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!

WOZA - women of Zimbabwe Arise

I am continually amazed by the women and men of Zimbabwe, their tenacity in daring to stand up for their dignity as human beings. So I'm reposting here something just recieved from WOZA - Women of Zimbabwe Arise and from Kubatana. They are not church NGOs just people risking their lives for the good of their country. Many are still in prison.

You can find out more news from Zimbabwe on the WSCF's campaigning Zimbabwe blog.

You can also read this powerful post about what happened to one activist for truth and justice.

If Zimbabwe is ever in a state to truly rebuild then the women and men there will need our support.

ZIMBABWE’S CONSTITUTION MAKING PROCESS – A WOZA PERSPECTIVE

Women
of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) has consulted with members over the last few weeks on
the constitutional reform process initiated by Article 6 of the Global Political
Agreement (GPA)1 and recognise the opportunity to play a role in making this
process result in a truly democratic Zimbabwe. WOZA has already been involved in
joint civic society discussions on these developments and will continue to take
part in a coordinated response. We are prepared to participate fully in the
process but do so under protest as we feel there are serious shortcomings in the
procedures articulated in the GPA.
- Ordinary Zimbabweans were not consulted
and did not input into the 15 September 2008 Global Political Agreement. It may
therefore prove inadequate as a tool of creating a truly people-driven
constitution.
- Constitutional Amendment 19 went further in providing
wide-ranging direction and oversight role to the Parliament of Zimbabwe, which
makes the constitutional process subject to political party control.
-
Whilst we acknowledge that the people voted for Members of Parliament and
Senators and recognise that they can be expected to represent the views of the
people in their constituency, constitution making should be an inclusive
process. It is a given that the whole nation needs to take ownership of their
right to determine how they are governed. At the very least, elected
representatives need to conduct public meetings to hear the views of the people
in their constituencies in open and direct discussion rather than making
unilateral decisions on our behalf.
- Most importantly however, we feel that
there is no real operating climate for full enjoyment by citizens of all their
freedoms of expression and assembly. There continues to be flagrant disregard
for the rule of law, politically motivated and indiscriminate arrests and
detentions and a climate of fear remains. Citizens need a tangible sign that
they will be able to meet and debate without harassment before a truly
meaningful process can be embarked upon.

Emotion in worship do you control or let go?

This morning worship in the ecumenical centre in Geneva was a bit of a last minute feast. Weeks ago I asked colleagues from the countries we are praying for as part of the ecumenical prayer cycle to lead or read, but many were travelling and not available. Then last week I was on holiday and the person who had been going to coordinate also took leave. Everything was prepared but it was my job to hijack people at the beginning and get them to lead and read different parts of the service. (Thanks goodness we have a very motivated choir who turn up early!) I would not normally recommend this organising-worship-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to the liturgy - even if the service was prepared and printed.
However, this morning two quite extraordinary things happened as a result. One was my colleague Rogate Mshana telling us Kagina's story which I've written up on my blog - he didn't know he was going to say anything - nor that he had anything to say - until I asked him to speak two minutes before the service began. (Janet, Rogate is a brilliant person for remembered Bible, we've used the method several times here and he's just a natural.)
The other preaching of the gospel came when a young colleague from the Pacific read the gospel, standing in for another person I had asked last minute. Our colleague read in a beautiful strong voice as the congregation stood to listen to the gospel. We could hear the emotion surging through her and see the tears begin on her face. She breathed deeply, her voiced wavered only a bit, the emotion remained yet she finished the reading and the congregation responded with an even louder singing of the alleluia. That emotion-filled reading of the gospel was its preaching. Tomorrow will be the fourth anniversary of her brilliant, rugby-playing-theologian father's death.

Recently emotion also caught me unawares as I was leading worship, I heard my voice cracking but I continued. I have never broken down in tears while leading worship, although I have often wept in church when I didn't have that role. The Reformed tradition is quite buttoned up when it comes to emotion and I'm not fond of what I think is orchestrated or false emotion either in preaching or in worship. But I wonder what is happening as we overcome or harness grief, joy and other emotions in worship - do actors also sometimes get overcome by the emotion of the texts they are performing or is this a different dynamic - is worship more or less real than theatre? What is real?

At the end of this morning I reflected that it is a challenge to put together worship which only lasts 30 minutes, which others have to lead and which takes place at 8.30 on a Monday morning ... but sometimes despite everything it all comes together and becomes much more than you could ever have prepared for. I was very fortunate to have that experience this morning.

So what are your experiences of worship and emotion?

Jane

What are you reading at the moment?

Women will be forever strangers unless their words and their voices revise the social and symbolic rules of language, transforming the law or ordered hierarchy in language, in subjectivity and in politics into a grace of rich plenitude for human flourishing.

Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak, feminism, language, God.

