Articles – Page 173 – Religion Online

Unmasking the Black Conservatives

The publication of Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics in 1975 marked the rise of an aggressive and widely visible black conservative assault on the traditional liberal leadership of blacks in the United States. The promotion of conservative ideas is not new in Afro-American history. George S. Schuyler, for example, published a witty and acerbic column in an influential black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, for decades, and his book Black and conservative is a minor classic in Afro-American letters. And Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most renowned Afro-American woman writers, wrote reactionary essays (some of which appeared in the Reader’s Digest) and gave her allegiance to the Republican Party -- facts often overlooked by her contemporary feminist followers. Yet the bid for conservative hegemony in black political and intellectual leadership that was initiated by Sowell’ s book represents a new development in the post -- civil rights era.

This bid is as yet highly unsuccessful, though it has generated much attention from the American media. Besides Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, other prominent figures in the black conservative movement are Glenn C. Loury, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Walter E. Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University; I A. Parker, president of the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, Inc.; Robert Woodson, president of the National Association of Neighborhood Enterprises; and Joseph Perkins, editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. Though there are minor differences among these people, they all support the basic policies of the Reagan administration, including the major foreign policies, the opposition to affirmative action, the efforts to abolish or lower the adult minimum wage, the proposals for enterprise zones in inner cities, and the vast cutbacks in social programs for the poor.

These publicists are aware of the irony of their position -- that their own ‘upward social mobility was, in large part, made possible by the struggles of those in the civil rights movement and the more radical black activists they now scorn. But they also realize that black liberalism is in a deep crisis. It is this crisis, exemplified by the rise of Reaganism and the decline of progressive politics, that has created the intellectual space that the black conservative voices (along with the nonblack ones) now occupy.

The crisis of black liberalism and the emergence of the new black conservatives can best be understood in light of three fundamental events in American society and culture since 1973: the eclipse of U.S. economic and military predominance in the world; the structural transformation of the American economy; and the moral breakdown of communities throughout the country, especially among the black working poor and underclass.

The symbolic events in the decline of American economic and military hegemony were the oil crisis, which resulted principally from the solidarity of the OPEC nations, and the military defeat in Vietnam. Increasing economic competition from Japan, West Germany and other nations ended an era of unquestioned U.S. economic power. The resultant slump in the American economy undermined the Keynesian foundation of postwar American liberalism: economic growth accompanied by state regulation and intervention on behalf of disadvantaged citizens.

The impact of the economic recession on Afro-Americans was immense. Not surprisingly, it more deeply affected the black working poor and underclass than the expanding black middle class. Issues of sheer survival loomed large for the former, while the latter continued to seize opportunities in education, business and politics. Most middle-class blacks consistently supported the emergent black political class -- the black officials elected at the national, state and local levels -- primarily to ensure black upward social mobility. But a few began to feel uncomfortable about how their white middle-class peers viewed them. Mobility by means of affirmative action breeds tenuous self respect and questionable peer acceptance for many middle-class blacks. The new black conservatives voiced these feelings in the form of attacks on affirmative action programs (ignoring the fact that they had achieved their positions by means of such programs).

The importance of this quest for middle-class respectability based on merit rather than politics cannot be overestimated in the new black conservatism. The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most Americans want -- to be judged by the quality of their skills, not the color of their skin. But surprisingly, the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

The new black conservatives assume that without affirmative action programs, white Americans will make choices on merit rather than on race. Yet they have adduced absolutely no evidence for this: Hence, they are either politically naïve or simply unconcerned about black mobility. Most Americans realize that job-hiring choices are made both on reasons of merit and on personal grounds. And it is this personal dimension that is often influenced by racist perceptions. Therefore the pertinent debate regarding black hiring is never "merit vs. race" but whether hiring decisions will be based on merit, influenced by race-bias against blacks, or on merit, influenced by race-bias, but with special consideration for minorities as mandated by law. In light of actual employment practices, the black conservative rhetoric about race-free hiring criteria (usually coupled with a call for dismantling affirmative action mechanisms) does no more than justify actual practices of racial discrimination. Their claims about self-respect should not obscure this fact, nor should they be regarded as different from the normal self-doubts and insecurities of new arrivals in the American middle class. It is worth noting that most of the new black conservatives are first-generation middleclass persons, who offer themselves as examples of how well the system works for those willing to sacrifice and work hard. Yet, in familiar American fashion, genuine white peer acceptance still seems to escape them. In this regard, they are still influenced by white racism.

The eclipse of U.S. hegemony in the world is also an important factor for understanding black conservatives’ views on foreign policy. Although most of the press attention they receive has to do with their provocative views on domestic issues, I would suggest that the widespread support black conservatives receive from Reaganite conservatives and Jewish neoconservatives has much to do with their views on U.S. foreign policies. Though black conservatives rightly call attention to the butchery of bureaucratic elites in Africa, who rule in the name of a variety of ideologies, they reserve most of their energies for supporting U.S. intervention in Central America and the U.S. alliance with Israel. Their relative silence regarding the U.S. policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa is also revealing.

The black conservatives’ stance is significant in light of the glacial shift that has occurred in black America regarding America’s role in the world. A consequence of the civil rights movement and the Black Power ideology of the ‘60s was a growing identification of black Americans with other oppressed peoples around the world. This has had less to do with a common skin color and more to do with shared social and political experience. Many blacks sympathize with Polish workers and Northern Irish Catholics (despite problematic Polish-black and Irish-black relations in places like Chicago and Boston), and more and more blacks are cognizant of how South Africa oppresses its native peoples, how Chile and South Korea repress their citizens, and how Israel mistreats the Palestinians. This latter identification especially worries conservatives. In fact, the radical consequences for domestic issues of this growing black international consciousness -- usually dubbed anti-Americanism by the vulgar right -- frightens the new black conservatives, who find themselves viewed in many black communities as mere apologists for pernicious U.S. foreign policies.

The new black conservatives have rightly perceived that the black liberal leadership has not addressed these changes in the economy. Obviously, the idea that racial discrimination is the sole cause of the predicament of the black working poor and underclass is specious. And the idea that the courts and government can significantly enhance the plight of blacks by enforcing laws already on the books is even more spurious. White racism, though pernicious and potent, cannot fully explain the socioeconomic position of the majority of black Americans.

The crisis of black liberalism is the result of its failure to put forward a realistic response to the changes in the economy. The new black conservatives have highlighted this crisis by trying to discredit the black liberal leadership, arguing that the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Black Congressional Caucus and most black mayors are guided by outdated and ineffective viewpoints. The overriding aim of the new black conservatives is to undermine the position of black liberals and replace them with black Republicans, who downplay governmental regulation and stress market mechanisms and success-oriented values in black communities.

Yet the new black conservatives have been unable to convince black Americans that conservative ideology and Reaganite policies are morally acceptable and politically advantageous. The vast depoliticization and electoral disengagement of blacks suggests that they are indeed disenchanted with black liberals and distrustful of American political processes; and a downtrodden and degraded people with limited options may be ready to try any alternative. Nevertheless, black Americans have systematically rejected the arguments of the new black conservatives. This is not because blacks are duped by liberal black politicians nor because blacks worship the Democratic Party. Rather, it is because most blacks conclude that while racial discrimination is not the sole cause of their plight, it certainly is one cause. Thus, most black Americans view the new black conservative assault on the black liberal leadership as a step backward rather than forward. Black liberalism indeed is inadequate, but black conservatism is unacceptable. This negative reaction to black conservatives by most blacks partly explains the reluctance of the new black conservatives to engage in public debates in the black community, and their contrasting eagerness to do so in the mass media, where a few go so far as to portray themselves as courageous, embattled critics of a black liberal establishment -- while their salaries, honorariums and travel expenses are paid by well-endowed conservative foundations and corporations.

The new black conservatives have had their most salutary effect on public discourse by highlighting the breakdown of the moral fabric in the country and especially in black working poor and underclass communities. Black organizations like Jesse Jackson’s PUSH have focused on this issue in the past, but the new black conservatives have been obsessed by it, and thereby given it national attention. Unfortunately, they view this urgent set of problems in strictly individualistic terms, and ignore the historical background and social context of the current crisis.

The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, hard work, deferred gratification and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Since the end of the postwar economic boom, new strategies have been used to stimulate consumption -- especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos. Ought we to be surprised that black youths isolated from the labor market, marginalized by decrepit urban schools, devalued by alienating ideals of beauty and targeted by an unprecedented drug invasion exhibit high rates of crime and teen-age pregnancy?

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing ‘a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking this, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament.

The ideological blinders of the new black conservatives are clearly evident in their attempt to link the moral breakdown of poor black communities to the expansion of the welfare state. For them, the only structural element of political-economic life relevant to the plight of the black poor is the negative role of the state and the positive role of the market. An appropriate question to these descendants of slaves sold at the auction block is, Can the market do any wrong?

They claim that transfer payments to the black needy engender a mentality of dependence which undercuts the values of self-reliance and the solidity of the black poor family. The new black conservatives fail to see that the welfare state was the historic compromise between progressive forces seeking broad subsistence rights and conservative forces arguing for unregulated markets. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the welfare state possesses many flaws. I do believe that the reinforcing of "dependent mentalities" and the undermining of the family are two such flaws. But simply to point out these rather obvious shortcomings does not justify cutbacks in the welfare state. In the face of high black unemployment, these cutbacks will not promote self-reliance or strong black families but will only produce even more black cultural disorientation and more devastated black households.

Yet even effective jobs programs do not fully address the cultural decay and moral disintegration of poor black communities. Like America itself, these communities are in need of cultural revitalization and moral regeneration. There is widespread agreement on this need by all sectors of black leadership, but neither black liberals nor the new black conservatives adequately speak to this need.

At present, the major institutional bulwarks against the meaninglessness and despair rampant in Afro-America are Christian churches and Muslim mosques. These churches and mosques are indeed fighting an uphill battle; they cannot totally counter the pervasive influence on black people, especially black youths, of the sexual and violent images purveyed by mass media. Yet I am convinced that the prophetic black churches -- the churches that have rich cultural and moral resources and a progressive politics -- do possess the kind of strategy it takes to meet the crisis of black culture. That is, churches like Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Herbert Daughtry’s House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, Charles Adams’s Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit, and Frank Reid’s Ward African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles are able to affirm the humanity of poor black people, accent their capacities, and foster the character and excellence requisite for productive citizenship. Unfortunately, there are not enough of these institutions to overcome the cultural and moral crisis.

What then are we to make of the new black conservatives? First, I would argue that the narrowness of their viewpoints reflects the narrowness of the liberal perspective with which they are obsessed. In fact, a lack of vision and analysis, and a refusal to acknowledge the crucial structural features of the black poor situation, characterizes both black liberals and conservatives. The positions of both groups reflects a fight within the black middle-class elite. This parochialism is itself a function of the highly limited alternatives available in contemporary American politics.

Second, the emergence of the new black conservatives signifies a healthy development to the degree that it calls attention to the failures of black liberalism and thereby encourages black politicians and activists to entertain more progressive, solutions to the problems of social injustice. Finally, I would predict that the next area for black conservative attacks on the black liberal leadership will be that of U.S. foreign policy. The visible role of the NAACP and black elected officials in the antiapartheid movement will probably come under a heavier ideological assault. This attack can only intensify as black liberal leaders find it more and more difficult to pass the conservative litmus tests for pro-Americanism in foreign affairs: uncritical support for U.S. policy toward Israel and U.S. intervention in Central America.

Perhaps the widening of the split between black liberal leaders and black conservative critics will lead to a more principled and passionate political discourse in and about black America. I am confident that with more rational debates among conservative, liberal and leftist voices, the truth about the black poor can be more easily ascertained. The few valuable insights of the new black conservatives can be incorporated into a larger progressive perspective that utterly rejects their unwarranted conclusions and repugnant policies. I suspect that such a dialogue would unmask the new black conservatives as renegades from the critics of black liberalism who have seen some of the limits of this liberalism, but are themselves highly rewarded and status-hungry ideologues unwilling to question the nature of their own illiberalism.

Confidentiality and Mandatory Reporting: A False Dilemma?

The existence of state laws requiring clergy to report evidence of physical or sexual abuse of children has become a source of controversy. (See, for example, Jeffery Warren Scott’s recent Century article, Confidentiality and Child Abuse: Church and State Collide," February 19.) The ethical goal of protecting children from harm appears to clash with the pastoral ethic of confidentiality. The professional ethic of confidentiality ensures that congregants or clients can share their concerns, questions or burdens without fear of disclosure. It creates a context of respect and trust within which help can be provided. The tradition of clergy confidentiality has allowed some people to seek help who otherwise might not do so out of fear of punishment or embarrassment. Confidentiality has traditionally been the ethical responsibility of professionals within their professional relationships, and is generally assumed to be operative even if a specific request has not been made by a congregant or client.

