC-San Francisco, there were many late afternoons when I depended on lesbians, who owned a string of small businesses on Castro from Market Street south to 17th, to answer phone calls from me about my nephew's whereabouts. Sadly, I could not wait at the station for him every day as he returned from middle or high school. I was often delayed on the UCSF campus.
Since his pattern was to exit the MUNI/BART stop at Milk Plaza, walking south toward our apartment in the 300 block of Eureka, I called one shop after another to ask if he had passed by already and when that was. Many times, he was in one shop or another where he was fed pastries and milk, so I had a minute or two to hear about his studies, homework, and give instructions about dinner preparation. Seldom was he out of school for more than three hours before I arrived home.
These good women parented Roland as much as I, and often they did it with less authoritarian overlay than my custom. Roland knew at least fifteen men who lived with AIDS who lived within a half block of us. He helped grocery shop for them, pick up their mail, listen to their physical complaints, and learn how to be present without platitudes or advice. Maybe he learned these skills from watching me. But I prefer to say he awoke to himself in the Castro--that's how God knit Roland in his mother's womb. He attended their funerals, where he always sat next to one of his lesbian mamas. They often had prepared food for him and me and enough for the vagabond assembly at our meals after funerals.
Roland also discovered more catechesis of Christ from these women who were among what they might consider Nones and Dones today. My brief anecdotes fit well with the ways Michael Plekon paints of the community as church in his 2021 Cascade Books monograph, 'Community as Church / Church as Community.' I cite Michael's book because its fourth chapter, "More Resurrection: New Identity, New Life, Simplicity, and Back to the Table," reminds me of the tent or clothes I said the Castro lesbians had woven and sewn for us. Give thanks to the Holy One, for all that is good.