Four intelligent women, followed closely, shape the contours and substance of Katie Gaddini’s important book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022). The subtitle announces the theme. The book is filled with insight, story, and potential value for anyone ministering in a church or teaching in a seminary!
What wounds is she talking about?
The promise of equality met with marginal status.
As one of her subjects says it so piercingly, “Give me a Catholic opposed to women in leadership any time over a church leader who theologically supports it but doesn’t practice it.”
That space of promised equality and delayed equality Gaddini calls the “borderlands.”
Question: What are the best indicators that the promise will not be met?
Here’s a good way of putting it (from “Liv”):
What I found really frustrating when I joined the church at twenty-six and was identified as an all-star with heaps of potential, was that time and time again I would see men join the church at the same level and get put straight in with the church leaders. They would be taken to football games, flown over to Napa on a private plane to go to a winery. They would be supported, you know? One of the male church leaders started doing all these leadership weekends where he would take fifteen men away to a cabin in the woods and really invest in them. And nothing like that was happening for women.
Promises, promises, promises. The borderland between promise and fulfillment.
Gaddini explains and tells stories about the experience of that borderland for women.
It means “paranoia, self-doubt, confusion, pain.”
She concentrates her stories on:
(1) Anger: lots of it, building up, storing it, expressing it.
(2) Loneliness: it is “unaccounted for, unindexed, outside the norm, it isolates and separates its inhabitants.” Privilege blinds itself; it is invisible to the males. Single evangelical women feel it doubled-down on their chances of promotion into leadership.
(3) Self-doubt: is “a low-grade, durational, and persistent emotion.” And it is “infinitely sustainable” … “an adversary who promises you everything you want yet time and time again fails to deliver… an amorphous regime of power.”
(4) Exhaustion: those in the borderlands between promised equality and realized equality are exhausted. They fight for equality with men and don’t win. Only 3% of American evangelical churches have an evangelical pastor while 35% say they affirm women as pastors. And more women are churchgoers than men. A male minority dominating a female majority.
(5) Battling this tension in the borderland “gives rise to emotions that move contagiously among bodies; more importantly, these emotions move bodies.” That is, they move out of the church. Promises unmet lead to exasperation.
(6) Not built for long-term residence: that’s the fact. One can dwell in the borderland of promise and fulfillment only so long. Eventually one moves on.
Why do such women leave, walk, or are those “defecting in place”? They feel discrimination for gender, sexuality, singleness, and having career ambitions. They don’t fit, they are “feisty” or accused of being “difficult.”
What are the best indicators that the promise will not be met? I've had decades of experience with this in the past and it's possible that the situation today has been somewhat eased. But perhaps not. For me a first indicator is the warm patronizing look accompanied by complements to the woman about her womanhood. I know that look: it says, "You are such a lovely woman and you honor your (sub-) position in the church so well, we are so pleased to have you on board as a model of godliness for our women." There is no mention of tasks or positions. It's all about how much a woman graces the church AS A WOMAN. That's often the first indicator. A secondary indicator is the assignment of some task that "suits a woman's womanhood." And in my experience (!) it usually means overlooking inviting the woman to an unscheduled meeting so that the men meet and later apologize when the woman hears about the meeting and protests the fact that she was not invited. It's all usually so "nice" that it's hard to bite into it. I could go on, but this is probably enough for now.
Best indicators I have seen: We have to study it more... Getting bogged down in certain passages… Arriving at no conclusion… Conclusion: we better stay in liminal space, it’s less disruptive than to afford equality of leadership to women! Let’s meet with the women and see how they feel. Let’s also meet with the men lest they feel slighted to see how they feel. Then do nothing thinking understanding how others feel solves anything. And a last indicator: We will follow the theology we grew up in refusing to get curious and do serious theology as a church. We’re afraid of our own theologizing. Let’s let others do it for us. We trust them but we can’t trust the Holy Spirit guiding us. Rant over.