For the pastor, priest or rabbi, confidentiality has a spiritual as well as professional context. In Christian denominations, the expectation of confidentiality is tied most specifically to the act of confession. But the responsibility of the pastor or priest who hears a confession varies among denominations. For Anglican and Roman Catholic priests, confession has sacramental significance, and whatever information is revealed is held in confidence by the seal of confession, with no exceptions. The United Methodists do not view confession as sacramental, but their Book of Discipline states:

"Ministers. . . are charged to maintain all confidences inviolate, including confessional confidences." The statement by the Lutheran Church in America tries to protect the confidence of the parishioner while allowing room for the discretion of the pastor: "No minister . . . shall divulge any confidential disclosure given to him in the course of his care of souls or otherwise in his professional capacity, except with the express permission of the person who has confided in him or in order to prevent a crime" (Minutes of the United Lutheran Church in America, 22nd Biennial Convention, 1960, quoted in Seward Reese, "Confidential Communications to Clergy," Ohio State Law Journal [vol. 24 (1963) 1, p. 68).

As the Lutheran statement indicates, the clergy ethic of confidentiality must be placed in a larger ethical context. There may be, as Sissela Bok puts it, "reasons sufficient to override the force of all these premises, as when secrecy would allow violence to be done to innocent persons" ("The Limits of Confidentiality," The Hastings Center Report [February 1983], p. 26). The law itself is unclear as to the clergyperson’s duty to disclose someone’s intent to commit a crime or cause harm. Is the clergyperson who does not report the probability of a crime legally liable for the crime? Are clergypersons obliged to protect the innocent, who in this case are children?

It is useful here to make a distinction between confidentiality and secrecy. A commitment to secrecy is a commitment never, under any circumstance, to share the information in question. This commitment on the part of the priest is inherent in a sacramental confession. Confidentiality, on the other hand, means holding information in trust and sharing it only in the interest of the person involved -- with their permission, or in order to seek consultation with another professional, or in order to protect others from being harmed. The ethic of confidentiality is intended to assist people in getting help for their problems; it is not intended to prevent people from being held accountable for their harmful actions or to keep them from getting the help they need. Shielding people from the consequences of their behavior is likely to endanger others and only postpone the act of repentance that is needed.

Another ethical ‘principle that applies here is that of justice-making. Christian Scripture is very specific about responding to the sins of others. "Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him" (Luke 17:3) Those who sin and who harm others must be confronted with their deeds so that they might repent. Both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are clear that repentance has to do with change: "Get yourselves a new heart and a new spin so turn and live" (Ezek. 18:31-32) In this context of accountability, justice and repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation may be possible. And repentance and reconciliation should be a minister’s primary concerns.

It is also critical to keep in mind what we know about those who sexually and physically abuse children.

• The fact of child abuse must be revealed in order for the victim and offender to be helped.

• Offenders will minimize and deny their activities.

• Offenders will continue to abuse children unless they get special treatment. And they will not be able to follow through on their good intentions or their genuine remorse without that help.

• Treatment of offenders is most effective when it is ordered and monitored by the courts.

• Clergypersons do not have all the skills and resources needed to treat offenders or to assist victims.

• Quick forgiveness of the offender is likely to be a form of cheap grace, and is unlikely to lead to repentance.

It should also be pointed out that it is actually rare for a child abuser to come forward and confess his or her sins to a pastor. What happens, in the experience of most pastors, is that a child or teen-ager who is being abused, or another parent or family member, comes in search of assistance. What is involved, then, is not a confession but a cry for help. Confidentiality is still a concern, but not in the sense of the "confessional seal." Rather, the concern is to respect the nature of the information that has been shared and to meet the particular needs of the victim.

Responding to such a situation is never easy. But there is a system of child protective services in every state to ensure that an abused child is protected and an abuser gets help. This system is no more or less perfect than the church, but it is a vital resource. The pastor needs to support the efforts of those who have been harmed to break through the veil of secrecy and get help. Though responding to the victims’ cries for help will usually involve difficult ambiguous choices, what is important is that the pastor have a clear purpose: to protect the one who has been victimized and to hold the offender accountable. Confidentiality should be seen as a means of accomplishing this end rather than a way of keeping the abuse secret and avoiding the fact of accountability.

Confidentiality should not be regarded as a sacred cow. As Bok argues: "The premises supporting confidentiality are strong, but they cannot support practices of secrecy -- whether by individual clients, institutions, or professionals -- that undermine and contradict the very respect for persons and for human bonds that confidentiality was meant to protect" (p. 30). The mandatory reporting of child abuse should be viewed in this context, rather than as a challenge to the principle of pastoral confidentiality. Mandatory reporting laws can assist clergypersons in fulfilling their responsibilities. Hence, the need for mandatory reporting and the need for pastoral confidentiality may not be as contradictory as they at first appear.

The Theology of Pac-Man

The younger of our brilliant, honors-division daughters returned from her university at Christmastime with a big, red, raw blister on the palm of her right band. In the solicitous manner of fathers, I demanded to know what had happened to her. She muttered something about some man.

“What?” I cried. “A man did this to you? A man has tortured my little child?”

She turned away in shame. “It wasn’t a man. It was Pac-Man,” she choked out. Then she turned to me with desperation in her voice. “You must help me. Whatever you do, give me no money. No matter how I beg and plead. Pay my bills at college directly. End my checking account. Warn your friends that I might hit them up.”

“What are you talking about?” I screamed. So she poured out the terrible tale of her humiliation. It seems that on the Friday night before Christmas vacation she and several friends, sober students all, had gone to a video arcade. Our daughter has been to Europe, Disneyland, Gettysburg and the Riverfront Stadium. She speaks Russian. Nonetheless, she was ill prepared for the real world, the lights that dazzle and the sounds that beckon. She innocently slipped a quarter into the Pac-Man slot, curled her fingers around the controls, held the bright red ball of the joy stick firmly against her palm, and there she remained -- hour upon hour, quarter after quarter, desperately trying to keep her Pac-Man out of the voracious jaws of four different-colored and deceptively cute-looking monsters; trying to make him eat up the dots on the “table” and down the bunches of fruit which occasionally appeared; and sporadically trying to make him turn the monsters into frightened blue turn-tails by eating “energizing dots” -- all of this in an attempt to build up points for the owner of the increasingly blistered hand.

Before the night was over she had spent all the money she had with her, tried to cash checks, borrowed all the cash her friends had, begged money from strangers, and finally been dragged back to her room, screaming and sobbing, “Just one more quarter. One more. I’ve got it now. I’ve figured it out. I can beat ‘em this time.” Her friends closed their ears. They had all been through it. In fact, they returned to their dorm and formed the first campus chapter of PA (Pac-Man Anonymous)

I was shocked, chagrined, shamed and humiliated. Christmas cookies and peanut brittle lost their allure for a child of Joe Cool, the Ice Man, known to his colleagues as “Dr. Death” because of the level of his excitement at church committee meetings; she had sold her subzero birthright for a heated romp through a video maze.

As the days slogged on in the after-Christmas slush, I knew not what to do. My child was a junkie, and I could not understand or identify with her experience. I could not comprehend how anyone, especially a child of mine, could just lose control that way.

Then one day I was walking through a local shopping center, passing by the gaping mouth of its video arcade, where an oily looking man sat on a stool, an evil smile curling the corners of his serpentine mouth, as he suggestively jingled the quarters in his little leather apron. I glanced quickly around. Seeing no one I knew, I slipped into the arcade and was suddenly surrounded by dozens of moving, lighted, gonging, clanging video machines. They all seemed not only to be watching me as I hurried through the narrow corridors separating them, but to beckon me as well. “Hey, Big Boy, want to go to heaven for a quarter?” “Hey, Honey, you lookin’ for action?” “Hey, Mister, slip me a quarter and we can really have a good time!”

I came to the one marked “Pac-Man” and read the instructions on how to play. I did not understand them. They reminded me of IRS instructions on how to prepare an alternate Schedule C for a 1040-A. Either you are born understanding such things or you are not. The game was already in motion, showing the uninitiated what could happen, and introducing novice players not only to the names of the characters but also to their nicknames. Since I did not understand those either, in my mind they became Hinkey, Dinkey, Parley and Vous, and so they have remained.

Deciding that the only way to comprehend the instructions was to play, I slipped a quarter into the slot. Four little monsters appeared in a cage in the middle of the maze, while Pac-Man appeared toward the bottom of it, eating the dots that populated every half-inch of every corridor of the table. I guided him along, seeing the score rise as the dots were consumed. Suddenly I realized the monsters were uncaged, and converging on Pac-Man! I twisted the joy stick desperately, but they were coming at him from all sides. Coming at him? They were coming at me! I was there in that maze, fighting for survival, a survival that was not to be. As they caught me and I melted down to nothing, a short, sad, awful funeral dirge played.

But wait! The monsters returned to their cage, the consumer dots remained digested and Pac-Man reappeared. I was reborn, still in control. I was in the maze again but I was also outside it, looking on, the aptly named joy stick still in my hand. Cherries appeared near at hand -- a chance for an easy 200 points, and the chase was on once more. This time I understood. I could do it!

I did not do it, of course. My successive Pac-Men ate more dots and avoided the monsters a little longer, but the end for each one was the playing of the same sad little song. When three had gone that way, the board flashed the awful words, “Game Over.” Without thinking, I reached, into my pocket for a second quarter.

With my second game I discovered that there were four big dots which, when consumed, energized Pac-Man, changing him into a monster. The real monsters turned blue and ran at the terrifying sight of the turning worm, the righteous avenger, the passive one becoming aggressive, the meek inheriting the maze. While the monsters were blue I could chomp them with the jaws of Pac-Man and get 200 points each. But, alas, they remain blue only momentarily. Just as I was about to catch Hinkey he began to flash back into his old color. I turned, but too late, and the sad song played for me once more.

When my quarters were finally gone, I started to run to the man at the door. He had quarters while I had only useless dollars. I must make a monetary exchange.

Then I realized . . . It was happening to me, too. Just as my “chomper” (in the argot of the game) had been consumed by the monsters, I had been consumed by Pac-Man. And my tale is not singular. If truth be told, many an otherwise upright citizen slips into many a video arcade with a sweaty palm full of quarters and a surreptitious glance over his shoulder.

Why is this so? Of all the video games, why has Pac-Man captured the imagination, and the quarters, of so many? Because it is based on the Christian understanding of life, that’s why. Pac-Man is a phenomenon of the industrialized countries not just because it is part of the advanced technology of electronics, but because those are the countries most thoroughly saturated with the Christian story. Pac-Man is based on the biblical narrative, its story the same one Jesus told in a different way. Pac-Man is existence, captured in the bleeps and blips of the electronic board. It is, in short, life.

The little white dots that Pac-Man gobbles up are days, the regular chronology of existence. You get points for downing them -- not many points, not big points, but you get something just for going through the maze. With the control stick you can go any direction you wish, though of course you have no choice but to stay within the confines of the maze itself.

John S. Dunne says that there are three strangers that invade our lives: the world, mortality and sexuality. I would add aging as a fourth. Perhaps these are the monsters that pursue our hero, Pac-Man.

When these variously colored monsters appear at the center of the maze, you do not automatically and immediately know that they are monsters. The instructions may tell you they are, others may have warned you about them, but they look so innocent, so benign, so cute. They even have nicknames, for Pete’s sake! Demons -- I mean monsters -- do not have nicknames. It is, interesting to note that Pac-Man and the monsters are very similar in appearance and chomping ability, and are all rather lovable. Of course, demons always disguise themselves to look lovable, to look as much like their prey as possible.

Despite their resemblance to one another, each monster is different from the others in behavior. They move at different speeds and follow different patterns through the maze. If you cannot distinguish between them as the game progresses, you are much more likely to get caught. Naturally, with four monsters and only one Pac-Man, the odds are hardly even. The patterns of the monsters are bound to converge on Pac-Man sooner or later, and it is usually sooner. At such times, Pac-Man’s only salvation is in one of the four energy dots that transfigure him into a superman and make the monsters run for their lives.

Monsters, however, do not scare for very long. Those religious experiences of life, those times when we are so spiritually supercharged that demons quake at the sight, do not last very long, and the monsters know it. Soon they begin to flash, meaning they are going to turn back to their usual colors. Normalcy will soon return, and Pac-Man had better get back to eating as many dots as possible, to run up the score before the monsters come again. It is worth noting that the longer the game goes on, the faster the monsters move, and the shorter their blue periods are. It is just like what happens as one advances in the spiritual life.

