In July of 2011, Rev. Dr. Nancy Petty, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, took a stand that few other pastors have taken. She refused to sign marriage licenses for heterosexual couples until same-sex couples can legally marry in her state of North Carolina.

With Rev. Dr. Petty’s leadership, the congregation voted unanimously in November of 2011 to affirm this prophetic statement:

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church has a longstanding tradition of supporting the rights of all citizens to equal protection under the law. We find that current North Carolina law and the proposed amendment to the North Carolina Constitution that “Marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state” discriminate against same-sex couples by denying them the rights and privileges enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. As people of faith, affirming the Christian teaching that before God all people are equal, we will no longer participate in this discrimination.

 

Consequently, the members of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church affirm the following:

 

1. Marriages between same-sex and opposite-sex couples will be treated equally, and marriage ceremonies conducted at our church will reflect the spiritual nature of the solemn commitments between two people in a loving relationship.

2. To obtain legal sanction for their union, heterosexual couples may obtain their legal marital contract from another source such as a local magistrate until such time as the State of North Carolina recognizes the legal union of both heterosexual and same-sex couples.

This stand for marriage equality is only one of many prophetic stands Rev. Dr. Petty has taken. She partnered with Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the NAACP of North Carolina and pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, to oppose the Wake County school board’s plan to dismantle the district’s policy designed to promote school diversity and to move to a community-based system of student assignment. For participating in sit-in protests at school board meetings, Revs. Petty and Barber have been arrested several times.

In an article in Raleigh’s News & Observer, Rev. Petty wrote: “We must not fool ourselves by thinking that the issues at hand are not issues of race, economic status, privilege and power. If we allow our elected leaders to return us to a place of segregation and intolerance within our schools—a place where the gap between the haves and have-nots is widened rather than closed—it is ultimately our children who will suffer.”

Balancing her prophetic and pastoral work proves challenging, Rev. Petty says. “Change takes time, but my preference is to move forward when I see something that needs to be done. I go back to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ which is a significant piece of writing for me and how I see my ministry. King writes about being ‘disturbers of the peace and outside agitators.’ That’s what the church is called to do, and that’s what we as ministers are called to do.”

Rev. Petty applies King’s statement to inclusive language and imagery in worship. “I know that I need to agitate people about including Divine Feminine language and visual imagery, that it’s not about trying to comfort people. At the same time it’s important to meet people where they are and to try to understand what it is within them that’s resistant. That delicate balance of being pastor and prophet is a constant challenge.”

Rev. Nancy Petty started a women’s group called Ruah (Hebrew word for “Spirit”)  at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church. This group has the vision of changing the visual imagery in the sanctuary to include the Divine Feminine and to include diversity in race and sexual orientation. In this church, Nancy says, there’s more resistance to inclusive visual imagery than to inclusive language:

“We have people who don’t want anything in the sanctuary to change. It’s hard to know if it’s because they don’t want the feminine imagery in there, or if they truly feel that this space was designed for the purpose and they don’t want it to change. My guess is that it’s both. Some people ask, ‘Why do we have to bring feminine imagery in? We have a woman pastor, and we know what we believe. Why is it important to put stuff on the walls?’ I keep saying, ‘Because it’s theologically the right thing to do.’”

Rev. Petty gives credit to Rev. Larry Schultz, minister of music at Pullen, for helping the church implement language and imagery inclusive of the Divine Feminine. “Credit goes to Larry for including feminine divine names. We sing about God as Mother Eagle, as Mother, as Spirit, Ruah. Also, Larry has helped us to use images that celebrate the feminine and masculine within each of us and to use images of God beyond the human, like God as sky, as eagle, as rock—all of those rich biblical images. It makes a big difference to have someone on a church staff other than the pastor who’s carrying some of that message and vision, because people get tired of hearing it from the pulpit. And coming from a man makes a huge difference, because they can’t accuse Larry of being an ‘angry woman.’”

Inclusive language, leadership, and theology can liberate men as well as women, Rev. Petty believes. “I don’t think it’s just women who’ve been oppressed by our patriarchal culture and church. Men have been oppressed too, because they’ve had to carry this load and power all by themselves and have been cut out of being able to nurture and care and connect on a different level.”

Rev. Petty believes that women ministers and theologians make a powerful statement on women as equal images of the Divine. She saw Dr. Elizabeth Barnes, one of her seminary professors, as the face of the Divine Feminine. “I go back to how significant it was in my own experience to have that encounter with Dr. Barnes, to see a woman and hear a woman’s voice. Representing the Divine Feminine is really important to me because I know how much Dr. Barnes meant to me and how she changed the way I see myself as a theologian and as a pastor. And a number of women have said to me, ‘You don’t know what your presence means; I can look up there and see myself there.’ Over the years I’ve continually listened to women tell me what a difference it makes to have a woman in the pulpit, that it in some way symbolizes their story, their experience.”

