Hearing the Voices of Peoples Long Silenced: Week 3

Gender Justice 2014

Reproductive Justice and PC(USA) Social Witness Policy, Ann Hayman

It is hard to remember back to the pre Roe v. Wade days. There were the road trips from Idaho to California with classmates seeking abortions. There were fledgling birth control devices and pills that made some aspects of decision-making easier and others ever more difficult. Somewhere in the 80s and 90s, we had a sexual revolution, but there was also an AIDS epidemic. There was an enormous backlash against women as moral decision makers, and new tests were invented that could peer into any stage of a pregnancy and predict an outcome. Even though abortion is legal today in all 50 states, access to a safe and legal procedure has eroded since the passage of Roe v Wade. Continue Reading

Feminism as Evangelism: How Gender Justice Brought Me Back to the Church, Rev. Darcy Metcalfe Mudd

“I have always found it difficult to walk away from the church, but I have also found it difficult to walk with it.” Those evocative words, the first sentence of feminist theologian Letty Russell’s formative work Church in the Round, are the best summary I can give of my introduction to feminist theology. As a woman who grew up in a church tradition that did not allow for any sort of leadership by women, “walking with” the church has been a painful experience for a large part of my life. Even now, long after I left that particular church tradition, those years of forced diminishment of my humanity have left what feels to be a “limp” in my soul. Continue Reading

Silencing: Testimonials of the Exiled Christians, Rachel Murr

I’ve always loved telling my story. In college, my campus Christian group would pass out spiritual gifting inventories, and we’d take a test to help determine whether we had the gifts of prophesy, faith, teaching, healing, evangelism, service, etc. I never identified strongly with any of these gifts, so I made up my own category, telling myself I had the gift of testimony. It wasn’t that my story was remarkable; I was a goody-goody rule follower my whole life. I didn’t have a radical conversion story—just one of knowing aimlessness and loneliness until I found meaning and community among the followers of Jesus. I loved having the chance to speak my truth in a way that offered hope and pointed others toward the gospel. Continue Reading

The Hope of Something New: Feminism, Evangelism, and New Worshiping Communities, Rachel Parsons-Wells

If you were going to create a church that fully lived into gender equality as one of the central values, what would that look like? Who would preach? What language would you use to represent God? Who would preside at the table? Who would make up your congregation? What might they look like? Where would you gather? Creating a New Worshiping Community means having the opportunity to answer these questions as a congregation for the first time, to create a church with a new set of social norms. Community members come together with some idea of what church is supposed to be as well as their own desires for what authentic community feels like. Together, they weed through how this specific community will work together to follow God’s call. This process provides an exciting opportunity to recreate church norms about how men and women show up in church. It is a process full of innovation, idealism, and big ideas. Continue Reading

Status of Women’ Study Underway, Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty

A church-wide study of the status of women on all levels of the PC(USA) is now underway. This will be good news to many advocates who invested time and energy in advancing the idea of the study or served on the task force that created the original design which was brought forward at the 220^th General Assembly (2012). The Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns (ACWC) originally began discussing a church-wide study of the status of women in 2004 and first brought forth a resolution to form a task force to design the study at the 217^th General Assembly (2006). Continue Reading