Occasionally as Pac-Man makes his way, cherries appear in the maze, and if you are good enough to get into the advanced stages of the game, other types of fruit also show up. If your Pac-Man can eat them, you get big bonus points. The problem is that you never know when or where they will appear, and they usually lure Pac-Man away from the safety of the energy dots, out to where the monsters are freewheeling through the alleys. You might call the fruits opportunity, or you might call them temptation.

If Pac-Man manages to outwit the monsters long enough to eat all the dots in the maze, there is a short intermission and even a little show in which all the characters cavort about harmlessly. It is a plateau, a short rest, before another maze appears, and life goes on. It would be interesting to compare the various mazes to Erik Erikson’s stages of growth or James Fowler’s stages of faith, though I haven’t been able to do so because I am stuck in the beginning mazes. It is clear, however, that the successive mazes of Pac-Man in some way bear witness to life as it moves from one stage to another.

I suspect that Pac-Man was developed by those in the Wesleyan tradition. Some sort of “prevenient grace” predisposes humans with quarters to enter into the maze and “to go on to perfection.” But there is a Hebraic strain, too. An adaptation of the game is a switch to silence its electronic sounds allowing the player to “Be still, and know

The clincher, however, that relates Pac-Man to life is the price one pays. The unadept pay a high price in quarters; the adept require less money, but pay in time and concentration and Pac-Man elbow!

Why does Pac-Man appeal? Because it mirrors the patterns of reality. Like life, it presents us with days of frustration and moments of salvation; it includes pursuit by demons and rebirth for another try; it makes us attempt to survive through maze after maze. It includes the hope that pulls one on, and the sad song at the end when one finally steps away and another takes one’s place at the controls. Pac-Man is the story of life as we hear it in the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the most thoroughly theological of all the video games.

When the Century pays me for this article, I would like the money in quarters.

Looking for the Gospel at a Gospel Concert

My wife and children have not forgiven me yet; perhaps they never will.

We were in the small southern Indiana town where I grew up, and a gospel concert was advertised for the auditorium of the little Christian college there. It seemed like a grand opportunity to let my family in on a part of my cultural heritage. I could already hear the piano runs, the black and white spirituals, the gospel folk tunes from the hills, the glorious harmonies of the male quartets -- it all welled up from my memories of hot, humid nights in the small, dimly lit churches of my youth.

My steel-city wife and suburbanite teen-aged children were remarkably unanxious to witness this aspect of my past. Perhaps they were remembering all the watery homemade ice cream, the mosquitos under the elms, and the interminable nostalgic "talks" at the church homecomings to which I had subjected them in the past. But I wanted them to appreciate this vestige of the true, unadulterated, uncommercialized folk religion that had provided the foundation for the urbane, analytical, sophisticated Christian I had become.

Their skepticism was well founded. The concert was a disaster from the beginning. The local newspaper had announced that it would start at 7:30. We arrived at 7:20. It had started at 7:00. There seemed to have been a local underground communication network at work to get everyone else there at the right time. The only remaining seats were in the very front row, directly in front of a huge, rectangular, mesh-fronted black box, from which poured the combined sounds of a steel mill, a chicken farm and a day-care center, accompanied by a lone violin. The daughter with the hearing problem turned her deaf ear to the box and announced (we had to read her lips) that a miracle had already occurred: she was hearing through that ear for the first and last time.

The tinkly piano of my youth had disappeared. In its place were the huge black boxes and what looked like the control panel of a 747, with great round reels of tape spewing forth the prerecorded accompaniment for the singers on stage. At first I thought the singing was on the tape, too, and that the vocalists were only lip-syncing the words. But one of the ladies forgot to come in at the proper place and had to sing double time until she caught up with the tape.

A group called The Family something or other was on the stage. The men wore tuxes. No one had ever worn tuxes before in that town, even for proms or weddings. I was impressed. This was something special.

The women were something special, too. They wore spike-heeled, peek-a-boo shoes, dark stockings, short skirts, and the tightest, lowest bodices this side of lingerie ads. At first I ducked every time they drew a deep breath. By looking around, however, I discovered that this was improper behavior. Everyone else was staring fixedly, round-eyed, unblinking, certainly not ducking. Surprisingly, the women’s voices lacked the depth and range their appearance led one to expect. Whenever a high note approached, the soprano surreptitiously hit the volume control on the tape deck and opened her mouth a little wider. She seemed to be not only singing but doing a ventriloquist routine that mimicked Doc Severinson’s trumpet as well.

This group was only warming up for a group of brothers (familial, not racial) in pink tuxedos. Like the soprano, the tenor could not hit the high notes, but he made up for that by sporting a frizzy hairdo and by ripping open his ruffled shirt front, in the process making one wonder if he were really bald under the curls. The brothers sang songs of their own composing, they said, but they still used the ubiquitous tape deck and the unknown, uncontrolled orchestra which had previously occupied it.

Finally, there appeared the group de resistance. These were the college boys who had returned home, the ones whose individual names were known -- although not to me, since I had gone away to the godless state university and, incomprehensibly, received there "the call to preach." But these men were of my generation. We had received our calls to God’s church in the same era if not at the same school. Surely they would break the chain of ditties about how Jesus was coming soon, partially to reward us faithful ones, but mostly to get the others.

They did. Oh my, how they did! They brought us right back to a very real concern for the present. Everyone knew why they were last on the program. They were the showstoppers. They were what true Christianity was really all about. They were the "minutemen of song." They were the patriots.

The groups and the songs that had gone before had received enthusiastic applause. Those vocals about Jesus and the apocalypse and the inspiration of the holy book by the Holy Spirit were all thoroughly enjoyed. But now . . . . Applause! Applause!

According to this final group, Christ had chosen America, especially its white immigrants, as a special rod of iron to scourge his wayward world and return it to the pristine purity of capitalist Eden. The same spirit of religion that had made the U.S.A. the greatest military nation the world had ever known would surface once again to save the world from the twin terrors of communism and divorce.

Then, with the lights dimmed and the volume control turned counterclockwise, the bass soloed the finale, the benediction, his much-anticipated "talking song." He told the story of driving down a gravel country road. He saw an old man sitting alone on the porch of his farmhouse. He stopped to talk, and asked the old farmer why he sat alone when the farm work needed to be done. The farmer explained that he was too old to work, and his only son had been killed in Vietnam, so now there was nothing to do but sit.

The narrator noticed a gleam in the farmer’s eye, and asked him if his son’s fate did not make him sad. No, the farmer replied. He could not be sad, because his son had died for America, died for freedom, and even though the unchristian politicians kept us from winning that war, as we should have, he knew in his heart that we had really won, because his boy had died for a good cause, and now although the work at home did not get done, he was prouder than ever to be an American, and only another true American could understand what he meant.

Suddenly the place was up for grabs. The auditorium was on the second floor of the building, and I seriously considered the possibility that it might soon be on the first. People stamped their feet in unison. They clapped. They shouted. They cheered. They stood.

"They" did not include one area in the front row. My family and I sat stunned, although probably for different reasons. I suspect that my wife and daughters would have preferred to stand, at least, just to avoid being so conspicuous. Perversely, I refused. I even sat on my hands to be sure no one thought I was applauding. I was in the auditorium of a Christian college, listening to a "gospel" concert. This was not some meeting of the Bundestag, of the Party, of the VFW or NCPAC or NAM or the AFL-CIO. Why had these people not stood and stamped and cheered for the songs of salvation, of resurrection, of church?

Then I understood. These were their songs of salvation and resurrection and church -- of salvation through military might, of the resurrection of "the frontier spirit that made this country great," of the church that is a nation. These folks’ religious faith was very real, but for them the gospel story had been completely absorbed into the national story. Jesus walked the hills of southern Indiana, not of Galilee. The temptations he warded off in the wilderness had to do with smoking and drinking and dirty movies, not with power and its political manifestations. Paul said it did not matter if you were Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, as long as you were first an American. The Bible of those folks in my home town was summed up by the display I once saw in the window of a flowershop in Moline, Illinois. It was early July, and the florist had fashioned an open Bible from red, white and blue flowers. Where the Bible was "opened," flowers spelled out the words to John 3:16 -- "For God so loved the U.S.A."

Fear did not occur to me. These were, after all, my people. I had left 25 years before, but it was still my town. I saw few faces that looked familiar, but I recognized the hairdos the polyester suits, the farm-shaped hands. I knew the accents and I could still use the local vocabulary. I was at home, among a people with whom I no longer had anything in common, except a desire to serve and belong to God.

Normally that might be enough. After all, we are Christians together. And these are not bad people, the ones who surrounded me that night. They are good folk, struggling vigorously against the temptations of sex and booze, battling mightily against the considerable forces that work to tear apart their families, toiling hard to gain and keep a piece of the American economic dream in a society where they have very little control.

As we walked to our car, I hummed the church songs of my youth. "I walked today where Jesus walked, and felt his presence there." "The joy we share, as we tarry there . . ." "He lives! He lives¹...." "He walks with me and he talks with me . . ." "How great Thou Art!" "Saviour, like a shepherd lead us . . ." "I once was lost but now am found . . ." "Were you there . ."

They were songs of incarnation. H. Richard Niebuhr echoed them when he said that "Christians are not those who are being saved out of the world but those who know that the world is being saved." We sang songs of heaven, to be sure, but they never suggested that Christ is absent in the present.

It was the note of incarnation, I decided, that was missing in that contemporary "gospel" concert. The sounds and the technology were the latest, but the heresy was the oldest -- Docetism. Christ was off in heaven, waiting. Resurrection and ascension had completely superseded incarnation.

If Christ is absent until Armageddon, who’s in charge here? Who’s the vicar of Christ for Protestants? It used to be the Bible, but the "paper pope" has been replaced by a modern version of "the chosen people." The U.S.A. holds off the chaos and evil of the world until Jesus comes back. In his absence, we are identified not by what unites us in Christ but by what divides us in the world.

In ancient Israel, among the first chosen people, the kings and high priests were anointed with oil. Then the whole nation was called "the anointed." Today, in the absence of Christ, it is the president of the U.S.A. who personifies the nation chosen to be God’s special people.

Christians need not fear the "devil lyrics" of current rock’n’roll. We know the devil was defeated on the cross and in the grave. We should, however, fear the anti-incarnation lyrics of contemporary, commercial gospel chic. Perhaps we should start singing "the old songs" again: "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine." "Beneath the cross of Jesus." "Are ye able. . ." Sentimental and old-fashioned? Sure, but perhaps they were better than we knew. Now, turn off those blasted machines and turn in your brown hymnals to Number 144. We’ll start with "He leadeth me . ."

Acting Out Faith Through Organ Donation

Rarely in recent history has there been a scientific advancement that has not shaken the foundations of Judeo-Christian faith. And hardly ever has scientific virtuosity actually invited a reaffirmation of basic Christian themes or opened up new possibilities for their application.

However, the transplantation of human organs and the possibility of organ donation may be a watershed in the relationship between science and Christian ethics. The option of organ donation gives Christians a concrete opportunity to act as "people of the resurrection" by passing on the gift of life.

With this need in mind, pastors and ethicists organized a day-long conference in mid-April on "Organ and Tissue Donation: Role of the Ministry" to inform pastors about the current need for donor organs and to help them approach the topic of organ donation during bereavement counseling.

The need for organs is acute. An estimated 7,000 people are waiting for kidney transplants, 40 for hearts, 175 for livers and 30 for pancreata. More than 3,000 people need corneal transplants, and, if there were no shortage of tissue, an additional 100,000 skin grafts could be performed each year to help burn victims.

Arthur R. Lillicrop III, of the pastoral counseling center at the Washington Hospital Center (which hosted the conference) , told participants that the gap between the number of organ donors and the number of potential recipients is ripe for redress by Christians. "I feel the community that can narrow this gap is the religious community," he said. "A pastoral mode of education is greatly needed on the local church level where people can think through, pray through and make preparations well in advance of their own deaths for organ donation."

Most transplantable organs come from individuals who have been killed in accidents (automobile collision, shooting or drowning) that result in "brain death" but leave vital organs such as the heart, liver, kidney and pancreas intact. Physicians are understandably reluctant to approach family members at the worst moment of their lives to ask them to donate a loved one’s organs. Consequently, many hospitals are turning to ministers, priests, rabbis and social workers to request organ donations from grieving families.

Asking a grieving family to donate a loved one’s organs -- with its intimations of "body snatching" -- is not a simple matter. "The task requires a pastoral alliance that is based on trust, faith and risking," Lillicrop said. "One must be person-centered, empathic and able to respond to the feelings of the client or family."

Daniel G. Smith, Washington Hospital Center’s transplant coordinator, said that when he began asking for donations, he couldn’t help wondering if he was doing more harm than good. "Here’s a man who has just lost his only daughter. How much more can you lose?" he said. "Then I come along and ask him to donate the child’s organs. It took me a while to realize that we aren’t really taking something away, but that we are giving something back."

