How Many Women?
By Laura Tarro
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
I was in a room recently where a female professor paused her teaching to ask:
How many women in this room have done the job of a pastor without the title?
Hands went up all over the room. She paused for a moment to let it land and then went back to her teaching. That moment has stuck with me.
Those hands represent:
1. A lack of networking opportunities.
2. A lack of clergy compensation benefits (this one is a big deal, y’all).
3. A lack of respect for education and experience. (I had a conference superintendent tell me she asked that “years of full time ministry experience” on a job-finding survey be changed to “years of ministry experience” because so many women have years of unpaid or part time experience).
What else am I missing?
[Laura adds her own experience:]
The net impact is, people who do the job without the title of Pastor are:
1. Isolated.
2. Under-compensated.
3. Kept under-qualified. (Their job description does not match the work they are doing, which impacts them if they go to find another job.)
Ask me how I know.
I planned and led a weekly worship service. I presided over the Lord’s Supper, every week. I did exegetical research and prepared sermon-based Bible studies for the whole congregation. I co-taught membership classes. I wrote and led seminars on evangelism and the Bible. I managed a budget and trained volunteers. I was referred people for pastoral care. I preached on occasion. I was a part-time director.
I had told the senior leadership of my call to pastoral ministry before I was hired. I was told to be patient. I was asked to keep quiet about the whole thing. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone before I preached for the first time.
I’ve since met a lot of people with similar stories.
Soon after I asked for my job description and title be changed to match the actual work I was doing, I was told to resign. When I said I didn’t want to resign I was told, “staying is not an option.”
So I left. The next church where I served immediately identified my pastoral calling and gave me the title pastor upon arrival. I hadn’t suddenly become more qualified.
I recently said to someone I was being introduced to, “oh yes I was on the ministry team of a church for ten years”
only to have the other person in the conversation, an Anglican clergyman, say,
over the top of my head, “she means she was on staff.”
I had another clergyman from the same diocese answer me when I said I was on the ministry team “‘well then you certainly have a strange definition of ministry team.”
My job included planting and running a weekly service, writing and preaching sermons, leading a pastoral care team and doing a huge amount of pastoral care, many funerals and all the general planning, being part of the team that anyone else did. But no, not called pastor.
Cut, paste, insert my name.
As everything was falling apart beneath me, I was called to pursue my doctorate of leadership and spiritual formation. There is so much I am learning about 1) how abusive that environment was and 2) how I *might* have led the adaptive process differently. In the beginning of my program I found your blog and read Nijay Gupta’s book. While I haven’t learned anything women haven’t been seeing and saying for years from you or Nijay (specifically regarding women in ministry), I’ve learned that God is raising up allies for women in the church. So my project is focused on the unique formational needs of evangelical women formed in the patriarchal church as space opens up for mutual leadership in evangelical churches. I believe God is doing a good work, but, man, the breadth of pain and damage that’s been caused along the way makes me weep. Thank you, Thank you for providing space for us to give voice to our experiences. Please don’t stop.