A womanist church has great power to transform church and society, primarily because womanist theology centers the experiences of Black women while working for the survival and wholeness of all people and all creation. Experiences of the triple oppression of racism, sexism, and classism give Black women an epistemological insight into recognizing injustice and creating solutions that benefit all. The Gathering is unique, the only church founded and identified as “womanist,” applying womanist theology to the full life and worship of a church. The Gathering, a womanist faith community in Dallas, Texas, welcomes all people to partner in pursuing racial equity, LGBTQ equality, and dismantling PMS (patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism), following Jesus in liberating the oppressed and lifting up the marginalized. The Gathering, A Womanist Church tells the story of the birth and ongoing development of a womanist faith community. This book includes personal narratives of people transformed in this community, womanist co-pastors’ sermons informed by their experiences and those of other Black women, and litanies for womanist worship.
Building Bridges: Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Friends
Letha Dawson Scanzoni changed the landscape of American evangelicalism through her groundbreaking work on the gospel-based intersection of gender and LGBTQ justice. She coauthored two of the first books that support women’s equality and LGBTQ rights with the Bible: All We’re Meant to Be and Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? In all her work Letha applies the liberating message of Jesus to women and to people who have been marginalized by church and society because of sexual orientation. Building Bridges combines an exploration of the life and work of Letha Dawson Scanzoni with stories of people she continues to empower through her writing and the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus-Christian Feminism Today, an organization she cofounded. This book illustrates her growing influence as she continues her prophetic collaboration with new generations. In addition, it provides resources for churches as they build bridges for their ministries of liberation, justice, and peace.
Why are most churches still segregated by race and culture? Is it possible to build intercultural ministries today? What are the challenges of creating and maintaining these ministries? How do intercultural churches give equal power and privilege to each culture? How do they avoid assimilating minority cultures into dominant cultures? Intercultural Ministryexplores these questions and more with chapters from a racially and denominationally diverse group of pastors, theologians, and teachers who reflect on their experiences and experiments in intercultural churches and other ministries. Contributors include Peter Ahn, Amy Butler, Brad Braxton, Brandon Green, Daniel Hill, Angie Hong, Karen Oliveto, Carlos Ruiz, Sheila Sholes-Ross, Christine Smith, and more.
This book includes the stories of ministers and laypeople driving foundational Christian theological change, restoring sacred value to women and girls, transforming faith communities and the wider culture. In a world filled with injustice and violence, people long for a new sacred symbolism to inspire transformation. This yearning includes a widespread hunger for female images of Deity—Wisdom, Ruah, Mother Hen, Mother Eagle, God-She, and more—in church life and worship to restore gender-balance in order to bring wholeness, justice, and peace.
She Lives! Sophia Wisdom Works in the World presents inspiring narratives of clergy and laypeople who are changing the institutional church and society by reclaiming biblical female divine names and images in Christian theology and worship. Their stories reveal the connection between including multicultural female divine images in worship and justice in human relationships, illustrating Wisdom’s works such as gender equality, racial equality, marriage equality, economic justice, care of creation, nonviolence, interfaith collaboration, expanding spiritual experience, and changing hierarchies into circles. This book also provides creative expansive, gender-balanced worship resources and locations of feminist emancipatory faith communities in the United States and Canada.
She Lives! invites readers to join the adventure of creating rituals that include the Female Divine and to join communities that celebrate Her, affirming the sacred value of all people and all creation.
Through the fascinating stories of pioneering ministers, this book reveals a unique picture of progressive changes occurring in the Christian tradition. Meeting challenges and overcoming obstacles, these twelve diverse ministers are changing the church as they take prophetic stands on gender, race, interfaith cooperation, ecology, sexual orientation, economic opportunity, and other social justice issues. Believing in the power of sacred symbolism to shape social reality and to provide a foundation for justice and freedom for all people, these ministers lead worship with inclusive language and imagery for humanity and divinity. They include multicultural female and male divine images in their faith communities. Their stories affirm the connection between this expansive theology and an ethic of justice and equality in human relationships. In working from within to change the church, these ministers have risked censure by denominational authorities, loss of opportunities for promotion to larger congregations or to prestigious denominational positions, and even loss of their jobs. They have found creative ways to balance advocating for change and working to support the church, using their positions as ordained clergy to bring liberating change to the church and the wider culture.
Seeking Wisdom: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Public Occasions
Seeking Wisdom: Inclusive Blessings and Prayers for Public Occasions provides clergy and laypersons with a unique resource to use in community settings, healthcare institutions, and faith communities. These blessings and prayers respect people from diverse religious traditions and use gender-inclusive language for humanity and divinity. Predominant themes are peace, justice, healing, hope, liberation, partnership in relationships, and caring for the earth. This collection includes blessings for such events as community Thanksgiving services, Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations, Women’s History Month celebrations, Holocaust Remembrance Day services, breast cancer survivors celebrations, transplant survivors celebrations, chapel dedications, memorial services, lay ministers dedications, and baby dedications. This book also includes pastoral prayers, invocations, calls to worship, offertory prayers, benedictions, a lament for violence against women and girls, and a lament for other forms of injustice. Seeking Wisdom includes more than two hundred inclusive, interfaith blessings and prayers for public occasions. These blessings and prayers can be adapted or combined to fit specific occasions, providing a valuable resource for clergy and laypersons.
Breaking Free: The Story of a Feminist Baptist Minister
Jann Aldredge-Clanton didn’t start out as a reformer. When she was a pre-teen, she almost starved herself to death trying to fit into the culture’s feminine mold. In high school she felt inadequate because she never won a beauty crown, even though she graduated at the top of her class. Slowly, she began waking up to her own voice, and became one of the first women ever to be ordained as a Baptist minister in the South.