Smith admitted that it can be frustrating when a family refuses to donate. However, he is careful not to influence decisions one way or the other. "My intent is not to get them to agree to donate, but to have an educated choice," he explained. John Fletcher of the Bioethics Program at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health added that a grieving family overwhelmed with anger and frustration is apt to blame not only a transplant coordinator, but also the physician who failed to keep the loved one alive. Ultimately, the family may blame God. Hence, a pastor involved in bereavement counseling must confront the difficulty of explaining the ways of God to humans. The option of organ donation may actually help resolve a family’s anger over the death, allowing them the chance to forgive, Fletcher said.

Several political options are being considered to increase the number of donor organs. Yet physicians and ethicists agree that donating must always be a choice, not a requirement. The notion that the human body and its parts are automatically interchangeable, or that a physician has a presumptive right to remove an organ, raises serious religious, moral and philosophical questions.

Nevertheless, some physicians have advocated a policy of "presumed consent," which they say will still respect the rights of those who don’t want to donate. At a conference on transplantation last year sponsored by the American College of Legal Medicine, Thomas Starzl endorsed a policy of presumed consent, which allows physicians to retrieve organs unless the deceased opted out by specifically stating an opposition to organ donation prior to death. Dr. Starzl, a prominent transplant surgeon from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, suggested that drivers’ licenses could be used for this purpose.

At that same conference, however, Arthur Caplan of the Hastings Center countered that presumed consent is fraught with legal and ethical traps. "It will only take one case in which someone’s decision not to donate is overlooked or ignored," he admonished, "to put an end to presumed consent for good."

More popular with both physicians and ethicists is the policy of "required request," mandating that hospitals ask families about organ donation in every case of brain death. Many hospitals across the country have voluntarily adopted such a policy, and several states have enacted or have pending required-request legislation.

"The beauty of required request is that it takes the question of organ transplantation out of the realm of the extraordinary," Smith said. "The public still thinks of transplantation as something highly unusual, but the possibility of organ donation needs to be thought of as a natural part of the process of dying."

It is roundly agreed that a family’s decision about organ donation is best facilitated by confronting the question before a tragedy occurs. Lillicrop described how his former Episcopal parish sponsored an annual organ and tissue donor Sunday, with an adult forum focusing on the issue. Parishioners were asked to sign an organ donor card and present it as a symbolic offering during the worship service.

Lillicrop -- who is himself a three-time corneal transplant patient -- testified that the transplant that allowed him to regain his sight was nothing less than a miracle. "Words like incarnation and resurrection started taking on new meaning for me when I thought of someone’s death giving me a new life," he said. "Surely this is what we are all supporting and working for in our journey as a risen community. It was a spiritual healing that reflects the dreams shared by a Nazarene who said there is ‘no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends."’

Do You Have to Go to Church to Be Religious?

The statement that one can be religious without attending church is seen by some as a new, gratuitous assault on organized religion. Americans believe in a vanished golden age when people attended church regularly, when families were cohesive and when virtue reigned triumphant. But Russell Hale spells out the historical reality: "Contrary to popular celebrationist notions of a golden religious age, the seventeenth and eighteenth century American landscape was not dominated by church spires. There were more wayside inns and taverns than churches in colonial America. . . Fewer than one in ten Americans were formally affiliated with any religious institution" (The Unchurched: Who They Are and Why They Stay Away Harper & Row, 1980], p. 4). Throughout our history, church membership has continued to grow to its present high level, and some church watchers believe it will continue to climb.

When the times seem out of joint, human beings tend either to anticipate a future utopia or to dream of a mythic past when things were the way they ought to be. To find the "good old days" when most people went to church, we would have to reach back across the centuries and the seas to European cultures and their state churches. Many people came to America because they didn’t want to be pushed around by the religious establishment. That important part of our history and identity has made ours a country where there are many religious options, and where one doesn’t have to support any church. The vitality of American churches may owe a great deal to the fact that having so many competing religious traditions has forced each to work hard to attract and hold members.

People aren’t born into the church in America; they are born free, becoming church members only if they choose to be. It seems to be part of our tradition (1) to believe in God; (2) to say that one doesn’t need to go to church; (3) to go anyway.

Thus, the first level of meaning I discern in the statement "You don’t have to go to church to be religious" is simply that, in a nation more inclined toward autonomy than dependence, religious observance is a matter of private choice. It cannot be compelled by the state or by an established church. We assign religion to the private sphere, placing the choice of whether or not to go to church within the domain of individual freedom, where nobody may tell us what to do. "Don’t talk about religion, sex or politics’’ is a time-honored way of saying that we see those areas as belonging to individual self-determination. People both inside and outside the church declare in many ways that religion is a private matter between individuals and God; it does not belong to any church.

Do-it-yourself independence and rugged individualism are important factors in the "You don’t have to go to church" comments. In the rhythm of our daily lives we all move back and forth between venturesomeness and need. But we glory in the autonomous pole of that oscillation, and we are a bit scornful of dependence. In "Faith Without a Sanctuary," a CBS documentary on the unchurched (aired November 1, 8 and 15, 1981, on For Our Times), one man says: "Great religious leaders in history, like Jesus and Buddha, went into the wilderness. Nobody was preaching to them. Maybe those people go to church who don’t have the capacity to go into the wilderness."

The assertion that people who have no church affiliation can be religious often is, then, a declaration of independence. Those for whom belonging to a church is a central part of life find this rejection of organized religion hard to accept. It is enormously difficult for many committed people to see their own and their faith communities’ profound convictions as but one set of options among many in America’s free religious market.

The ease with which many disconnect their individual faiths from institutional belonging is revealed in a study of the unchurched in Appalachia: 80 per cent engaged in religious activities every week -- activities ranging from prayer to reading, from watching religious television programs to conversations with others or visits to ministers (David H. Smith et al., Participation in Social and Political Activities [Jossey-Bass, 1980], p. 222). Another study showed that young Catholic dropouts did not see themselves as abandoning religion when they left the church (Dean R. Hoge, Converts. Dropouts, Returnees: A Study of Religious Change Among Catholics (Pilgrim, 1981], pp. 90-101). The research on those who separate themselves from institutional religion suggests that for some people dropping out is a protest against the church’s implicit claim of total ownership of their religious lives.

Not only nonattenders but staunch church supporters see their private faiths as distinct from, and at least as important as, their participation in congregational life. Jean Haldane’s interviews with Episcopal parishioners suggested that their faith journeys flowed along private streams fed by many springs, quite separate from the busy mainstream of congregational life (Religious Pilgrimage [Alban Institute, 1975], p. 10). In another study, churchwomen similarly revealed the division between their personal faith, prayer life and deepest concerns, on the one hand, and their involvement with pastor, parishioners and church activities, on the other. In an article appearing in the Episcopalian (January 1983), Martin Marty reported on a survey revealing that 85 per cent of Americans prefer to pray alone, 74 per cent remember being taught to pray by their parents (not preachers or teachers) and the majority prefer to pray at home rather than at church.

All these studies underline the fact that religion’s communal and solitary dimensions are different from each other, and that both are essential. I can encounter God through my religious community. But God is not limited to my church. The church does not possess God, who also speaks in a "still, small voice" through the depths of my experience by day and in the drama of my dreams by night. I would not want to give up either my regular Saturday morning time for reflecting in my journal or the Sunday morning celebration that lifts up and addresses the life of my religious community.

When we turn from the viewpoints of churched and unchurched people to the institutional church’s attention to corporate and individual expressions of religion, we discover its tendency to emphasize the former and ignore the latter. Congregational activity often fills so much of the church’s time, attention and energy that it pays no attention to people’s lives outside the church.

A lack of interest in people’s religious lives apart from the congregation has not, of course, characterized every religious tradition in every period. While it does seem to typify modern mainline Protestantism (though not the Quakers), for centuries the monastic tradition has kept alive the solitary dimension of spirituality; the Catholic Church has preserved that strain, keeping it available for us to rediscover today. Perhaps the rigors of medieval life made it necessary to have a division of labor: most people just struggled to survive, while the "religious," freed from the duties connected with the day-to-day life of parish churches, held the contemplative fort. Today more and more of us expect a rich variety of experiences -- including work and prayer -- in our lives, and many are reaching into the Catholic or Eastern religions’ treasure houses to recapture the more inner-directed spiritual wisdom of an earlier day. Protestants who used to show little interest in religious retreats (except for youth programs) are now borrowing Catholic retreat models, such as Marriage Encounter. The modem hunger for a personal awareness of God is evidenced by the eager response to such efforts as Tilden Edwards’s Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, DC. -- efforts that may herald a recovered balance between the individual and the corporate dimensions of religion.

In recent times, however, churches have tended to focus on "what we do with our togetherness," and it isn’t difficult to see some of the reasons why. We live in an extroverted society. It is possible to study and measure the social side of religion. Because we hear about religion primarily through religious organizations, the organizational view tends to become normative. We don’t hear very much about faith from those outside the church, or from those who lack power or credentials within it. As R. T. Gribbon points out, "We assume that congregational leadership is most commonly drawn from those to whom ‘belonging’ in the congregation is most important; those persons understandably have difficulty understanding those church participants for whom ‘belonging’ and church-related activity is of little importance" (When People Seek the Church [Alban Institute, 1982], p. 14). The church tells its corporate truths, while individuals listen and are seldom encouraged to share their faith journeys.

It is easy to understand why the church would tend to emphasize those needs it can meet, and appear to claim a patent on religion, while ignoring what is outside its control: personal religion and the laity’s life in the world. There may even be an element of institutional fear in this silence and ignoring. The late Father Geoffrey Curtis of England’s Community of the Resurrection once said that he thought the reason for the church’s failure to encourage personal spiritual growth was its fear that people might grow independent of the institution -- an independence that would not serve its interests.

Perhaps a broader view of the church as an organization serving people’s spiritual needs would speak more powerfully to the laity than does the picture of an institution clutching its "patent." We all come alone into the gathered church, bearing the anxieties, disappointments and uneasy consciences that are an inescapable consequence of our struggles in the world -- and also bringing our memories of the week’s graces, gifts and growth. We move out of the church alone as well, carrying with us our own fragments of warmth and insight as we seek to make connections between the great symbols of the faith and the stuff of everyday life. A church that acknowledges the extent to which our lives are lived inside our own hearts and minds and in the secular world -- from which we come to church and to which we return -- will find and share riches in the stories of a journeying people.

All relationships require both boundaries and commitment. In every form of human belonging there is the tension between "me as an individual" and "me as a part of the group," large or small. Even in the heart of the gathered church, in its worship, we are essentially alone, together. Accepting the challenge of living in this tension between separateness and togetherness is a way of living more abundantly. Perhaps if there are parts of our private journeys that we would like to share with others, to ask for help with, or simply to have acknowledged by our fellow parishioners, we might ask that the inner dimension of religion be acknowledged, supported and celebrated in our gathered communities.

"You don’t have to go to church to be religious." The statement is, first, a declaration of independence; second, it is a way of saying that the life of faith is a solitary journey as well as a rendezvous. The third shade of meaning in this refrain is that the ultimate is not to be captured by any institution, but holds all organizations under judgment. The distinction between the church, a broken human institution like every other, and the transcendent reality to which it points comes through clearly in the comments of many persons interviewed by researchers. One woman evaluated her experiences as a Catholic child: "I’m saying that most religious groups and their priests and parishioners -- they try to take the place of God. I’m still searching, none of us have the answer. No religion or person can tell me what my communication with God is" (The Unchurched, p. 22). Another person confessed, "To be honest with you, I might miss a Sunday if it wasn’t for her [his wife], but only because of my belief that religion isn’t as important as being in touch with God. I don’t believe that you have to go to a fancy house or church to be in touch with God" (Converts, Dropouts, Returnees, p. 143).

A young woman described her process of moving back to the church after dropping out: "In my early teens . . . I just hit a stage that it seemed all boring. . . . I had questions. I was confused. But I don’t think I ever really doubted God and Christ. I only doubted the church, some of the hypocrisy that I felt even then -- money mainly. . . . To me, the church is your relationship with God. You don’t need four walls and an altar to discuss your love directly to him, to communicate directly to God." For her, Marriage Encounter proved the way back in, a way to decide that church participation "wasn’t something that I owe God, but something that I wanted in my life" (Converts, Dropouts, Returnees, pp. 152-6).

Despite the very different places in which these three people found themselves, all clearly distinguished their relationship with God from their relationship with the church. People do not identify the institution with the eternal reality to which it points, and they judge the church -- embracing or rejecting it -- on the basis of whether they experience that reality mediated through it. The encounter with God is what matters. Religious participation is vitally important to people if it furthers that encounter. But external observances that have lost their transparency to the ultimate may well be discarded like empty shells.