Rev. Dr. Nancy Petty articulates an expansive vision for the future of the church. “As I think about my vision for the future of the Divine Feminine and how we talk about our faith, it’s my hope that the church can represent all people as equal. I want both our girls and our boys to know that when we say we are made in the divine image, that means all of us. It doesn’t matter what gender you are, what your sexual orientation is, what color you are, how well you’re educated or not educated. Everyone has gifts to offer. If there’s one vision that points me in my ministry, it’s that we are all equal. My vision is for the church to live into that and believe it in a way that’s counter to our culture. I don’t think our culture will ever really understand that, because there are systems in our culture that require that hierarchy of leadership. Instead of the church reflecting the culture, it’s my hope and vision that we can represent something different and be a different voice in the world.”

The prophetic ministry of Rev. Petty and Pullen Memorial Baptist Church are contributing to making this vision reality.

To read more of Rev. Dr. Nancy Petty’s story, see: https://wipfandstock.com/store/Changing_Church_Stories_of_Liberating_Ministers

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our Bible contains lots more images and metaphors for God than the official, orthodox Trinitarian formula,” Rev. Dr. Rebecca Kiser proclaims in a powerful sermon on Holy Wisdom. “God is indefinable in human thought and language, so we end up using many names to try and capture the hugeness, the awesome enormity, the variety of experiences that make up our story with God. In the text we read from Proverbs on the figure of Wisdom, you’ll notice in your Bibles that the “W” is capitalized as a name, and Wisdom is pictured as a woman calling out to people to come to her and find Wisdom. We call several books of the Protestant Old Testament the Wisdom books—Job, Psalms, Proverbs. And in the Catholic Bible there is also a book called the Wisdom of Solomon. People who study world religions often talk about the ‘wisdom traditions’ within various religious traditions. The figure of Woman Wisdom, or Lady Wisdom—or in Greek, Sophia—is a part of this. Several folks who have studied Holy Wisdom in both Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, where there are more chapters about Her, have noticed a great correlation between what is said of Her and what is said of Christ, especially in the book of John. Much of what is said in John’s prologue about the Word was taken from what is said in other places about Holy Wisdom. It’s neat to read about Holy Wisdom on Trinity Sunday, because this name emphasizes that God can’t be captured by any one definition, one experience, one perspective, one interpretation.”

Rev. Dr. Kiser is not only the first woman pastor of First Presbyterian Church in West Plains, Missouri, but the first woman pastor in the city. She has been a trailblazer for many years.

When she was a student at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Becky worked on a task force that published an inclusive language worship resource for use in the chapel. “We edited all of our hymnals,” she says. “Inclusive language about people was a given by that time, but inclusive language about God was the cutting edge. At one point I got into a really big discussion with a systematic theology professor about language for God. We were trying to say ‘Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer,’ and he just went ballistic. He got really red-faced and said that if you weren’t baptized in the name of the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,’ those exact words, it was not a Christian baptism and didn’t count. There was some real resistance to the language change. Some people were really invested in the maleness of the language. Words have power.”

When she was healing from the traumatic loss of a child, Becky expanded her divine images to include the feminine. In an article published in Update: Newsletter of the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, Becky tells the story of the transformation that took place in her divine images after Emma’s death. “As I began sorting out and dealing with my anger and grief, two images of God in the feminine arose in my prayer and became agents of healing and restoration. This was surprising to me because, at the time, I was not comfortable using feminine pronouns or imaging God in the feminine.”

One of the Divine Feminine images was “God of the Casserole.” Becky writes: “I had talked of seeing God in the people who came to be with us, bringing dinners and fruit baskets and desserts as well as their love and care. Yet I had difficulty accepting this image or feeling any comfort from it. Suddenly, I remembered that old picture from my Sunday school days, where Jesus is standing at the heart’s door and knocking—only when I pictured it now, Jesus was carrying a covered casserole. The image captured me, so I decided to sculpt it. The form that emerged from under my hands was a woman, like so many of the people who had come to my door. She carried a 9×13 pan of either lasagna or chicken and rice; I couldn’t decide. She became a focal point of all my ambivalent feelings, for I felt gratitude and comfort from her presence at the same time that I experienced a raging anger that she didn’t do more. I raged at her, and still she stayed, her face concerned, her gift in her hand. She was not put off by my anger; she didn’t take her gifts and go home. I came finally to realize that she is who she is, and the anger was mine, the expectations were mine, the desires for protection and security were mine, the disappointment that came from a false image of God was mine. She is who she has always been: compassionate, strong, present, passionate, truth, connected from the womb, unafraid, encompassing, mysterious.”

