The Feminized Church

"Gender & Religion" by Kenneth L. Woodward, in Commonweal (Nov. 22, 1996), 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y. 10038.

Is the Christian church a patriarchal institution whose oppression women only lately have begun to overcome? That is not the church that most Americans know, contends Woodward, a long-time writer on religion for Newsweek.

"If we look inside Protestant churches on Sunday," Woodward notes, "we find that most of the people in the pews are women. Although there are no hard-and-fast statistics, pastors I talk to say that women usually outnumber the men three-to-one." Women also typically dominate the church committees, the prayer groups, the Bible study groups, and the Sunday schools. And most of those whom a Protestant pastor counsels during the week are women. "The pastoral challenge facing most clergy," Woodward says, "is to find ways to draw men into active participation."

Though it might be argued that it is the pastor who has the authority, and therefore the power, in the church, and that most pastors are male, Woodward contends that "the reality of congregational life is more complex than that." In black Baptist churches, for instance, the ministers and members of the boards of trustees are male, but women raise the money and effectively determine how it is spent. Power in those churches is wielded by "the Mothers," a group of older women who dress distinctively in white on Sundays and constitute the heart and soul of the church. As C. Eric Lincoln of Duke Divinity School has written, "woe be it to the minister" who does not have the Mothers on his side.

Within American Christianity, Woodward contends, "the altar and the pulpit represent the last bastions of male presence"—and, within the liberal mainline Protestant denominations, those strongholds are rapidly giving way. Although males still outnumber females by three to one in the mainline clergy, seminary statistics "suggest that the future belongs to women," Woodward writes. Among Presbyterians, United Methodists, and Episcopalians, male seminarians outnumber female ones, "but not by much." Feminist theology is widely taught in the seminaries. Studies suggest that, because of the different attitude toward authority and its exercise that women who enter the seminary have, the ministry is being transformed into a "profession without authority," one bent on eliminating the distance between clergy and laity. Woodward, however, believes that "congregations...require the exercise of authority and demand that some distance be observed between those who stand in the pulpit and those who sit in the pews."

As the masculine presence in the church diminishes, he writes, "the dialectical relationship of masculine and feminine"— from which, according to Catholic theologian Walter Ong, the church gets "much of its dynamism and energy"—is weakened. That "may be one reason why mainline denominations are in such dire straits" today.