Once one has discerned the important meanings in the oft-repeated comment that "You don’t have to go to church to be religious," it becomes necessary to add a few "buts" -- to supplement active listening with a critique.

Although Americans believe that one doesn’t need to go to church, 71 per cent report that they do belong to a church or synagogue, and 40 per cent say that they attend weekly. Not only do most belong, but the indications are that most of those who do not, once did. Of the converts to Catholicism studied by Dean Hoge, "85% said they received religious training as children, and 83 % said they attended Sunday school or church two or three times a month or more when they were in elementary school. This finding agrees with all earlier research showing that most new members of Christian churches already possess a Christian world view" (Converts, Dropouts, Returnees, p. 36).

Not only have those who rejoin had early experiences with the church, but many of the unchurched also say that they carry with them a legacy from their churchgoing days. Many young adults still feel connected to the church, even though they have had nothing to do with the institution for years, and have consequently been dropped from parish rolls. Many people who are presently not members nevertheless are clearly conscious that they received something valuable from the church in their childhood training -- a "christening present" that forms the core of their personal faith. They want their children to have a similar experience, and will send them to church even when they themselves don’t feel the need to keep going. Reading all of these people’s comments gives one an image of a great tide of humanity washing in and out of an institution that does not have the rigid membership boundaries often perceived by church leaders who look at the church from the inside out (and who are responsible for keeping the statistics).

Although those now out of the church frequently think of themselves as carrying along an inheritance from an earlier period of church attendance, it often seems a piggy-bank kind of treasure. Sometimes that childhood heritage consists of little more than a dusty memory that religion means being good: "I feel that we live perfectly good Christian lives as it is, and I think that we do good and I don’t think we have to be members of the church," as one man in Hale’s study put it (The Unchurched, p. 112). Hale concluded that "those who have lost by imposed or voluntary exile the very religious communion they seek. . . live in a lonely, private world, bereft of the shelter, instruction, hope, voice, and connections of any meaningful religious community" (pp. 28-9).

Although many of the unchurched expressed gratitude for what they had received from Sunday school, their personal faiths, like cut flowers, had stopped growing. Their religion was like a dried flower pressed in a Bible, and often seemed to consist of nothing more than a desire for peaceful feelings, a vague longing to be connected with something that transcends the self and a sense of obligation to be decent to their fellows -- all positive stirrings, but hardly the vigorous plant that could flourish in a nurturing religious community. The memories of childish religious sentiments are not strong enough stuff to equip adult saints for their work of ministry.

Most know that. To their concerns for autonomy, for the solitary journey of faith, for a vision of the transcendent not captured in human institutions, most laity add their awareness that they want a loving community where they can find help for their task of making meaning. Boundaries are held in tension with commitment. They know, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 1954, p. 59). love means that "solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

Men, Women, and the Remarriage of Public and Private Spheres

So God created (the human creature] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and till the earth and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Gen. 1:27-38).

But the very stress on wholeness in this picture hints at separation and disruption. Our primal unity is daily "put asunder": the image of God often does not shine through us; women and men frequently cause each other pain; our responsibilities usually don’t feel like blessings; public dominion is commonly expressed in loveless ways; and parents are often puzzled about how to exercise their authority.

For most of human history, that original pair of human tasks -- procreation and dominion -- has been divided. Though procreation clearly requires the cooperation of men and women, we have tended to view it as the proper role of woman (something shared with the animals) to be carried out in her domain -- the private sphere. And the dominion given to male and female has somehow become an exclusively male responsibility (something to be shared with God) exercised in the public sphere, which has come to be regarded as the appropriate arena for the labors of men. Human beings have not embraced their tasks as partners: men have distanced themselves from their nurturing selves and their bodily lives, and women have tended to distance themselves from their public responsibilities. The earth creature was given what Phyllis Trible has called the paradoxical task of ruling over the earth by serving it, but somehow the ruling and serving have come apart: men have been more likely to rule, and women to serve.

Even within the religious tradition of the writer of Genesis we can see a growing division between procreation and dominion, and between the private sphere of women and the public sphere of men. The spiritual dimension of procreation, for example, became located in the fertility gods of pagans and was regarded by Israel as a suspect power, to be conquered and suppressed. And a covenant faith sealed by circumcision could not include women as full participants. Throughout most of the biblical period, women might have had some status as mothers, but as mothers they were homebound, removed from public life; they were like the veiled Muslim women who, like snails, carry their homes with them when they venture into the streets. And as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has noted, Paul relegated Christian love to the private life rather than to the arena of social transformation.

The divorce between public and private arenas has multiplied over the centuries. In A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Face of American Manhood (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) Mark Gerzon traces the nature of this split in more recent times. Before the industrial revolution, Gerzon points out, men and women worked at home, and women, like men, could be butchers and gunsmiths, mill and shipyard operators. But after industrialization the world of work became the province of men, and home and family the proper arena for women. Children learned to "equate the first sex with the world outside the home, the second sex with the world within" (p. 158).

This carving up of life’s territory seems to make people miserable. I want to sketch briefly some of the forms that pain takes for women and for men, at home and outside the home. In doing so, however, I don’t mean to deny that there are women who are already powerful leaders in public life, nor that there are men who are wise and affectionate fathers. I am aware, too, that there are political, social and psychological problems that -- along with gender differences -- contribute to the divorce between public and private spheres. I simply wish to focus here on the ways the public/private divorce is a special issue between the sexes.

The invisible cords restraining women are many. Jean Baker Miller tells of a woman who "felt able to work and to think well so long as she worked on her ideas and plans in her own house. She could not bring them into the work setting. As she used to put it, "If only I could bring my inside self outside"’ ("Women and Power" [Works in Progress, The Stone Center, Wellesley College], p. 3)

I know that as a young woman, I took it for granted that my real life was my private life. At the end of a day at school or work, I would be released from secondary tasks to pursue the things I cared about most. Considering the numbers of women who don’t expect very much from the workplace beyond a modest paycheck, I conclude that the whispers I responded to then are still audible today.

Women who do reach out for a place in the world are often reluctant to give up control at home. Consequently, they are overextended and exhausted, and can’t give their best in either place. Though they may say they want home tasks shared equally, they treat their husbands like inept assistants -- and that’s what they get! Perhaps they are frightened to give up a toehold in one realm when the other realm seems so uncertain.

In the workplace itself, a woman may still be identified with the procreative task. She may find that her talents are discounted, her female coworkers are jealous, and that her male co-workers sexually harass her.

In less obvious ways, she is likely to find that her working style -- the gifts she has to offer, her way of exercising influence and her definition of success -- is different from the norm. Measured by masculine yardsticks, her contributions may seem inadequate. And unless she is willing to focus all her efforts on the job, she may find it difficult to be successful. If she does achieve success, she may pay the cost of isolation.

Women experience the pain of the divorce between public and private spheres at home as well as at work. Though struggles in marriage and motherhood require enormous personal initiative, sophistication and courage, the heroism of the private sphere generally remains unsung. It may go especially unnoticed by a husband who sees his wife’s domestic routine as cozy, safe and free of the pressures he trudges off to encounter every morning. For some women the at-home role can feel like a trivial, emotionally sterile one. Gerzon describes talk-show host Phil Donahue as "every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her" (p. 188) Perhaps women consult psychiatrists and pastors in greater numbers because of their hunger for someone with whom they can share their experiences and feelings (a hunger that feels "feminine" to many men and from which they therefore distance themselves). A woman’s attentiveness to (and resultant sophistication in) reflecting on her personal experience and emotional life may further isolate her from others, especially if her partner responds to her overfunctioning in that sphere of life by underfunctioning. For not a few women, home life consists of caring for a group of immature people, one of whom is her husband. I know of one family (now sundered) in which the husband seemed to join his adolescent sons in thumbing their noses at Mom. She had been granted, and had accepted, all of the emotional responsibility in the family -- and was cordially hated for it. How unfair, she might well have complained, to be treated that way after she had poured her heart and soul into her nurturing role all those years! Too many women embark on the false quest offered by the culture: to earn salvation by being domestic workaholics, pursuing the perfect home, gourmet meals and a successful and happy family. Disappointment and depression are the inevitable results of pursuing such a false savior.

When families come apart, says Gerzon, divorced men "refuse to understand that most mothers have been awarded by the courts what they had all along -- the daily responsibility for their children’s care" (p. 195). For many men, their distance from home life began with the birth of their children, an event they avoided through fear and feelings of inadequacy. Those feelings may be a large reason -- besides the inherent lure of the marketplace -- for men’s reluctance to involve themselves in their families.

Indeed, men are socialized in ways that may prove dysfunctional in home life. "Winning" is not a very useful goal in the private sphere. Parenthood is an experience that can force people to grow up in this area of life; but some fathers opt out of that school of hard knocks, and as a result remain immature in their intimate relationships.

If one thinks dependence is a dirty word, one isn’t likely to admit being starved for opportunities to be dependent. So one stays hungry. If one thinks that attention to the complex demands of intimacy is "feminine," then it is tempting to reduce intimacy to sex, an unimpeachably "masculine" urge, and never explore broader possibilities of a close relationship. And even though separation from the bodily and affective life may seem masculine, that separation can ultimately undermine men’s vitality, which they cherish so deeply and on which their worldly success depends.

Men are also not without their publicly inflicted forms of pain. Women may be unaware of the oppression men experience in the workplace -- the experience of impotence in the midst of a powerful system, for example -- and the risks, responsibilities, moral dilemmas, long hours and perhaps wearying travel and dreary motel rooms that are often part of men’s working lives. If women’s strengths are not fully present in the public sphere, it is men who have to get along without them.

If we put these two sketches of male and female pain into the same frame, the possibilities for mutually induced misery multiply. If the woman’s life is confined to the private sphere, she may nag her husband to function in that setting as though that were the only place there were. (It is the only place she sees.) Men keep her out of the public arena, and she responds by largely ignoring it. His need to win may lead him to put in 60 or 70 hours a week on the job, removing him further from the world of his wife and children. Each feels trapped, and regards the other’s "freedom" with resentment. He hides or denies his profound dependence on his wife, and thereby fuels his contempt for her. His emotional dependence on her is reciprocated by her economic dependence on him.

One of the most excruciating collisions occurs when a woman, dutifully following her cultural instructions, concentrates all her energies in the cramped arena of home. My mother-in-law was one such woman, and only after her death did I come to see her as a victim rather than an oppressor. She had been successfully indoctrinated with the belief that her lifelong duty was to take care of her family. After her husband died, she alternated between apathy and a frenzied attempt to revive the vocation that had given her life meaning. On vacations she fed all of us relentlessly; the rest of the year she languished in front of the television, having no outlet for her energies. She had never been invited to use her considerable nurturing skills outside the small circle of blood kinship. Her caretaking energies became a burden to her grown sons and their families rather than a point of connection with the wider world that needed her care.

Women who exercise too much power in too limited a sphere -- a sphere that has a formative effect on our lives -- become oppressive to those who inhabit it. I have seen several men respond with deep feeling and instant identification to James Thurber’s drawing titled "Woman and House," in which a tiny man cowers apprehensively on the sidewalk in front of his home, which is being transformed into the menacing figure of an enormous woman. How ironic that women’s confinement to the private sphere should be a major source of men’s oppression!

Thus, the separation between dominion and procreation, the work of the body and the work of the mind, the work of love and the work of power, is a source of suffering. The life-giving energy that is generated when opposites are held together in tension dissipates or turns to hostility when they are sundered.

Society, as well as the human heart, has been the 3 victim of the divorce between public and private life. Dorothee Sölle points out that the sphere left for love is reduced by this division; the great commandment becomes a small one: "Love your neighbor, but not in public" (The Strength of the Weak [Westminster, 1984], p. 36). The men who have skipped the crash course for maturity offered by parenthood play boys’ games in their sphere of dominion, threatening the destruction of both spheres. Meanwhile, the domestic strength of women is needed in the world. I look at those gathered to hold discussions on arms control and see an ocean of dark flannel suits. The women are not there. As Ellen Goodman observed of news reports about the recent summit meeting: "Women had no public role, so they were covered in their private role. Every item in each wardrobe was scrutinized... It is sad that the summit is one of the last bastions of an all-male world" (Washington Post, November 30, 1985).

The divorce between public and private has unfortunate consequences in our churches as well. When our parish recently offered a course on "Women and Men in the 80s," lots of women signed up right away, evidently eager for some dialogue with men about the changing roles of men and women. Men’s registrations, however, straggled in slowly, reflecting an apparent ambivalence about the prospect of such a discussion. But it was the male participants who raised ecological or political issues in the course of the discussions -- subjects on which the women were silent.

I don’t think this vignette of parish life is atypical. I hear male clergy complain that their congregations are full of women, and there is much moaning about a feminized, privatized religion. And, apparently in reaction to this situation, clergymen issue rattling attacks on the social problems of the day. attacks that appear to be today’s version of muscular Christianity.

