Food for the Soul in January!

Where is it? The Windermere Centre
When is it? 11-14 January 2010
How much is it? £200 (£165 to Windermere; £35 to Pamela Ward, our treasurer, on arrival)
What's happening when?
Monday
4.00pm Arrivals & making your mark
6.00pm Bar
6.30pm Gathering Meal
including Bread and Wine and Cairn building
7.30pm Welcoming: Remembered meals, personal special meals and biblical meals
9.00pm Sweets, Treats and Feeding 1000s
Bring some of your favourite sweet and savoury snack foods to share as we worship
Tuesday
8.30am Breakfast
leading into Breakfast on the beach
9.30am Intro to the day
10.30am Morning Coffee Break
11.00am How am I fed? Stories and creating
1.00pm Lunch including Bread and Wine
2.00pm Free Afternoon
4.30pm Afternoon Tea
5.00pm Bread for the Journey - hands on bread making
6.00pm Bar
6.30pm Evening meal including Bread and Wine
8.00pm Bread for the Journey
leading into Evening Worship
Wednesday
8.30am Breakfast
leading into African worship
9.30am Intro to the day
10.30am Morning Coffee Break
11.00am Soul Food: Film and creating
1.00pm Lunch including Bread and Wine
2.00pm Free Afternoon - go and find more food!
4.30pm Afternoon Tea
5.00pm Spiritual Nurturing: Awareness walk / labyrinth
6.00pm Bar
6.30pm Evening meal
including Bread and Wine
7.30pm The journey ahead for WIM
8.30pm African Delights! Making & sharing
9.15pm African Worship
Thursday
8.30am Breakfast
9.30am Intro to the day
10.30am Morning Coffee Break
11.00am Journeying on: Closing Ceremony
12.30pm Agape Lunch
including Bread and Wine, Milk and Honey
What to bring?
• Memories of special meals
• Favourite sweet and savoury snack food to share as part of Monday evening worship
• Family graces or sung graces to share at meal times
• Percussion instruments for African worship
• Bible
See you there, I hope!

Jan Berry Book launch 30 November at Luther King House

So here's an invitation to the book launch for Jan Berry's new book Ritual Making Women.
The launch takes place at Luther King House, Manchester on November 30 at 18.30.
I'm sad not to be able to be there but hope some of you can make it.

Celebrating women church leaders

Following my delight at the election of Margot Kässmann as chair of the EKD Council in Germany I tried over on my own blog to put together a list of national church leaders. I got some help from the comments section.
Here's the list so far ... perhaps we can add to it, but perhaps we also want to start thinking about what leadership may mean for women in the church - does it mean having to play the game of the structures in the same way as always. Reflecting about what womanly ways of leadership are and could be might be a good thread to develop here at some point.
But for now this is to note and celebrate teh women church leaders we do have. There are fortunately already quite a number women at regional levels of leadership around the world - bishops, moderators, regional presidents etc. - but very, very few at national levels of leadership. It is just starting to break through now and this does represent a huge change.
Here's my ammended list, do correct and add to it.

1) I was very proud when my own church, the United Reformed Church was the first in the UK to appoint a woman as head of the denomination. Roberta Rominger comes originally from the USA and she's been doing a really great and challenging job since she took over in 2008.

2) Sharon Watkins is the General Minister and President, and thus the leader of her denomination, the Disciples in the USA. She preached the sermon at the national prayer service following Barack Obama's inauguration.

3) Katharine Jefferts Schori has been presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA
since 2006 and has been involved in difficult church political issues.

4) Margot Kässmann was elected yesterday as the chairperson of the EKD Council in Germany.

5) Jana Jeruma-Grinberga was appointed as the presiding bishop of the Lutheran Church in great Britain.

6) Rosemarie Wenner is the main representative of the United Methodist Church in Germany. She is also the president of the Association of Protestant Free Churches (Vereinigung Evangelischer Freikirchen). I think, we can count her as a national church leader.

7) Judy Redman left a comment on my blog saying "I was very pleased when my denomination (the Uniting Church in Australia) elected a woman as its seventh national leader in 1994. Dr Jill Tabart was/is not only female but a layperson and she did an excellent job. However, we are now up to number 12, and Jill has been both the only woman and the only lay person. Of course, in our noticeably multicultural church, there has never been a non-Anglo president, so gender is not the only qualification."

Women and leadership

Yesterday I put as a status update on my facebook page "Had some interesting conversations about the leadership of women at work today. A long way to go..."
It generated more conversations on the same subject today ... not entirely surprising given recent events.

From 27-29 October the Evangelical Church in Germany will meet in Ulm to elect a new chairperson of the EKD Council, Bishop Wolfgang Huber is retiring. Some people seem to expect that Bishop Margot Kässmann will be elected as his successor. Personally I very much hope this is the case but I wonder whether it will really happen. A life time in politics has told me electorates are not always to be trusted.

For me being a woman in ministry it is important not only to encourage women to discover and fulfil their leadership potential at all levels, we also need to be able to point to women who can serve as role models for us. I think knowing that there is a diversity of leadership at the upper levels of churches and organisations, helps us to work for that same diversity of shared leadership at the grassroots and intermediate levels.

There are some interesting posts here and here on the CPAS women in leadership blog.

Working for change on the area of women and leadership is a long hard slog. I give thanks for the pioneering work of women in our own traditions and am very proud to share that 1917 date of the first ordination of a woman to the word and sacrament. However, the Daughters of Dissent project showed us just how painful and sometimes long the wait for recognition of women's ministry at all levels of the church has been. What I realise now is that, just like democracy, so also with the recognition of the gifts of all God's people, this needs to be worked at at all levels and at all times. Ah yes, and sometimes we get tired.