It has not been an easy road. She almost lost her job as a professor at a Baptist university because she refused to sign a fundamentalist statement of beliefs. She was labeled a “heretic” for calling God “She” and “Mother.” Others said she couldn’t be an ordained minister because it would be “unbiblical.” The controversy over women’s roles in religion is just another example of the glass ceiling women too often face in American society.
Called “Waco’s Give ‘Em Hell Minister” for her outspoken opinions and action on social issues, Jann tells in Breaking Free how she discovered her mission of freeing people, including herself, from sexism and other injustices. Breaking Free is a remarkable memoir that shows the liberating power of faith combined with feminism. It will inspire readers of all ages to find the freedom to become all God created them to be.
Few topics within Christianity have generated as much controversy and debate as the topic of the gender language used to speak of God. In Whose Image? God and Gender is a clear and accessible summary of theological, biblical, ecclesiastical, and anthropological issues. The author gives biblical, theological, and historical support for the inclusion of female images of God. She demonstrates how reclaiming biblical divine female images, and including them along with male and non-gender images in worship, contributes to healing women, men, children, and the earth.
Aldredge-Clanton calls for a fuller reading of the Bible and Christian tradition, and she effectively demonstrates ways to do this. She also points out ways that the sexism of the Christian tradition has explicitly contradicted the revealed word of God and suggests ways to bring change. This book also looks at how an exclusively male imaging of God is not only limiting for women, but for men as well. When there is a retrenchment on the part of some to belittle these matters as mere “word games,” this book clarifies the fact that these are central and vital issues for the Christian church.
In Search of the Christ-Sophia: An Inclusive Christology for Liberating Christians
This book presents powerful biblical and theological support for a Divine Feminine image buried in Christianity. In Search of the Christ-Sophia resurrects Sophia (Wisdom) and connects Her to Jesus Christ. This book presents an inclusive christology based on the biblical parallel between Christ and Sophia (Wisdom) that will help Christians expand their horizons and rethink traditional beliefs.
In Search of the Christ-Sophia combines theological scholarship with pastoral sensitivity to demonstrate that a christology inclusive of both female and male is vital to liberation and equality. Aldredge-Clanton uncovers the New Testament links between Christ and Wisdom (Sophia), a female symbol of Deity in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). She applies the theology of Christ-Sophia to contemporary spirituality, social justice ministry, and the restructuring of the Christian community. The final chapter contains more than a dozen services, prayers, litanies, reflections, and songs that can be used for personal prayer or communal worship. It also explains how an inclusive worship community can focus on the liberating image of Christ-Sophia.
With a clear and concise style accessible to general readers as well as to theology students, In Search of the Christ-Sophia creates a challenging new agenda for all Christians and their churches.
Praying with Christ-Sophia: Services for Healing and Renewal
This book offers a collection of worship services to bring healing and renewal to both individuals and faith communities. The services focus on Christ-Sophia, a symbol drawn from Hebrew and Christian Scripture and tradition that embraces new possibilities for wholeness and shared responsibility. This symbol is built on the foundation of the inclusive christology the author developed in her book In Search of the Christ-Sophia, and is intended to overcome dualisms and make equal connections between female and male.
The rituals in Praying with Christ-Sophia focus on such themes as justice, relationship, peace, freedom, and healing to address the concerns of contemporary women and men. The inclusive language and images seek to convert the imagination to view divinity and humanity in a balanced, holistic perspective, one that benefits all people. These rituals contribute to justice by giving equal value to women and men of all races, sexual orientation, and abilities.
Over 35 original texts set to standard Christian hymn tunes are featured. These songs offer participants an opportunity to express their spirituality and human needs through egalitarian words sung to familiar tunes.
This book provides inclusive materials for the religious education of children in the church and in the home. The stories, pictures, songs, prayers, and other resources in this collection teach children to apply a theology of inclusiveness to their everyday experiences. Illustrations and language are inclusive in gender and race.
The stories, pictures, songs, prayers, and activities in this collection will help teachers and parents instill in children the theological truth that girls and boys of all races and abilities are created in the divine image, and thus have equal value. Through a balance of male, female, and non-gender-specific pictures and references to God, the resources in this book teach that God includes and transcends female and male. All language for people is inclusive as well. Stories highlight girls as well as boys, female as well as male role models of different races. Biblical examples include as many women as men. These materials tell and show children that God is for girls as much as for boys and that God is for children of all races and abilities. The hope is that this truth will become deeply ingrained in the minds and emotions of children.
The resources in God, a Word for Girls and Boys can be used in Sunday School classes, in Bible school classes, in day-care centers, in separate services for children (children?s church), or as part of Sunday morning worship services. Given prominence in worship services, they can be powerful teaching tools for children and adults alike. Focusing on children in a worship service gives them a feeling of importance as a vital part of the church community. The children’s sermon thus becomes a “teachable moment” with great potential for permanent influence on thought and behavior.
God, A Word for Girls and Boys Coloring Book
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Few moments are as devastating as hearing a diagnosis of cancer. Unfortunately, one out of three Americans will hear this diagnosis at some point in their lives. In Counseling People with Cancer Jann Aldredge-Clanton brings a perspective from a theology of hope to people struggling with cancer. Aldredge-Clanton believes that in the midst of a frightening illness, our spiritual task is to reunderstand our life story in light of the sacred story of God’s love in the world. She explores the images of God held by cancer patients and finds ways to connect their stories to rich and renewing sacred stories.
