Ideas for Celebrating Bold Women's Day
Celebrate Bold Women's Day on Sunday, February 26, 2012!
You’re encouraged to celebrate Bold Women’s Day on the fourth Sunday of February, but another day will do just fine if it better fits your schedule. Pull together a small planning team, including women of different generations. Provide each with a copy of “Celebrating Bold Women’s Day” in advance, and have everyone read through it before your first meeting.
Start with “When you gather in community” and the program resources at right. Feel free to mix and match, designing an event that is just right for the women who are gathering. Be creative. These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Advance planning, effective publicity and attention to hospitality will ensure a successful event.
Instead of a group observance or in addition to one, you can suggest ways in which women in your congregation can celebrate Bold Women’s Day individually. Take some of the ideas in “Ways to celebrate on your own” and turn them into a newsletter article, a bulletin insert or a Sunday morning announcement (or all of those) as a way to invite individual participation.
Once your group or individual celebrations have occurred, share what you’ve done by sending an e-mail to women.elca@elca.org or by posting on Facebook.
Create an illustrated timeline of women’s leadership in your congregation. Post a long sheet of paper (6’ to 10’ in length) in your fellowship hall. Begin with the date your congregation was formed (or an earlier date if ministry occurred before then) and note major decades along the top of the sheet. Invite members to add in dates and activities of women in your congregation, such as the first time a woman was elected to the congregational council or the first time a woman was a lay reader or assisting minister. You’ll have fun recalling these events, and the younger people in your congregation might be surprised at when some of these “firsts” took place.
Did you ever see this quote? “Anonymous was a woman.”
Discover stories about the women in your congregation who have contributed greatly to ministry in your community but who have done so with little fanfare or recognition. Interview older women. Document their lives. This makes a great oral history project. Consider sharing these stories in a written format. This would be a real gift to your congregation.
Books provide great jumping-off points for a Bold Women’s Day observance.
Pull together a display of books about bold women from your church library. Invite women and men to donate books about bold women for your local library. Focus on children’s books and donate them to a homeless shelter for families. For congregations with book clubs, select three books about bold women and meet in February to discuss them (perhaps one a week for three weeks) and then culminate your literary discussions with a potluck on Bold Women’s Day itself. Don’t have a book club? Try one out for February. It may even become a permanent fixture.
Hold a family night in your congregation. Start with a potluck supper or a catered meal—your choice. Then invite families to answer questions together. Use these or come up with your own:
What’s the boldest thing someone in your family has done? Whom do you admire for his or her boldness? What does acting boldly on your faith in Jesus Christ mean to you? Create a bold chain: Using construction paper cut into strips, have family members write their responses to these questions, one answer per strip. Have each family construct a short chain. Then have the families connect their chains as a witness to the boldness in your community. Hang the chain as a reminder of that boldness.
Arrange to show the documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. It tells the story of our Lutheran sister Leymah Gbowee, who gathered Christian and Muslim women together in Liberia to bring about peace in their country, a country torn apart by an extended civil war. Hold a discussion afterwards.
Don a costume and use our Katie Luther skit to introduce this bold woman to the children in your Sunday school.
Give the gift of community to the women you love—family, friends and other women in your congregation—by making them
individual partners in Women of the ELCA. For $20 per year, an individual partner receives subscriptions to
Lutheran Woman Today,
Café and
Threads (a newsletter for partners) while gaining access to global networks, advocacy efforts and more.
Some other group ideas include:
- Pray the “Litany of Boldness.” Use in worship or to open a program or retreat.
- Honor the women in your congregation with a Bold Women’s Day certificate.
- Invite the young women from the campus ministry group at your local college out for coffee. Ask about their hopes and fears. Pray with and for these women. Tell them about Café and invite them to subscribe.
- Sponsor a fair-trade fair. Visit Lutheran World Relief to learn more about how buying fair-trade coffee, chocolate and other items supports families, farmers and communities around the world.
- Plan a noon tea, bake sale, car wash, spa day or flea market. Contribute the money you raise to a Women of the ELCA ministry.
- Honor women from your community who have acted boldly for the community’s sake. Hold a special potluck or tea in their honor.
Reflect on the question, “Who have been the bold women in my life?” Use “
Journaling: Create Your Own Sacred Writings” as a guide in putting your reflections in written form.
Make a gift to Katie’s Fund in honor of a bold woman who has inspired you. If she’s still living, let her know what a difference she made in your life. Or invite her out to lunch and tell her why you think she’s bold.
Capture your own life story. Reflect on the question, “How have I acted boldly on my faith in Jesus Christ?” Record this in some way—in a journal, in a blog, in a letter to your children or a video.
Use your favorite search engine and embark on an online treasure hunt to
learn more about bold women. Start with Elizabeth Fedde (1850-1921), a Lutheran deaconess who established the Norwegian Deaconess Home and Hospital in New York, and Dr. Anna Sarah Kugler (1856-1930), who was the first of several female doctors sent as Lutheran medical missionaries to India.
Some other individual ideas include:
- Donate a book about a bold woman to your church or community library.
- Read the biography of a bold girl or woman. Try a biography of Katharina von Bora Luther or Hildegard of Bingen. For a contemporary woman, read This Child Will Be Great, a memoir by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected president of an African nation. Your librarian can suggest others.
- Commit to three new ways you can act boldly on your faith during the coming year.
- Watch the documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. It tells the story of Leymah Gbowee, a Lutheran peacemaker who gathered Christian and Muslim women together to bring about peace in Liberia.