Given that the split between the spheres of procreation and dominion impairs our ability to grow up and to respond to all creation’s gifts and tasks, that it makes men and women miserable and distorts our individual, social and congregational life, what possibilities are there for a "remarriage" of these spheres? I would suggest that we can glimpse some possibilities in the ministry of Jesus. the life of the early church and the nature of congregational life.

The rhythm of Jesus’ own life reflected an easy oscillation between public and private life. He moved with a sure instinct from times of solitude or intimacy with friends to compassionate involvement with crowds of people and deft movements in the political world. His carefully chosen public strategy never left him too busy to attend to a small domestic encounter -- with a worn-out hostess, children looking for some attention, the problem of a shortage of refreshments at a wedding, or a tearful, uninvited guest at a dinner party. His movement illuminates how important a balance between public and private spheres is in our lives. If we settle for a permanent retreat to private life, or are continually stretched out by demands from without, we will not have an abundant life.

Jesus’ life also provides a model of a wedding between the world of women and the world of men. In Jesus, centuries of religious struggle are momentarily reconciled. Jesus was open to the stranger, the marginal, to having his outlook broadened by a Syrophoenician woman and to the spreading of the good news through the enthusiastic testimony of a woman of Samaria.

The power of this reconciliation wrought by Jesus was evident in the life of the early church. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza describes the special integrative possibilities of the infant church that gathered in the homes of women and men. "The house church, by virtue of its location, provided equal opportunities for women, because traditionally the house was considered women’s proper sphere, and women were not excluded from activities in it. . . The public sphere of the Christian community was in the house and not outside of the household" (In Memory of Her [Crossroad, 19851, p. 176) Rosemary Rader in Breaking Boundaries: Male/Female Friendship in Early Christian Communities (Paulist, 1983) lifts up the joyful partnership between Christian men and women who experienced liberation from the restrictions of patriarchal marriage through heterosexual friendships and early informal communities. Though the old divisions soon reasserted themselves, we can look to the life of Jesus and the early church for a glimpse of some shining moments when the Genesis picture was brought to life anew.

I see hopeful possibilities in today’s churches, as well. Our congregations have a special opportunity to be a "bridge between the public and private spheres," to use Parker Palmer’s wonderful metaphor (see The Company of Strangers [Crossroad, 1981]. If the world of women needs to be stretched toward the public arena, and if men need to be called to pay attention to the affective side of life, then the church is a natural place for that stretching and calling to take place. People already expect the church to be this bridge: they come to the church for the solemnization and sustenance of their marriages, to have their children baptized and taught, and to find leadership in peacemaking and feeding the hungry. On that bridge, women and men can meet in a space removed both from the nuclear family, with its high emotional charge, and from the huge, impersonal public sphere, which often leaves people feeling frightened, powerless and confused.

As a bridging place, the church can encourage women and men to acknowledge the value of both spheres, even while they may, at a particular stage in life, need to invest most of their energies in one sphere. The church can encourage us not to make an idol of either the public or the private sphere, not to put down those who are engaged solely in one or the other for the present, and to choose some toehold of our own in each sphere that will make our acknowledgment of its validity concrete and keep its possibilities alive for us. A woman caring for young children at home, for example, may be encouraged by her church to support a political initiative. Women who now enjoy many productive years after their children are raised particularly need to be affirmed, supported and challenged to engage in service. If they are treated as subjects, rather than objects of ministry, both their families and the world will benefit.

New ways of looking at power and leadership are needed in the church. Serving and ruling must be held up as different aspects of the same reality. Churches too often encourage people to feel powerless -- personally, theologically and organizationally. Hierarchical styles of leadership must be radically questioned. The church can draw on its ancient knowledge that prophetic voices can come from those who are marginal to public power.

Churches’ involvement in private and public issues will also need to be informed by a more sensitive understanding of how men and women approach those issues. For example, Patricia Washburn and Robert Gribbon, in Peacemaking Without Division (Alban Institute, 1986) , point out that most women will not respond to social issues if they are approached on the basis of ethical principles or ideological abstractions; they will, however, respond to approaches that are communal, contextual and concrete. According to their research, "In church activities for social justice, women seem more comfortable dealing with concrete situations involving real people, whether that is an exchange with Soviet citizens, staffing a food closet, or providing sanctuary for a Latin American refugee family." This kind of understanding, and a welcoming of masculine and feminine approaches, needs to be developed and expanded in church programs.

The role of the clergy, especially male clergy, is crucial in the "bridge church." The pastor, like the psychiatrist, cares for a woman’s emotional life as part of his daily work, and provides what she may be starved for at home. (Some research indicates that clergy wives are just as starved as the parishioners.) Instead of accommodating this situation by merely taking up the emotional slack for the men, pastors should encourage men and women to work their problems out with each other. Rather than basking in the grateful admiration of his female parishioners, the clergyman could encourage women to ask assertively for what they need from the men in their lives, and they could coach their brothers in the affective skills they have developed through pastoral work. Clergy can recognize that women’s emotional and spiritual strength is a gift that the world needs, not an aberration to be avoided or remedied. Rather than serving as chaplains to a feminized church, pastors could use their authority to support men and women in leadership, and to hold up both masculine and feminine perceptions, experiences, styles, strengths and passions. Taking a hint from the missionary couples of the early church, our congregations could benefit from recruiting male/female leadership teams.

Clergywomen have an essential contribution to make in this area. Previous generations have expressed concern about the effeminacy of the clergy, and it’s not surprising that if Christian ministry requires feminine sensitivities, and women have been excluded from being leaders, then an "effeminate" style of leadership may have resulted that put off both men and women. When women’s leadership is fully welcomed by the church, then we can all lead each other to incorporate the gifts of women and men without surrendering our primary masculine or feminine identities. I hope that women will increasingly hold their share of the church’s public roles as senior ministers and church executives, and that churches can thereby provide society with a new model of leadership.

Clergy also need to have a more sophisticated understanding of their role. We have lived through a period when clergy were people almost completely identified with their roles, and a subsequent period when, in reaction, many pastors shrugged off their role and tried to be "just plain folks." Though one can be sympathetic to this response, it represents the abdication of the appropriate clergy role in favor of a private and personal reality. We need clergy who accept the public responsibilities that are properly theirs as religious leaders. Clergy who accept their authority faithfully, who move in and out of their public role, share in the struggle and joy of their Lord and encourage the rest of us to own the authority that is ours in our public and private lives.

Perhaps all of us by pondering the biblical symbols that point to the unity for which we hunger, and by exploring the possibilities for the remarriage of public and private spheres that lie in the life and leadership of our churches, can rediscover the union in which we were joined by God at creation.

To Animate the Body of Christ: Sarah Bentley Talks About Sacred Dance

Sarah Bentley was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1980 to a ministry of teaching and dance. Having worked in the area of theology, education and dance since 1973, she is now on the teaching staff at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. Her work in congregations, conferences and workshops is part of a growing effort by individuals and groups to recover the use of dance in worship. She has worked to promote congregational participation in dance and to find ways of using dance in theological reflection.

A former staff member of the National Council of Churches and of Church Women United, Ms. Bentley is now a doctoral candidate in Christian social ethics at Union Theological Seminary. A member of Riverside Church in New York, she performed a series of dance processions there to celebrate Advent and Epiphany.

On a recent visit to New York City, Century associate editor Jean Caffey Lyles interviewed Sarah Bentley at her apartment on Manhattan’s upper west side. From that conversation, we offer a potpourri of the views Ms. Bentley shared on the role of dance in the church today.

On the role of dance in the Christian tradition:

Of course dance is in Scripture. The best-known examples are Miriam and David. And then the Psalms are full of rejoicing and leaping and doing physical things. As a tradition, liturgical dance doesn’t mean choreographed, technically correct dance by performers. It means the people of God spontaneously moving and praising, dancing as a way to explore and express their faith. In the New Testament this spirit is present in the recurrent use of “rejoice,” which in the original Aramaic means “leap.”

In the history of the church, dance comes and goes. I would imagine that generally it’s associated with groups that lose -- heretics. We know it was present in the early church because in the apocryphal book the Acts of John, there’s a hymn in which Jesus leads the disciples in a dance.

Dance usually was associated with the pagan, the sensual, even the egalitarian -- all of which were pushed out at certain times in history. Both theater and dance wane with the Reformation. Music makes it further than both in the Protestant tradition, and some movement remains in the Roman tradition -- the mass is really a dance in many ways. But the real use of dances as art form is only sporadically present. In medieval times, there were circle dances; there were also labyrinth or mystery dances. At Chartres, for instance, there was a maze -- a labyrinth -- inlaid on the floor. The entire congregation would follow that maze in movement symbolic of finding one’s way to a goal, to one’s spiritual home, to Jerusalem.

In recent times, liturgical dance began to be recovered in the late ‘30s and ‘40s. A central person was Margaret Fisk Taylor, who first worked in Chicago and then in Hanover, New Hampshire, with dance choirs. Other key figures at present are Carla de Sola, founder of the Omega Liturgical Dance Company (resident at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City); Judith Rock, a United Presbyterian minister and founder of the Body and Soul Dance Company (located in the San Francisco area); and Doug Adams (Pacific School of Religion), who has written a great deal on the subject. Scores of individuals and groups now work in local churches across the country to bring dance back to the heart of our worshiping traditions.

On a recent series of dances at Riverside Church:

At Riverside we have a copy of the Chartres labyrinth built into the floor of the chancel. Since worshipers typically don’t go up into the chancel, most don’t even know it’s there. I did four processions leading into this maze on the Sundays of Advent. In one I recreated the medieval tradition by going up the stairs to the chancel on my knees, followed by movements of kneeling and rising. It was a stylized attempt to recover the spirit of the medieval dances and to represent the congregation’s own journey as a people. Later much of sacred dance was carried on in secular forms. For instance, labyrinth dancing became children’s hopscotch. So for the last procession, which was about joy, I did very simple movements, like a child leaping in a game of hopscotch.

On the relationship between sacred and secular dance:

Major American choreographers have always used biblical themes, tried to use stories -- for instance, those of Cain and Abel, Eve and Adam. And for some people that is an opening to new worship possibilities outside the church. The definition of sacred dance is very open, so I would like to see it explored much more fully. For instance, if Paul Taylor choreographs a dance on a “secular” stage that’s essentially a vibrant statement of theological anthropology -- is that “sacred” or not?

The sacred dance movement can err on the side of limitation. Because of the difficulty of claiming our place within a conservative worship tradition, we often must justify our work to others. That can make one unnecessarily timid. We need to push the bounds more so that religious dance, like all dance, is not trapped in conventions of beauty or harmony, or only “nice” emotions. If you really dance religion, a lot of powerful feelings are involved, a good deal of Sturm und Drang -- real struggle -- and it isn’t timid gestures. Sacred dance can be saccharine if one isn’t attentive to this problem. (Perhaps more participation by men might affect this, bringing another kind of energy or spirituality into play.)

There is some disagreement among liturgical dancers as to whether we are primarily performing or praying. Some seem to say, “Well, as long as your heart is in the right place, it doesn’t matter.” But others are willing to say, “Wait a minute: there’s a sense in which this is a stage I’m on. I have to be good, and I can’t justify what I do within the church as being of any lesser quality than what I would do if I were asked to perform outside the church.”

On bringing dance into the week-to-week life of the church:

You need to begin with a process of education, by acquainting yourself with the tradition and some of what’s been done. Approach it like any other issue in the church about which you would like to educate people: incorporate it in preaching; talk about dance within the tradition. Then begin using very simple experiments with gesture or movement or pantomime in other places in the church first -- on a retreat, in a youth camp, at a potluck supper. In worship find creative ways to do it with a group that represents that congregation, or with children, or even with the whole congregation. Introduce a new prayer gesture -- for example, praying with uplifted hands. I try to use humor and gentleness to encourage people to try something different. The beginning of dance is simply to reacquaint people with any conscious use of the body in religion -- even standing, sitting and processing. A good way to move dance into the church is to begin with a processional. Then we can recall where movement historically played a role in the liturgy and see if there is any vestige of that left. Many churches have no processional at all -- not even the clergy go down the aisle.

On getting the whole congregation involved in dancing:

The first dancing was inclusive -- no soloist, no performer, no difference between the leadership and the congregation. Everybody participated. As far as I’m concerned, that should still be the goal. Dance in worship is not just me performing. It’s any of us finding ways to incorporate movement as expressions of our worship -- to confess, to pray, to celebrate, to mourn. Dance can express any life experiences that people are reflecting on.

