Breaking through the stained glass ceiling

Columbia’s female clergy members talk about how they found themselves leading congregations across the city.

By Nancy Yang • Photos by Carole Patterson

Rev. Paula Robinson

It’s Sunday morning at Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Columbia. Crisp sunlight spills into the foyer, wedging between a group of people in robes and cassocks who file into the sanctuary singing “Christ, whose glory fills the sky!” A standing congregation joins in. The procession moves through the glare of the open door and into the filtered light of stained glass. Brightness plunges into shadows that form a backdrop for the shining cross that leads the way. Behind the crucifer stroll two young acolytes, followed by the choir, Eucharistic ministers, another cross and the clergy.

The service that follows, while imbued in a rich history, reflects somewhat of a break with tradition for Calvary. For the first time in its 153-year history, the rector, or head minister, is a woman—and an Irish one at that. The Reverend Paula Robinson, who began working at Calvary in March and was formally instituted Sept. 24, comes to Columbia having broken a bit of tradition of her own.

“To be honest, it took me a long time to realize I wanted to be a priest,” said Robinson, who hails from Belfast Northern Ireland. Although she supported a movement to ordain women, it wasn’t until midway through a career in education that she considered the priesthood for herself. “I had a little niggle in the back of my brain that maybe I am called to be a priest.” The disconnect, as Robinson calls it, was that her “niggle” was an earthly impossibility, because the Church of Ireland didn’t allow women priests. Drawing on her faith and the wisdom of a woman approaching middle age, she followed the call anyway, and when officials recommended her for seminary, training for the priesthood, she set the terms. “I told them I’d accept as long as they changed ‘if’ the church ordains women to ‘when.’” In 1990, shortly after she entered the seminary, her request became prophetic. The Church of Ireland amended Canon law to allow the ordination of women.

“I went to seminary on faith,” she said, of what was then a bastion of male membership. Yet interspersed between the hurdles of ordination were serendipitous events she calls God incidents. “Everything’s in God’s good providence, but in some places that portal between this world and the next is so porous you can feel it.”  She describes her curacy, a first job that’s an apprenticeship of sorts, with a smile and a dash of self-deprecation. “We have a saying in Ireland that if you displease the Church you’ll go to Hell or Connaught — and I went to Connaught. No one who wants to make a name in the Church wants to go there because it’s hidden and remote.” A wistful expression accompanies smiling eyes: “I enjoyed it very, very, very much.”

Robinson joins The Reverend Amy Chambers Cortright, Calvary’s associate rector, making them the only all-female team of ministers in the Episcopal Diocese. “This wouldn’t be an unusual thing if we were men,” says Cortright, who unlike Robinson grew up surrounded by women priests. America’s Episcopal Church began officially ordaining women in 1976. Two years earlier, a group of women known as the Philadelphia 11 were ordained “irregularly”—without the recommendations of a standing committee—and declared invalid by the House of Bishops.

Queen Elizabeth I must have been rolling in her royal grave. The Episcopal Church and the Church of Ireland belong to a worldwide Anglican Communion under its mother, the Church of England. Mother church, indeed. It was Queen Elizabeth I who led the Church of England as supreme governor  and whose religious settlement created the church as we know it. It was she who empowered the Church of England to become the state religion and a formidable political force. When she ascended the throne, England was an insignificant country, but under her reign it became a major European power.

The world would wait more than 400 years before organized religions began ordaining women in significant numbers. “It was all just beginning when I went to seminary,” said Gertrude Linder Stawski, a former Unitarian Universalist minister who became one of Columbia’s first female clergy. “We were a precious few at the time. Change has taken place in my personal lifetime.”   When Stawski was ordained in 1968, women made up only 3 percent of active clergy. Today they’re grown to over half. More conservative denominations have seen increases in women ministers, as well. According to a 1999 article in the New York Times, ordination of women in mainline Christian churches and among Reform Jews has increased eightfold since 1972. In contrast, Orthodox Jews, as well as many Evangelical, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches continue to restrict ordination to men.

Rev. Karen McClure

Several blocks west and north of Calvary, Russell Chapel welcomes members and visitors alike with an affirming embrace. Colorful windows illuminate an altar and pulpit wrapped in pristine linens, a tradition on communion Sundays at this Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) church. Episcopal in the sense that it’s governed by bishops, this is no Anglican church. A predominantly African American congregation joins in a service that blends Western tradition with outward, spontaneous praise. When The Reverend Karen Walker McClure gives The Word, her message of praying for God’s will crescendos to an enthusiastic interplay between herself and the congregation.

“God shows up a lot when I’m in the pulpit,” she said. But McClure, pastor and first female Presiding Elder of the Missouri District of the CME Church, wasn’t always paying attention. “I didn’t have any real aspiration to be a minister until He started doing things in my life.”  At 18, she joined the civil rights movement through Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. Its accompanying worship service contrasted with her quiet Methodist upbringing. “I became more comfortable with demonstrative forms of worship during that time in my life,” she said. Years later, she led a youth ministry for her daughter; she also organized a Bible study for her father and others who didn’t necessarily attend church. “This was God pulling me into the ministry but I didn’t know it,” she said. “God was dropping little hints all around me, but I would reject them.”