“Encountering God this way made me reevaluate the notion of God as beyond gender and see God as encompassing both genders—gender-full rather than genderless. I look on the growth of spirit and creativity I have experienced as gifts from my daughter Emma and think it is somehow appropriate that it was she who, through her brief time on earth, introduced me to the Great Mother in God.”

Rev. Kiser attended the first Re-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis and comments on its power: “The language throughout the whole conference was inclusive. We could sing without changing words under our breath, and they called Christ ‘Sophia.’ They used the name ‘Christ-Sophia,’ and they called God ‘She’ for the whole three days. It was delightful!”

Even though she got flak and lost job opportunities for attending this conference, Rev. Kiser celebrates this transforming experience. “For the first time, I heard God addressed in female pronouns for three days straight, in worship and in sermon and by folks on the podium. It was a turning point in my own appreciation of the feminine, as well as a turning point in claiming my own point of view as I returned to a presbytery holding hearings and town meetings about a conference they considered heresy and even blasphemy.”

Rev. Kiser laments that the church does not lead the way on social justice issues. “I hate it that the church is often the last to see something that seems to me so obviously a Christian expression. We’re the last ones to get on the bandwagon. And then people call us ‘politically correct,’ like it’s not really a theological issue. It was hard at first to give my experience of discrimination as a woman the same kind of credence I’d been giving the experience of African Americans in our country. That was an obvious issue to me in the country and the world, but to apply that to women was hard. Once I got past that and began to see the women’s issue as a similar thing, suddenly all these other groups demanded my empathy as well—LGBT persons, other minorities, battered women, disabled people. It opened up a sensitivity to all kinds of minority positions. I’d like the church to be pro-active on some justice issue. I wish we’d taken the lead on the gay and lesbian issue. Our churches are really a part of our culture, and we don’t stand apart and criticize it really well or speak God’s word to it. Learning to talk feminist or womanist theology opens up a lot of doors.”

As the first woman pastor in West Plains, Rev. Kiser believes her very presence invites change. “I think it challenges people’s mindsets just to see a woman up front,” she says. “And I think of it as giving little girls more options. If they’ve only seen male pastors, suddenly they’re seeing a female pastor, and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I could be one of those!’”

To read more of Rev. Dr. Rebecca Kiser’s story, see: https://wipfandstock.com/store/Changing_Church_Stories_of_Liberating_Ministers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creating a Path Toward Liberation!

 

O Spirit-Sophia…

 

We long to begin a spirituality of new-found wholeness.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We thirst for fulfillment in new ways.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We need to believe that we are made in the image of God.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We hunger for more than masculine language during the holy hour.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We demand that the voices of women be heard in the church and everywhere.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We want to break free from the chains of patriarchy.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

We yearn for a society free of us versus them, male versus female, white versus black, straight versus gay.

 

Guide us toward liberation.

 

O Sophia, Justice must be done

 

 O Sophia, Lover of all creation,

You have called us to a time of Jubilee.

By your power, may we hear your call.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

O Sophia, Relatedness of the cosmos,

You have created us as inter-dependent creatures.

By your power, may we awaken to our inherent connectedness.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 O Sophia, Source of all life,

You have given us the gift of creativity.

By your power, may we use our creativity for good.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

O Sophia, River of life,

You have quenched our thirst with abundant resources.

By your power, may we quench every creatures’ thirst.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

O Sophia, Co-Creator of the universe,

You have blessed us with freedom.

By your power, may we free the oppressed in the land.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

O Sophia, Spirit of all that lives,

You have shown us the way of righteousness.

By your power, may we live righteously in every breath.

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

Cause justice must be done!

 

(Sound noisemakers)

 

Cause justice must be done!

A New Journey

 

As we embark on this journey,

we begin our new lives.

The dawn breaks,

and hope ignites for restoration.

 

We reflect on our old lives and begin anew.

The sun rises,

And our spirits connect with all.

 

Gathering the water of life,

we wipe away our tears.

We embark on a new journey

with the Sophia of life we hold dear.

 

Seated in a circle with women and men in a beautiful room with stained glass windows at Grace United Methodist Church, Christina Cavener leads this liberating liturgy which she has created. She cleaned up and transformed this room that was not being used at the church. She also transforms Christian liturgy with her creative Feminine Divine Worship services.

Christina’s personal experience contributed to her passion for including female divine imagery in worship. “Growing up in a Presbyterian church with exclusive male language for God caused me to internalize that I was less holy than men,” she says. “I also felt that God could not quite identify with my experiences, and so I became increasingly distant from the God I knew. This inflicted so much pain on my spirituality that I began to doubt the mere existence of God.”

Remaining active in church as an undergraduate at Texas Woman’s University, Christina served as assistant youth director at First United Methodist Church in Rockwall, Texas, and as publicity director for the Denton Wesley Foundation. After completing her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and women’s studies, she served as a missionary in the Congo from August of 2008 to May of 2009. During these months, her spiritual struggles intensified.