Dance is like preaching: it’s a form of discourse. We are so split off from our right brain, from the nonlinear mode of discourse, that we don’t understand that whole cultures learned from and expressed themselves through dance. That was their form of education. That’s how they told their story. They didn’t stand up and give a three-point sermon. (In some cultures people would fall down laughing if you did that!) They wanted to see if you could dance it. We’re lucky in the U.S., by the way, because the native American tradition still lives -- and has these elements intact. That’s real sacred dance.

With a congregation, you build up people’s experience by having them see dance -- some churches will have a dancer come in and do a solo; others will sponsor a dance workshop. Then you begin to integrate movement more into the worship. You can have people simply learn processions. Slowly, they’ll become more comfortable with doing movement to a hymn -- very simple things where the whole congregation can move forward and participate, or where they can do it in their pews. Some of that can be stylized gestures, choreographed in some simple way. Here we run into the real problem of church architecture. There are many churches in which it’s almost impossible to move. But this difficulty isn’t insurmountable. A lot can be done with people in the pews: just standing, linking arms and doing gestures with simple hymns.

Congregational dancing -- that is, when the whole people dances -- is obviously similar to folk dancing. It’s the same metaphor and it’s the same kind of movement. It’s premised on the democratic principle of participation by all. One danger in introducing movement into the church is that of equating it with some kind of perfectionism so that anyone who feels incapable of dancing or anyone who’s literally disabled may feel that it’s an exclusive kind of thing. And so you find ways of helping people realize that dance is about movement and rhythm. People can stomp their feet or clap their hands. I work in terms of concentric circles -- the people in the innermost circle are the gutsiest, and the people on the outside are the ones who aren’t quite sure but are willing to carry the tune. Then you’ve got the clappers and the stompers. Eventually the circles collapse very easily and only a few people want to stay on the outside.

We’d move a lot faster if we thought of congregational movement as simply natural. Part of the reason we don’t, by the way, is that we’ve lost touch with dancing as sheer communal, social fun -- unless you’re lucky enough to live in the parts of the country where people still square dance and folk dance. Getting together, raising a barn, and putting on a hoedown are not unlike putting on a public witness as a church and then celebrating the fact that as a people you were capable of having that kind of prophetic drive.

On dance and faith for all ages:

The people who perk up the most in worship services where I introduce dance are kids and older people. Perhaps this is because they have nothing to lose. It’s all of us in between who are guarding our self-image Adolescence is an especially poignant time in which we’re not sure we should do anything with our bodies, let alone live in them! We’re so embarrassed that we’re six inches taller than we were last week.

There’s a potential for intergenerational communication here. If you want to show relationships with children, for example, you don’t have to talk -- you can dance with a baby. You can have an 80-year-old man and a little girl lead the procession in your church. You can encourage people who don’t see each other that much to have contact with each other. You show forth the body of Christ in all its forms. To me dance has the potential of being the ministry of, to and with any group of people in the church. Movement in some ways really expresses the child in all of us, the part that has always wanted and will always want to move, to give, to be spontaneous, to love. And every time we segregate ages, what we do is cut out a portion of our own experience.

During the Epiphany procession at Riverside I was literally the Bethlehem star, leading the wise men. I ended in the crêche scene next to our live baby (girl!) Jesus and I experienced my relatedness to that baby in a way I could never have done before. It was wonderful. I stood in the presence of that baby (while she played with my glittery garment) and there we were -- the Child and her star, the star that shone forth and the Light of the world. It really was a religious experience for me to relate to Jesus in that way, to realize, “This child’s coming into this world is somehow my purpose too.”

Later, after the nave had emptied out, a small girl in our congregation found her way to the front of the church, went up the steps and into the chancel where I had danced, and imitated me, dancing around in that empty space. It was so symbolic to me -- that people will come into the space of the altar and just take it over and say, “It’s my altar; I never thought of it that way.” It’s not the preacher’s altar; it’s not mine to preside over as a clergyperson who happens to be able to dance. That space is our space. For me my dance, completed by the little girl’s, was an integrative event.

On integrating dance into the liturgy:

Even if a solo dancer dances the confession, it’s crucial to have him or her be part of the liturgy in such a way that the people know it’s not an intrusion. This can mean that the dancer processes, or comes in as an officiant. Or the dancer may take a speaking part in the service so we realize that dancers can talk; they are not just “bodies.” At the end of each Advent procession I turned, walked to the front of the chancel over the labyrinth that I had just danced, and gave the call to worship. Some people thought, “Now, that’s strange,” and others thought, “I’m so glad she did that; she’s a real person.”

Dance always involves a participant in the liturgy doing something on our behalf. In this way it’s similar to the priestly role. (Of course the preacher is preaching on our behalf also, but we tend to forget that. At least in the priestly tradition, we remember it intellectually. ) To make this point, the dancer can come up out of the congregation. (There are some technical problems with that, but they can be overcome.) In other words, I do everything to make it not a performance in the sense of “you versus me” -- implying “you could never do this; I, on the other hand, can.” I try to lessen the distance. That doesn’t mean that I ignore the fact that I’m a performer, but it does mean that I must make sure I’m dancing something out of that congregation’s life. As a result, it may mean that I won’t do the same dance twice. That’s a corker: it’s like preaching a new sermon every time! It’s hard, but it’s also wonderful. It’s alive every time I do it, even if it’s an idea I’ve worked on many times before.

On the limitations imposed by church architecture:

If you look at renovation in churches, you see that people generally want flexible space, so they’ll create a space, and they’ll take out the pews. I think dance has grown partly because the limitations of church architecture were so great that people were getting tired of not being able to move. The limiting effect of architecture on worship began very early on and culminated in the situation where nobody in the congregation got out of the pew or even knelt. Nobody moved at all; they just sat. The goal seemed to be a sort of stasis or passivity.

In the early church, by the way, there were no pews, and everybody stood and milled around. An interesting thing is the relationship of standing, sitting, being able to move -- and the development of hierarchy in the church. It became important who stood, who sat, who went where, because movement is metaphorical. It represents where an individual can go in the life of the church. If you can’t go behind that railing, if somebody in the congregation can’t move beyond a certain point, then nobody really can. Our architecture often says, “This far and no farther.”

Dance could interact with architecture in a very creative, democratizing way. One of the things I do in workshops in church sanctuaries is to ask people: “How do you feel about this space? Have you ever been here within the chancel in this way?” And then we wander around and go in and out, and we process around the aisles. People go up into the corners and say, “I’ve never even been here before.”

Movement is a way to break open the bounds of the human space and the communal space. So even if you don’t dance yet, start to move in the space. Do a call to worship from a new place. Surprise people -- anything that changes the energy flow of the space. Come down out of the pulpit into the midst of the people -- that’s a real disturber!

About dance choirs:

Should dance replicate the pattern that music occupies in the church? Music and dance belong to the entire church. If you want to have a dance choir, if that’s the way your church will accept it, fine. But I’m on the side of inclusiveness. I don’t want dance to replicate music’s tendency toward embellishment in the life of the church. Such an attitude keeps us from exploring and risking in sacred dance or music. It can mean that people come to worship to feel good, or to be moved -- a little -- even to see “a good show.” Ultimately, dance should be a different -- and powerful -- form of discourse through which the values, the commitments, the struggles and the dilemmas of a congregation are represented.

One danger of sacred dance right now is that it may be the frosting on the cake -- one more way to attract people that you haven’t been able to get to church. I’m trying now to work within peace groups and intentional communities where dance can be part of who they already are. In that framework, I can say, “Can I see with you whether dance would help you express something?” Disarmament, or any struggle to be a creative, pluralistic, witnessing community, belongs to dance. We need to ask through dance about the interplay between our witness and what we need spiritually -- about who we’re trying to be as a people of God.

On dance as therapy:

There’s a broad range within the sacred dance movement from the performance of individuals representing the congregation to total congregational involvement. My interest in dance is really therapeutic -- the healing of the community as a whole. I would like to see dance employed in the pastoral care of the community as well, so that throughout the life of the church you see and experience the body as part and parcel of life. The big thing about congregational movement is what it does for the life of the congregation. When everybody moves, when people get involved, they just light up.

I’m told that after a recent dance workshop at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York, someone commented that “the reason this had such a marvelous impact was that everybody was really all kinds of shapes and sizes -- just like us. It was us dancing.” In contrast, other people will say without a doubt that “if the dancers are beautiful and firm and fine, I’ll like it; I don’t want to see any bouncing bodies.” If you can’t see the awkwardness of adolescence and the diminution of capacity that slowly comes on in aging, or enjoy the fullness of female and male bodies that are not all ten pounds underweight, then you can’t deal with your own human condition. I don’t say that one should force dance down someone’s throat; I’m as uncomfortable as anybody on certain points. If you don’t want to put dance right up front in the chancel, then allow alternatives. One example might be a group using movement as meditation. In such a setting, there would be no performance, no showing forth of perfection -- only everyone experiencing his or her body as an instrument of power and expressiveness.

My interest incorporates healing. There’s a lot of evidence that ecstatic dance -- spontaneous, unpremeditated dance -- has always been at the heart of religious traditions and has always expressed what the dance therapy movement helps us discover now. It expressed the need to integrate the various parts of one’s life and it spontaneously, publicly demonstrated that religion was the sphere within which that was allowed. In the religious community one was still able -- and encouraged -- to recapture wholeness, whereas now we go to the therapeutic movement for such healing.

Using dance elsewhere in the life of the church:

Walter Wink has pioneered a method of teaching and studying the Bible which is inclusive of forms of expression other than cognitive-verbal. So as a student in seminary doing an exegesis on the Gerasene demoniac, I could use dance as a means to go into that text. After studying it for some time, I could say, “Now, let’s look at it in another way.” The movement that results is sometimes closer to mime or gesture, because one asks: if I had to be this character in the story, how would I move? If I had to dance her, what would her dance be like? It usually is relational as well, as in a dance where I try to show the relationship of Ruth and Naomi.

Like all art, dance is another way of knowing something. I know differently if I paint something than if I describe it to you verbally. I have worked with very large groups where, after some Bible study, I invite people to participate in another way of knowing that story. Following the exegetical or homiletical work, then I’m saying, “Now take those same images and embody them.” By watching me, they experience me using my whole body to express a broken heart, a rejected sinner, whatever. Often I invite them to participate -- “What does a broken heart feel like? Show me; don’t tell me -- show me.” That’s why dance is unique as both a visual and a kinesthetic means of knowing. When I do a certain gesture, both you and I may realize something for the first time. It’s like an “Aha!” It’s very common for people to say then, “Oh, wow! I never thought of it that way.”

I’m intrigued with the possibility for a church with a pastoral care program to use movement as a form of relaxation and development of the expressive side of the self. In a creative movement class, students can learn to do improvisations, to express things that they otherwise wouldn’t know about themselves. If dance and movement can be a way of releasing or exploring or expressing, why shouldn’t it be part of the overall ministry of the church? There are ways of using movement that have long been recognized in the therapeutic clinical settings. We now see that the church may have to take on many functions in our culture because of the economic crunch. Some of these can be defined as original healing functions.

On dance and politics:

Another thing intrigues me: what about the sociopolitical directions we take? Don’t we have ways of celebrating and expressing and being ourselves there through the arts as well? Typically we find that politics and arts go apart in the church. Art is regarded as fluff, nonessential. (What I may get from my political friends is: “It’s all very well and good, but in terms of priorities, will it change the Reagan administration’s policy?”) But all artists live and work in a social setting. There’s always been a basic tradition in the artistic community that says, “I’m a human being. I live with other human beings. These are the dilemmas of human life as I know them.” Do we want to call that “political”? What we need to do is to break down the barrier between the life outside the church and the life inside.

In so many ways dance is the re-creation of sheer pleasure in being alive -- something we don’t have in our formal liturgies. I’m talking now about the liberal, activist churches -- they’re my concern. So many of us struggle with despair, and in part that’s because we don’t know how to be fully alive. So it’s no wonder we can’t show forth our faith! When I talk about dance, I don’t want it to be marginal; I want it to sustain us. I want us to be about animating the body of Christ for witness in the world. The reason to be brought alive on Sunday is to light on Monday. It’s not to be able to say, “Oh. we have dance in our church. Oh, you must see our dance choir.”

Maybe this makes me eccentric because I may go to a gathering of liturgical dancers and talk about the work as political. And they may ask, “Does that mean you decide the content of your dances based on your ideology?” No! It means that my friends who hit the streets on Monday morning are tired; we’re all a bit depressed. Some of us are burning out, having heart attacks, whatever. I want us to hit the streets on Monday morning, and I think in order to continue to do that we have to learn to care for and celebrate life in new ways. So I have this particular need, gift, intuition, drive to dance -- and to share that with others. I want to do it because I think it helps all of us stay alive.

