The Changing Role of Women in NC Churches
Edited from The Woman’s Coffeehouse of Spirit – Compiled by Evelyn Mattern, S.F.C.C.

The following is an anonymous true story about a Presbyterian woman’s experience within her church.

We started going to the Presbyterian church when I was in sixth grade. I loved it, everything about it. I knew early on that I wanted to work there. I can remember late at night preaching sermons as I went to sleep and, when the minister was preaching, saying things in my head, finding ways to say it better than he did.

As I grew up, I first thought, “I’ll need to be a minister’s wife, that’s what I’ll need to be. I’ll have to go find me a minister to marry.” Then it became, “Oh, I’ll be a missionary, because women can be missionaries.” Then our church hired a Director of Christian Education, so I was going to be a Director of Christian Education. That’s about where I was when I went off to college. In college, our campus Director of Christian Education went to seminary, and I also met my first associate female pastor. Immediately, I said, “That’s going to be me.”

I entered seminary and began dating a man who would eventually become my husband. While in seminary together, we each did our internship at the same church in Tennessee. I did one year, and he did the next.  We were both studying feminist theology, and we had the exact same job title, exact same pay, everything. I was put under the direction of the associate pastor, who was a female and a great mentor to me. I was put in charge of the youth group. I did very little in the pulpit and went on some home visitations with her, but not much. At the end of the summer, I was given a beautifully hand made card, with pictures of me and the youth group, and a t-shirt.

The next summer, my boyfriend, doing the same internship, was put under the care of the senior pastor—a man, so it was not totally inappropriate—but that also meant that he was in the pulpit every Sunday. And he did visitation with the senior pastor and very little youth work. At the end of the summer, he was given an official letter of thanks from the session. How we were reinforced in that same position was very curious. I got the warm fuzzies but nothing formal or official. He didn't get the warm fuzzies but got the formal. We thought about how we would both have liked both kinds of affirmations. Later, when we were married, even serving as co-pastors, we saw those kinds of reinforcements over and over.

One year, after I participated in the installation of a pastor in our town, one woman came up to me and said, “It was really neat to see a woman up there. You know, when you were up there, I thought: one day maybe our church should try to have a woman associate.” And I said, “Oh, I look forward to the day when you have a woman head of staff.” You would have thought I had hit her in the face. Her smile dropped, she took a step back, and the conversation finished. She walked away as if I had insulted her. It was as if there was only one box for a woman to be in.

A church in Chapel Hill has a female head of staff and often has female interns from Duke Divinity School. One Sunday they had a male as a guest preacher. One five year old leaned over and whispered, “Mom, can men be ministers too?” Often a parent will tell me a story about a child imitating me, for example, by wearing a scarf like a stole and saying, “Look, I’m like pastor P____.”  That may mean that little girls—and little boys too—grow up knowing not only that they could be ministers, but that they could be whatever they want to be, and create their own image of what that is.