ELCA Roundtable Celebrates Women in Church Leadership

INDIANAPOLIS -- Almost 600 members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) -- including 16 men -- met here Aug. 6-8 for the first ELCA Women's Leadership Roundtable. They celebrated the growing number of women in positions of leadership across the Lutheran church, including 30 years as clergy, and discussed ways of sustaining that momentum.
The gathering's "Lift Our Voice" theme brought emphasis to worship and song, mentoring, leadership development, Bible study and enjoying each other's company. Sitting around more than 70 round tables encouraged the participants to share their experiences and ideas across any possible barriers of race or age.

SPEAKERS HIGHLIGHT WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP
Recalling a time when only men were ordained as clergy and held positions of authority in the church, the Rev. Barbara K. Lundblad, associate professor of preaching, Union Theological Seminary, New York, asked participants to imagine the thoughts of a young girl in 1960.
The girl may not have dreamed that the Lutheran churches that formed the ELCA would ordain women in 1970 or that five women could serve the church as bishops today. The girl may not have pictured African American, Latina, Asian or Native American women in "her church," said Lundblad.
"Women in leadership in the church is a theological issue," said Lundblad. Women and men are both created in the image of God, and spiritual gifts are granted regardless of gender and regardless of ordination, she said. "To deny the gifts of God is to dry up the waters of our baptisms."
Many things the church considered "irregular" just a few decades earlier are now accepted practice in the church, Lundblad said. She said many things the church considers "irregular" today are "a wonderfully creative chaos" much like that which the early Christian church experienced.
Viola Raheb, director of Lutheran schools in Jerusalem and Palestine, is a Palestinian Christian and a Lutheran. She is the youngest woman to be the director of Lutheran schools and the first Palestinian woman to have a degree in theology. She is the only Palestinian woman who is publishing books and articles on feminist theology from a Palestinian perspective.
Through her work at the International Center of Bethlehem, Raheb mentors both Muslim and Christian women. She mentors other Palestinian women who have studied abroad who have come back to Bethlehem so they can also be voices of leadership and hope.
Raheb shared with participants aspects of leadership qualities. "Women's leadership has always been contextual," she said.
She told the gathering:
+ Leadership equals liberation.
+ Leadership has to do with silent witness. Real leaders are those who make an impact on others without even knowing it.
+ Leadership has to do with daring to challenge.
+ Leadership has to do with planting hope in a time of despair. It is very easy to be a leader in the 'well-off' context.
+ Leadership is overcoming bridges such as race and sexual orientation.
+ Leadership is being willing to take risks.
Using texts on biblical women -- Miriam, Esther, Deborah, and midwives Shiphrah and Puah -- Dr. Jeanne Porter engaged Roundtable participants in a Bible study of women leaders. Porter is associate minister of the Apostolic Church of God and associate professor of communication arts at North Park University, Chicago.
"Leadership must be about transformation," said Porter. "Transformative leadership is the movement of people toward collective and mutual goals of spiritual growth and higher purpose and empowerment," she said.
"Transformative leaders are visionary," she said. They see what others cannot see, move people to places and accomplishments they dared not go, said Porter.
"Leading ladies" move others toward collective purpose and understand that movement toward collective purpose entails transition and crisis. They help provide meaning for the transformational process, she said.
"Leading ladies use 'celebration' -- the enactment of ritual and spiritual symbols -- as part of the transformational process. We take a moment to not just 'smell the roses' but we start to talk about what the roses mean and how do they give us more insight to who we are," said Porter.
"Leading ladies" understand the times. They understand the link between timing and transformation. The transformative leader operates within God's time frame and not her own, said Porter.
Each participant received a "boomwhacker" -- a plastic tube, cut from one to two feet in length to create one of six specific pitches when struck. Patricia Hickey, therapist and drummer, Rhythmos Seminars, Grand Rapids, Mich., led the group in using the boomwhackers to create a series of rhythms.
Hickey noted that when two people walk together they create a common rhythm. "You will be getting in touch with your own rhythm," she told the gathering. "Then you'll be throwing that rhythm out into the crowd and creating a team spirit."
After leading the Roundtable in several group exercises, Hickey encouraged participants around each table to create their own rhythms. Then the entire group created a single rhythm and broke into song.

WOMEN SHARE LESSONS OF MENTORING
"How would your life be different if, as a young girl, you would have been invited to the table of women?" asked Charlotte D. Williams, associate director for leadership development, cross-cultural advocacy and budget, ELCA Commission for Women. "God placed the ELCA in my life," she said. "Then I took the initiative" to find mentors.
Katie Sorenson, youth and family ministry student, Augsburg College, Minneapolis, recalled words of wisdom she gathered from two women. One woman did not know she was a mentor, she said, while she intentionally asked the other to mentor her.
The Rev. Diane Jackson, Redeemer Lutheran Church, Pearisburg, Va., shared stories she had gathered from other participants in which women recalled being mentored as girls. "It's more than your turn," she said. "It's what we need to be about."
Participants discussed several scenarios in which there were opportunities for women and girls to mentor each other. Several acted out the scenarios in skits for the whole gathering.
Participants were invited to meet in "mentoring rooms" to explore opportunities for mentor relationships along certain categories: clergy women, educators, global women leaders, healing-overcoming-recovery and women's spirituality, "justice, peace and advocacy," lay church professionals and social services, lesbian leaders and professional women.
The Roundtable had a goal that at least 30 percent of its participants would be women of color or women whose primary language was other than English. Another goal was to have at least 30 percent of its participants be women under the age of 30.
Thirty-three percent of the participants were women of color, and 19 percent were women under 30. While not a planned goal, 46 percent of participants were women under the age of 45.
Receptions were held to give the two groups time for fellowship and sharing. The women of color group used their time to share their joys and pains of being leaders and women of color in the church. The women under 30, with the youngest being 16 years old, used a portion of their time to share brief descriptors of mentors in their lives.
The Roundtable preceded the ELCA's Seventh Biennial Churchwide Assembly here Aug. 8-14. Two of the women attending the women under 30 reception are voting members at the assembly.
Members of the ELCA Church Council and Conference of Bishops joined the Roundtable participants for Miriam's Feast, a gala dinner based on a biblical reference in Exodus 15. The dinner was punctuated with toasts for all ordained women, "our elders," ELCA Presiding Bish