On whether dance is exhibitionism:

In one sense, I suppose that if you have a gift and share it, that’s an exhibition and we shouldn’t overlook that. But maybe one reason some people don’t like dance in the church is that it can compete with the preacher-as-exhibitor. (Sometimes I say to preachers, if you’ve got to be an “exhibitionist,” you might as well give ‘em a good show! That’s true of music and dance too.)

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I imagine that a majority of liturgical dancers deal with this problem directly by considering dance as a form of prayer and grounding ourselves in meditation and prayer as a way of preparation. But then there’s the danger that I will overlook the reality that I also need to learn certain aspects of performance, like focus and disciplined movement, if I really want to do my thing well. It’s difficult to explain. For instance, when I do my dance about Mary Magdalene, how do you know whether I’m “inspired” -- and by what? One way to get at the question is to ask: How are you inspired? What motivates you and how does it show forth in your work? It’s tricky, I guess. Maybe the real criterion then becomes whether I can truly communicate and thus share my experience or vision with you. Frankly, I would fear a different problem in sacred dance -- as in the church -- that of false humility. The dance movement may err at the moment more on the side of humility than of pride or “exhibitionism.”

On those who feel threatened by dance In the church:

Approach dance as you approach every other thing you want to try in the church. If people are uncomfortable, don’t force it. We do tend to shove what we think are prophetic stances on people. Sometimes we implicitly say, “If you can’t take it, you can leave.” I’m interested in seeing whether we can encourage people, by our love and devotion to the faith, to say, “You know, one reason we feel uptight about all this is that we don’t even remember the healing power of our own tradition!” The fact that some of us are so unaccustomed to familiarity and touching and warmth in a religious service is a judgment on our appropriation of that tradition. It shows how little we understand the real meaning of the injunction, “Beloved, let us then love one another.”

You don’t have to hug everybody; I don’t mean that. I’m kind of a New Englander -- I’m very reserved in a lot of ways, and I respect privacy. What I’ll be doing in my work for the next few years is testing out the question, “What does it mean to respect all those differences?” But I have to say that the one thing that has hooked me, that has converted me from private, no-touching, don’t-move worship, from the coolness of our traditions, is that I’ve seen how I and other people come alive through movement and dance.

On dance in theological education:

Dance is part of theological education curricula in many places -- Pacific School of Religion, Union Seminary, New York Theological Seminary, General Theological Seminary, Saint Paul School of Theology -- to name only a few. I imagine most seminaries have tried it or have done it around the edges. But there are a number of reasons why the study of dance is crucial even if one does not intend to use it in liturgy. Dance and movement are, as I said, different ways of knowing -- about oneself, one’s world and one’s ultimate reality. The more we turn out scores of clergy who cannot perceive the world in any form other than verbal and linear, the more diminished is our capacity as a church for understanding and leading in these times. If the current economic squeeze in seminaries falls first on the arts, it will be incredibly detrimental.

People in seminaries should be exposed to dance as a form of worship as well -- there’s almost no one who cannot lead a simple dance. If I’m going to go out and serve a congregation, I have to learn to preach and do other things. Why should a minister be so totally ignorant of the living tradition of sacred dance? It shouldn’t be allowed any more than being ignorant of sacred music.

UMC’s Women Clergy: Sisterhood and Survival

Dallas.

Just as shivering football fans were leaving Dallas and its paralyzing ice storm after the Cotton Bowl last month, some 650 United Methodist women ministers and seminarians were arriving for what Indiana pastor Susan Ruach called “the largest gathering of clergywomen in the history of the world.” No one had handy a copy of The Guinness Book of World Records to confirm or dispute that claim, and in fact one may surmise that a Holiness body like the Salvation Army -- ordaining women since the 1880s -- has possibly assembled a larger crowd of ordained women on some occasion. But at any rate, it was the largest such “mainline” meeting anyone could recall.

The United Methodists have granted full ordination rights to females since 1956, but only in this decade have women entered the ministry in appreciable numbers. Presently 766 women are serving under appointment, and several hundred more are enrolled in seminaries. The program planners for the four-day meeting on the Southern Methodist University campus had designed a crowded agenda for the participants -- including 50 or so male invitees.

Both the formal program and the informal corridor chatter offered ample evidence that women clergy see themselves as bringing special gifts and graces to the practice of ministry, but they believe that the church has not yet allowed them to make the fullest use of those gifts both for their own professional development and for the enrichment of the whole church.

I

One of those gifts is preaching. Clearly, anyone who bemoans the decline of the pulpit craft has not been hanging out in the right sanctuaries. The styles of the white and ethnic minority women who preached for the week’s services varied widely, but some generalizations are possible. First of all, the best sermons were firmly grounded in Scripture, applying the biblical word to the nitty-gritty of daily life. The themes were often unapologetically autobiographical, using the preacher’s own life experience as the starting point for theology. At their best, these preachers were freed up from a dependence on a manuscript, and style was as important as content in conveying the message. That style was often warm, informal and colloquial, laced with humor. The preacher was sure of herself and of her faith. There was a dramatic flair, an unselfconscious exuberance in sharing the word. Women have assumed firm, strong, assertive voices that carry to the back row of a sanctuary.

Hearing a woman preacher for the first time is a mind-blowing experience not yet encountered by many Protestant congregations nor even by some female clergy. One of the great values of meetings such as the Dallas gathering is in giving clergy an opportunity to hear preaching by their peers. Some of those present were black women who spread the idea that worship is not a spectator sport and that preaching at its most effective is a participatory enterprise in which the congregation plays a vital and vocal role. Serving as leaven in the loaf, black women transformed the whole assembly. As the preacher shared with her colleagues the joys and trials of being a clergywoman, there were not only nods of assent but verbal responses signaling recognition of those experiences common to all their lives: “Yes, that’s how it is for me too.”

Liturgies for the preaching services tended toward the traditional. Scriptural choices often focused on women of the Bible -- Miriam, Deborah, Mary and Martha. Litanies recalled the names of such revered women forebears as Mary McLeod Bethune and Georgia Harkness. For the most part, ephemeral and folky guitar-songs ,were eschewed in favor of solid fare from the Methodist hymnal. Hymns and liturgies were determinedly nonsexist (“Substitute ‘Creator’ for ‘great Father’ in verse 4,” said the rubrics for one hymn in the order of worship). Occasionally God was referred to, a bit self-consciously, as “she” -- but for the most part, pronouns were carefully avoided.

At this point in their history, many women clergy are preoccupied with career issues -- with survival or success -- in the United Methodist itinerant system. The dilemma often involves the choice between ambition for upward mobility in a hierarchical system and efforts to change that very system. Whereas most other Protestant denominations operate under a “call” organization, with each congregation hiring and firing pastors on its own, in United Methodism’s itinerant plan, ministers are appointed to pastoral charges by the bishop. The unemployment problems suffered by clergy in other denominations are minimized, for under current United Methodist policy, every fully credentialed pastor is guaranteed an appointment. But signing on with the itinerant arrangement means accepting the bishop’s authority to determine where one will serve, and being willing to go where one is sent.

The ultimate in “upward mobility” is the episcopacy, and inevitably the possibility of electing the first woman bishop arose. Most-mentioned candidates Jeanne Audrey Powers, one of the denomination’s ecumenical officers, and Barbara Troxell, a district superintendent in California, have both served notice that they don’t want the job in 1980, feeling they can be more effective in their present posts. But a surprise candidate emerged when Michigan women urged District Superintendent Marjorie Matthews to stand for election. Matthews, a petite gray-haired establishmentarian and staunch defender of the itineracy, has a reputation for being supportive of women who are more radical than she.

“Open itineracy,” an ideal often voiced, is seldom a reality: few women pastors are appointed to churches of more than 300 members except in “associate” slots; almost never has a woman served as senior pastor in a multiple-staff situation; as for minority pastors, white churches of any size are seldom open to them. Is “upward mobility” an aim worth striving for? Marjorie Matthews told the women in her workshop: “There’s nothing wrong with ambition. Where do you see yourself in the ministry ten years from now?”

Perhaps the best advertisement for women pastors is the satisfaction of congregations who have enjoyed their leadership. When bishops have had the courage to appoint women to pastoral slots, congregations have typically accepted them warmly. Most women say that their chief problem is not lack of acceptance by laity, but the hostility of male pastors who feel threatened by competition in a job market with little room at the top.

II

Some 50 workshops were offered during the convocation, including “life style” sharing sessions for single, divorced, widowed, gay and “clergy couple” women; political strategy sessions to write legislation for the UMC’s 1980 General Conference; biblical hermeneutics; and liturgical dance. Some of the most popular workshops dealt with such practical matters as financial planning and pension benefits, management and administration, “power relationships” and “influencing the system.”

Many workshops arrived at one of the crucial questions troubling United Methodism today: can the itineracy system become more flexible, adapting to new strains, and yet remain a viable system? “Appointability” is a key word, and whether single, married to another minister or to a nonclergy professional, women are regarded in the church hierarchy as “difficult to place.” Cabinets are becoming more sensitive to the special needs of all clergy, and that fact may limit the latitude in appointment-making. A divorced pastor whose spouse has custody of the children desires an appointment nearby to facilitate weekend visits; the “guy who has an allergy to walnut trees” must be sent to a church in a part of the state where walnut trees do not grow. The pastor with a retarded child who needs special schooling must not be moved to an area where such schooling is not available.

“Clergy couples” -- with both husband and wife being ordained -- “are beginning to find their label oppressive,” said one workshop participant. It causes them to be regarded as an entity rather than as two pastors, and to be stereotyped as a placement problem. Coordinating the career moves of a couple -- whether they desire to serve a joint pastorate or separate parishes -- can be difficult. But cabinets have been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the two-career couple problem when one of the members is clergy and one is nonclergy. When both are ministers, the church bears responsibility for placing them both in jobs -- generally within driving distance of their shared parsonage. But when only one partner is ordained, the church has no control over the other partner’s career, and often fails to take it into consideration. The assumption has been that when the minister must move, the spouse must follow. The system worked well for many years with men who had nonworking wives, or wives whose careers as nurses or schoolteachers were regarded as transportable from one town to another. The two-career-couple crunch often forces a wrenching decision: “Which career is more important?” The assumption that the male’s ambitions always take precedence is being questioned, and couples are wrestling with the sacrifices required when career goals conflict.

The issue generating the most anger against “the system’ seems to be the difficulties faced by a woman raising children while serving full-time as pastor. Are motherhood and ministry incompatible? Under present rules, clergy must take appointments to full-time work. Women are pushing for part-time options to enable them to devote time to child-rearing. And more enlightened couples are seeing that part-time ministries could also allow male clergy to devote a major block of time to parenting. Some women in their 30s have postponed pregnancy until after the denomination’s 1980 General Conference in anticipation of new legislation that will allow them to combine motherhood and ministry. A church that has traditionally placed great emphasis on the family and on the nurturing of children ought, say many women, to set an example by offering flexible options for clergy parents.

III

Some of the week’s keynote speakers cautioned women not to work out their individual ambitions at the expense of other women. Annette Hutchins-Felder noted the tendency demonstrated by members of the white male structure to promote blacks who identify with the white community, and to advance women who don’t identify with the women’s movement. United Presbyterian Beverly Wildung Harrison of Union Theological Seminary said: “Those of us who are middle-strata white women will be invited in and rewarded precisely to the extent that we are willing to become ‘one of the boys,’ sensitive to minimizing any rocking of the boat.”

Jeanne Audrey Powers, addressing issues of power, focused on the manner in which “dualistic ways of thinking” have “run rampant in the church’s thought and action.” The spirit/flesh, spiritual/material, sacred/secular, church/world dualisms by implication lift one element up as superior, and denominate the other as inferior. “As women,” she said, “we have allowed that kind of dualism to mark our relationships to men in the church.”

Rejecting competitive win/lose models of power in which achievement is won at the expense of others, Powers called for a new vision of power. One direction to follow in shaping a cooperative model is to recognize that more power comes to us as we help our sisters express more of theirs.” Women must “affirm their support for one another in public ways,” she emphasized. For example, “If you’re invited to do something publicly and cannot, have you a list in your head of other women who could be invited instead?” Women should make use of “affirm signals” to give support to one another and to other minorities. “Do you give ‘listening support’ by the expression on your face? . . . If you’re often in the position of being a ‘token,’ are you able to bring in other sisters and brothers who never have your opportunities?” Such practice of “sisterhood” works to empower other women.

The task of getting beyond individual survival or success to the kind of sisterhood Powers described will not be easy. With seminary enrollments now totaling from 25 to 50 per cent women, the next four years could be crucial as the numbers of females seeking ordination and appointment double. The United Methodists, like other Protestant bodies, face the challenge of broadening the image of clergy leadership in order to welcome the special gifts and graces brought by the growing company of women who seek their profession serving the faith.

Archives: Articles