Eventually she found the courage to look inward. McClure, who had been working in supplier diversity management, began attending a small start-up church led by Essie Clark, a dynamic minister who didn’t shy away from her femininity. “This woman preached The Word in high heels and everything. She was one sharp sister.” A sermon titled “Catch it in a Whisper” spoke volumes. “I realized that I couldn’t run any longer. That sermon spoke directly to me.”  McClure phoned Clark and finally gave voice to her ruminations. A conversation with her family’s pastor only confirmed what she hadn’t wanted to hear: if you’re fighting it, you know you’ve been called.

The CME church is rooted in the Methodist Episcopal church of 1784, which opposed slavery, but the cultural differences that divided the nation eventually divided the ME church. The CME church was established in the wake of the Civil War, when 41 former slaves started the “Colored Methodist Church” to meet “the expressed desires and wishes of its African American constituents to have their own separate and independent organization.” Its name later became the Christian Methodist Church. By the 1970’s, the CME church began ordaining women, although it is the only African Methodist denomination that has not elected a  female bishop.

McClure’s choice to become a minister tested her faith in a slightly different way from Robinson’s. “Attending seminary was a culture shock,” she said. “In the African American culture you don’t question your faith. Seminary freed me up to ask questions about my beliefs, which made my faith stronger. I expected seminary to include more worship and less academics, but quickly realized this was an institution of higher learning. More mind and less heart,” she said. It wasn’t until after she completed her training that the heart emerged front and center. She was leading services at the nursing home that cared for her father, who had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s, when she noticed something remarkable. “The residents didn’t forget things that connected them with God. Your relationship with God does not depend on cognitive ability.”
The revelation helped her come to grips with her father’s decline, but a Nigerian woman, who asked her how she might pray for him, gave her pause. Years later it would become the subject of a sermon. Back at Russell Chapel, she speaks of this woman’s request and of her ambivalence with a disease that’s been called the long good-bye. “It’s hard to pray for God’s will to be done when we’re hurting.”  A chorus of affirmation chimes in: “Amen. All the time.”

Rev. Kristin Powell

West of Russell Chapel on Broadway, services at the Unity Center have gotten underway. The Reverend Kristin Powell introduces guest musician Phil Jones, who leads the congregation in meditation with an Aboriginal didgeridoo. A single tone drifts through the sanctuary like a foghorn. The drone picks up pace with a symphony of rumbles and vibrations that ripple though the vaulted room. Jones asks congregants to bow their heads to allow the ancient sounds to carry them inward and leave the clutter of their lives behind. Later in the service, Jones jokingly introduces a song titled Hail Mary: “I used a Catholic tune, took the guilt out of it and added a Hindu chant.”

Echoing Jones’ music and chants, Unity’s approach to worship seeks to shed modern light on ancient religious beliefs through a blend of teachings called New Thought Christianity. One example is an annual interfaith peace service during the Season of Nonviolence. The season commemorates the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and is marked by their respective assassinations. “Columbia’s spiritual leaders representing the world’s faiths present an authentic form of worship,” said Powell. “There are many paths to the One.”

The same could be said about Powell’s career. Back in the ’90s while working at a PR agency in Chicago, Powell’s sister took her to a Unity church, quite a stretch for a woman who was raised as a conservative Lutheran. “I thought these people were unusually happy. Something kept bringing me back. I began to feel more centered and peaceful throughout the week.”  Powell said she’s grateful for her traditional roots, which gave her a foundation of spirituality. “You can use spirituality to come to your own decision of what religious community may or may not work for you. The Unity belief system felt like a match for me.”

What didn’t seem like a match was the idea of becoming a minister. She had laughed off results of a high school career test suggesting teaching or the ministry. “I never thought I’d be either. I did have a thirst for knowing more of who I was and what I believe. I had a yearning that God wanted me to do something.” She calls it her save-the-world mentality. “Now I get that it’s an inside job. You change the world by changing your consciousness.”

The Unity movement began in the 1880’s with the spiritual awakening of its first woman minister, Myrtle Fillmore. (There have been many since, although the percentages have shifted over the years from predominantly women to 60 percent.) Fillmore’s husband and co-founder Charles helped her communicate her message through printed materials and a telephone ministry called Silent Unity. It was this ministry that led Powell to a strange and wonderful epiphany. Shortly after her ordination in 2002, Powell engaged in silent reflection on what her ministry might look like.

“God sent me a bizarre message to lead bike rides around the world.”  The message took root, manifesting itself into Unity Rising, which organizes spiritual adventures through travel. Trips have indeed included bike rides, as well as adventures across the globe. Powell has continued the travel ministry since becoming Unity’s senior minister in 2005. She highlights a recent journey to Peru during a brown-bag luncheon of area clergy women. “When the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, it’s believed we’ll be in a time of light and harmony,” she said. “There will be a shift on the planet into a balance of the divine masculine and feminine.”