“In a desperate attempt to revive my spirituality and discover the God in whom I yearned to believe, I enrolled at Southern Methodist University Perkins School of Theology. It was during this academic journey that I was able to reconcile my theology with my experiences. God was no longer a distant, domineering Father who watched my every move, but a loving liberator of the oppressed in whom we live and move and have our being. God is Sophia, the Wisdom of the cosmos who seeks justice and indwells in all of creation.”

In August of 2009 when she began studying at Perkins School of Theology, Christina joined the staff of Grace United Methodist Church. In May of 2011, she completed her Master of Theological Studies degree with a certificate in women’s studies. In October of 2011, she initiated the Feminine Divine Worship services at the church.

To be true to biblical revelation, Christina believes it is vital to include female divine language and symbolism in the church. “There has not always been exclusive language for the Divine. The Bible is chock-full of various names and images—both feminine and masculine—for God that have been used in worship. Sexism has caused society to eradicate or simply ignore the biblical use of feminine images and names for God historically and into the present.”

Christina says that exclusively masculine imagery limits and distorts the nature of the Divine. “Referring to the Divine exclusively as male creates a confinement of God’s identity. When we label the Divine exclusively as ‘Father,’ ‘King,’ or ‘Lord,’ we limit the ways we can express the multiplicity that God really is. The more names we can use to describe the Divine, the further we are from idolatry. I agree with Mary Daly when she states, ‘If God is male, then male is God.’ If we only refer to God as male, then we are worshipping males. Instead, we should create as many names and images as we can conceive, including the Divine Feminine, to describe a multifaceted God beyond our linguistic comprehension.”

Working to expand understanding and experience of the Divine, Christina began with her youth ministry. She comments: “As a youth minister, I believe it is imperative that teenagers see themselves in the image of God. Youth experience a lot of difficulties in being comfortable with their identities. They are often ostracized, judged for their appearances, or excluded. Therefore, it is important for them to know that they are beloved creations of the Divine. This is why I began to write my own curriculum and worship services that include the Feminine Divine among other names for God.”

Then Christina began creating Feminine Divine Worship services for adults at Grace United Methodist and for others in the community. Although Christina says that Grace United Methodist is her “favorite church” in Dallas, she saw a need that was not being fulfilled through the traditional services of the church. In order to include women and men who are active in churches on Sunday morning, she schedules the Feminine Divine Worship services on Saturday morning.

Participants have affirmed the life-changing power of these services. “People do not always realize they need something different for their spirituality until they experience it,” Christina says. “Even though we may have a logical understanding that God is not a giant male living in the distant heavens, we do not realize the effect ritual has on our spirituality. Worship forms us and we embody it in our daily lives.”

“Exclusive male language in worship is the reason so many women feel less than holy or unable to identify with God. If God is male, then God cannot possibly understand me. If God is a domineering Father who punishes, then he is no different from my abusive dad. Worshiping the Feminine Divine opens the door for healing because it allows participants to experience what exclusive male language cannot offer: liberation from a male-dominated tradition and society.”

The Feminine Divine Worship services are bringing change to the church as well as to individual participants. Christina notes “small valuable improvements” in the worship services of Grace United Methodist Church. “The call to worship rarely refers to God as ‘Father’ or ‘Lord.’ The Senior Pastor now avoids male names for God. There are more conversations about why inclusive language is important. The people who do attend the Feminine Divine Worship services see them as integral to the church’s ministry.”

Christina acknowledges the risk she is taking by creating rituals that include female divine language and symbolism. “By simply using the Feminine Divine in ritual and conversation within the institution of the United Methodist Church, I am taking a risk. Institutions do not tolerate deviations from rules and doctrine without consequence.”

However, expansive liturgy is worth the risk to Christina because she believes it will bring liberating transformation not only to the church but to the wider culture. Including the Divine Feminine will contribute to “less sexualized and objectified images of women and girls” in the culture so that we all can claim our power in the image of the Divine.

Through a variety of ministries, Christina has been working to empower people. As a missionary, she has lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for ten months, and has traveled to Haiti, Zambia, Cameroon, South Africa, Ireland, and Mexico to empower communities all over the globe. As an advocate, she serves as a trained Texas Woman’s University and Southern Methodist University ally to the LGBTIQ community and as a sexual assault advocate to survivors of violence.

Christina expresses an inspiring, hopeful vision for the future of the Divine Feminine in the church. “My vision is that there will no longer be any hesitancy to use the Divine Feminine during the ‘holy hour.’ When we can understand that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, then we will leave those hierarchies at the door. Sexism will no longer hinder our communities from seeing God in her fullest: as a multifaceted God who cannot be confined by our limited notions of God as exclusively male.”

Christina Cavener contributes to making this vision reality through her creative, prophetic ministry.