Readers of my blog will know that I am reading Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine at the moment. The above quote is one of two she uses to begin her chapter on trustworthy community. The first quote come from Julian of Norwich. The thing I am beginning to really appreciate abotu Jantzen's writing is how she weaves together insights from mysticism with radical theology. Her push in this book and her subsequent writing is to encourage a philosophy of religion that concentrates much more on our natality than on our mortality.
What I am finding particularly moving reading this is that a woman who is now dead is calling me to live as a natal and not as a mortal. It's difficult for me to put in words how inspiring, comforting and encouraging I find this. A real call to live life in a different way from beyond the grave.
Reading what Grace has written has made me realise how powerful a symbol each one of we women in ministries is. Remember everytime you do what it is you are called to do you are in some way giving birth to a new future.
Anyway what are all of you reading - as you can perhaps tell I have almost run out of crime fiction which is why I've had to turn to philosophy of religion instead!
Jane

Hospitality, food and learning

I really enjoy reading Deirdre Good's splendid blog On not being a sausage and one post last week just read mmmm... if you clicked on the link you went here. Here's a taster of what you find:

“With any decent form of teaching,” says Good, a professor of New Testament at the General Theological Seminary, “you’ve got to show a form of hospitality.”
Cooking dinner for your class (and holding class in your house) may sound extreme, but Good was simply putting two and two together: she enjoys cooking, and many of her evening students would be coming from out of town needing dinner.
In that first class, one student looked down at his plate and quietly said to Good, “this is the best first seminar I’ve ever had.”

This made me think about how hospitality and eating together, feeling at home with one another, sharing a table are important parts of building community. But I can see too how eating together helps the learning process. With all of the catechism classes I've been involved in the best ones always involve regularly having a meal together. Our current KT class has a picnic together but a different person each time brings a cake to share, it's great communion.
So I started wondering about how hospitable our churches are and the place of food in our congregations and work places. what is the place of food, hospitality and table fellowship in your ministry?

In Japan's Christian century 'women were religious leaders'

What follows is a copy of ENI's story from yesterday about the role of women as religious leaders in Japan. It gave me many interreligious insights I didn't previously have and was a bit of an Eastern echo of our own Daughters of Dissent project.
You can find details of the book itself here. If copying the article mention must be made of ENI.

First though here is a bit from the book's blurb
The book is divided into four sections devoted to an in-depth study of different types of apostolates: nuns (women who took up monastic vocations), witches (the women leaders of the Shinto-Buddhist tradition who resisted Jesuit teachings), catechists (women who engaged in ministries of persuasion and conversion), and sisters (women devoted to missions of mercy). Analyzing primary sources including Jesuit histories, letters and reports, especially Luís Fróis' História de Japão, hagiography and family chronicles, each section provides a broad understanding of how these women, in the context of misogynistic society and theology, utilized resources from their traditional religions to new Christian adaptations and specific religio-social issues, creating unique hybrids of Catholicism and Buddhism.
The inclusion of Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese texts, many available for the first time in English, and the dramatic conclusion that women were largely responsible for the trajectory of Christianity in early modern Japan, makes this book an essential reading for scholars of women's history, religious history, history of Christianity, and Asian history.

By Hisashi Yukimoto
Tokyo, 24 April (ENI) - Women played a key role as religious leaders in the middle ages in Japan, a recently published book shows.
"I wanted to introduce forgotten voices of women, especially those of religious leaders," the Rev. Haruko Nawata Ward, the author of "Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, from 1549 to 1650", told Ecumenical News International.
She said ,"I also wanted to pursue the question of the inculturation of European Christianity in non-European contexts during the Reformation period."
The author, a church historian at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, in the United States, noted, "The Christian Century in Japan gave me a suitable frame in which I can pursue both of these tasks."
Nawata Ward told ENI she used the term "Christian Century" in the book "because it captures the brief moment of Japanese history in which Christianity flourished between the time of its introduction by [Saint] Francis Xavier and its disappearance under its total ban by the Tokugawa government."
Ashgate, the publisher, explains that the book "outlines how women provided crucial leadership in the spread, nurture, and maintenance of the faith through various apostolic ministries".
The publisher notes on its Web site, "The author's research on the religious backgrounds of women from different schools of late medieval Japanese Shinto-Buddhism sheds light on individual women's choices to embrace or reject the Reformed Catholicism of the Jesuits, and explores the continuity and discontinuity of their religious expressions."
Nawata Ward, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA), said, "I hope that the stories of creative and resilient women leaders from the past may give hope and courage to today's women leaders in carving out their own voices.
"Networking with these women predecessors from the past in their imaginations might empower today's women leaders in their resistance against familial, social, religious, and political misogyny."
"Also, Christian women leaders might carefully find some enriching resources in Japan's Buddhist and Shinto cultural traditions while being critical in assessing what it means to be Christian leaders in a predominantly non-Christian environment," she added.
In writing the book, she became aware that there had been many women leaders who were part of earlier mission movements who created their own ministries.
Nawata Ward added, "I would like to have a network of scholars, researchers and leaders from the ecumenical Church who might be interested in resurrecting these women leaders' stories from Goa, Macao, Manila, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Ethiopia, England, Canada, and perhaps in other places that I have not even imagined during the early modern period and beyond."
:: Ashgate Web site:http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&pageSubject=1115&title_id=10039&edition_id=11248
:: Nawata Ward's profile: ctsnet.edu/Files/Directories/Faculty/Resumes/Ward_Haruko_08.pdf
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