In this week’s episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor we are talking about “blocked callings.” We are continuing our conversation with Bonnie Miller-McLemore. She is the author of the recent book Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. I enjoyed interviewing Bonnie recently. In this episode you’ll hear her read a little from her book.
In Part I of our conversation we talked about “missed callings,” which can arise from an abundance of opportunities. Now in Part II, we discuss blocked callings. They are the vocations that feel clear and compelling, yet outside sources prevent or thwart the call.
What is your experience of feeling blocked in your vocation?
Women’s Herstory Month
March 6 to 8, I attended and presented preliminary findings at the “Women and Religious Leadership Symposium” at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Friends and colleagues old and new inspired me with their work. All the presenters share an interest in changes, growth, and setbacks experienced by women in religious leadership. We heard a vast array of research considering women and lgbtiqa+ leaders from Methodists to Muslims, Buddhists to Baptists, and Catholic priests to Jewish rabbis.
Until about 60 years ago, there was very little to talk about in terms of official leadership. Women were the mainstay of religious groups, but they rarely had official authority or recognized roles as the leaders in religion in America or many other places around the world. As I’ve acknowledged before, of course, there were notable exceptions throughout history of women’s official and unofficial, yet powerful, leadership of religious bodies.
Blocked Callings
I’ve written a lot about Southern Baptist women and their callings in the book Anatomy of a Schism and other articles such as “Living Testaments: How Catholic and Baptist Women in Ministry Both Judge and Renew the Church.” In Anatomy of a Schism, I tell the stories of five women who were called to ministry in Baptist life. They faced an unbelievable array of blockades to their callings.
For example when they responded to God’s call, Anna, Martha, Joanna, Rebecca, and Chloe prepared themselves for ministry. Yet numerous people and organizations attempted to block their callings. Seminary professors and administrators devalued their previous experience, saying it didn’t matter. Male pastors and preachers told women, you are mistaken about your calling. Parents said, you can be anything you want. But then balked when their daughters said, I want to be a minister. Church members said, Too bad you’ll never be ordained. And “seminary wives” said, Isn’t your husband the one called to ministry?
Every Christian denomination has at least a book’s worth of stories about women’s ordination (and resistance) over the last 50 years. In one evening session we watched the 2024 documentary, “The Philadelphia 11.” This is the story of the first women priests and their “illegal ordinations“ in the Episcopal Church. The documentary is excellent, and we had the pleasure of hearing from the director Margo Guernsey reflect on her experience of making the film.
The documentary will air during Women’s History Month on PBS. Check the times and channels here.
For Baptists women’s ordination, among other issues, precipitated, schism, and permanently split in the denomination. For the Episcopal Church, the advice of Pauli Murray held. She said “Don’t leave the denomination. Make them put you out.“ Murray was the first African American woman to be ordained and Episcopal priest in 1977, just six months after the church voted to adopt women’s ordination as priests and bishops.
Blocked Callings During the Multiple Pandemics
In my symposium presentation, I asked this question. Did women return to congregational leadership, chaplaincy, and ministry-related work in the years following the shutdowns of 2020?
Five years ago (this week!), the country and the world entered a period of shutting down. Students home from school. Adults began working from home. We saw closed stores, businesses, and churches. We needed to save lives. Yet we lost so much. And women felt the brunt of these disruptions.
Globally 54 million women left the workforce. Many clergywomen were among them. Five years later my question and curiosity is whether women experienced net gains or losses to the overall leadership numbers. Next week I will share some of the data I discovered and a bit of analysis.
And I’ll be contributing a chapter to an edited volume along with other presenters. In that piece, I will share stories of five women from my various studies of ministers. All of them left the work of ministry in 2020 or 2021. Only three have returned to ministry jobs thus far.
What was the impact of Covid-19 and the multiple related pandemics on your ministry, calling, and life?