Listen again to Janet Wootton on Payer for the Day

Not sure how many of you are up early enough in the morning to listen to Prayer for the Day but Janet Wootton is doing the Radio 4 early morning slot this week and you can listen again here.
Living in France means I get to hear it an hour later into my day. Anyway Janet's reflections are well worth a listen and reflect on powerful bits of non-conformist women's history too. Good stuff.

Blogging and preaching

Ruth Whitehead has been blogging on her Sunday's coming! blog for over a year. It's a really great example of using blogging as a public way of reflecting on the process of reading the lectionary and preaching week by week. Maybe as part of the weekly round of preparing for worship you can also enter into conversation with Ruth through the comments section on her blog.
How do you go about the task of preaching each week if that's part of your ministry? Does it help to talk with others about the text? Is going for a walk, a drive or just sitting down at the desk the best way you can get the sermon to start in your mind?

A summer update - women in ministry on my mind

Jane writing.
I've just come back from the assembly of the Conference of European Churches in Lyon. I met with amazing people there and wrestled with ridiculous photocopying problems - I think it would be best to say I was in recovery. I've also been learning how to twitter. Not sure I like it as much as blogging but it's a useful communications tool and it can be fun!

For more than 4 years CEC has not had anyone appointed to the women's desk and women's issues were not exactly to the fore at the assembly. I suppose it was at least heartening to hear the general secretary of CEC, Colin Williams, facing the issue of gender squarely when asked in a panel discussion to say what some of the failures as well as the successes have been in recent years. Carla Maurer who works in CEC's Strasbourg office has also been very involved in the process of gender mapping at the assembly which may pèroduce some interesting results.

Meanwhile I had a brief moment to read about Margot Kässmann's fairly forthright recent words on churches' clichéd attitudes to women in leadership roles. Does anyone ever ask whether it's appropriate for a man with four children to take up a leadership position? I am really hoping that Kässmann will be elected to be chair of the EKD Council later on this year. It's great to have women in local ministry but I feel it's also important for us to have figureheads, people we can look up to. Slowly, slowly this also changes the image people have of the church.
My prayers this summer will be with women taking up that role in our churches - Kirsty and Roberta and Rowena and also women bishops, moderators, presidents and lay leaders. Male or female this is not an easy time to be leading the church, it's a time of enormous change.
And I thought I would link our blog to the CPAS Women in Leadership blog. There are some interesting posts there from an Anglican perspective, including Do Christians believe in equality? and some background on a pioneering deaconess.
There's also an interesting article here from the recent inter-religious meeting in Kazakhstan

Whatever the third Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions held in Kazakhstan might have achieved, it did prove that when it comes to religious leadership, women are yet to break through the glass ceiling.
A list circulated by the organisers featured the names of 184 participants - and only 13 of them were women ...
There were seven women representing Christianity - four as members of the World Council of Churches, two from Germany’s Lutheran church and one from the Anglican Jewish Commission of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Ecumenical Women's blog looking for women bloggers to contribute to their campaigning blog

Don't know if anyone is tempted to give this a go but it's worth sharing with your wider networks and it should be an encouragement to you all to start a blog or re-start your blogs:

Ecumenical Women (EW) is an international coalition of church denominations and organizations which have status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) at the United Nations. We train and empower faith-based advocates for gender equality at the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held every February-March.

Ecumenical Women at the United Nations is seeking a Blogging Specialist to update and maintain its blog and website, http://www.ecumenicalwomen.org/. Qualified applicants will be familiar with blogging and other social network tools, or demonstrate serious willingness to learn. Applicants should be committed to women’s rights and gender equality, be comfortable writing about Christianity and other faiths. Experience with advocacy, ecumenical organizing and the United Nations is preferred but not required.

The EW Blogging Specialist will be responsible for posting 4-6 blog posts per month, which s/he may either write or recruit others to write and edit. Posts should be within the interests and advocacy goals of EW’s member organizations. The Blogging Specialist must be a clear and creative writer, an independent worker, and capable of working remotely.

Essays on Mariam, the Magdalen and the Mother

Hat tip to Deirdre Good who has edited this book of essays, and whose blog "on not being a sausage" is one of my favourites.
Find out more about the book here.

Good's edited book is both a challenge and a delight. The challenge is watching ten competent scholars working carefully with a multitude of languages and religious traditions to bring a fresh assessment of the woman named Mary Magdalen. The complexity of the endeavor is captured in the book's stated intention, Rather than revisiting her singularity, Mariam, the Magdalen and the
Mother argues that the Miriamic roots of her composite identity and prophetic vision are prominent in all religious traditions of the first five centuries of the common era. The delight of the book is discovering the relationship of the names Miriam, Mary, and Maria, and the relationship of the women bearing these names. The scope of the book widens with essays dealing with Mary in Gnostic gospels, Islam, and Manichaeism. This work has copious footnotes, an impressive array of works cited, and a useful index. It would be a difficult task for the general reader, but advancing students, scholars, and professionals will find it
revealing and rewarding.

A pilgrimage to honour women

On Saturday June 6th the annual ecumenical pilgrimage will set out from Erfurt in Germany on a short 18km walk. Each year this ecumenical pilgrimage has a focus, this year it is two strong women from the Middle Ages Elisabeth of Thuringia and St Walburga.
This small local pilgrimage in Germany started me thinking, what sort of pilgrimage would you put together to honour women in the place you live and work? Maybe this is even a way of taking the Daughters of Dissent project a bit further - who preached in your town, was there a famous Abbess maybe or a woman saint, a suffragette?
So who would you want to honour on your great women pilgrimage? I shall go away and think about five names myself - use the comments section to give yours. And it can of course be a sort of fantasy pilgrimage - ie one that would be too far to actually walk.

Greetings by the way from Rome - maybe that's where all this thinking about saints has come from!