We were parishioners of the Anglican church when I was growing up, but the United Church was important to me in a key way. Margaret Bain was the minister there. I saw her regularly around town: at school functions, Girl Guides, Remembrance Day services, and other public places where religious leaders in those days were invited to take part.
I spent the year that I turned 15 bargaining with God about not wanting to be an Anglican priest. I had, as a thoroughly Type A teenager, thought I had my path ahead already mapped out, and it didn’t include anything about going to seminary or preaching in pulpits. I think back to how hard it was for me to be willing to hear God’s call in my life, and how much patience God had to deploy with me (sometimes the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable must be God), and yet what wasn’t part of my resistance was the worry that ministry wasn’t something that women do. The Anglican Church has been ordaining women longer than I have been alive. That fact, combined with Bain’s witness, meant that I grew up seeing women in ministry as thoroughly normalized.
As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women this November, I have been listening to stories and considering my own. For women who blazed the trail in those first decades of women’s ordination, and for those who grew up in parts of the church where women aren’t in leadership, considering a vocation looked a lot different than it did for me. Women not only had to contend with the inconvenience of having their lives called onto a path that they themselves didn’t imagine, but then they had to push back against the systemic gaslighting that told them that ordaining women isn’t something that is done. They had to figure out how to trust God was speaking to them when at every turn they were told that God doesn’t speak that way.
In her piece about this upcoming anniversary, Canon Margaret Murray posed these two questions to us: Are we making a different priesthood together? Is priesthood evolving?
In answering the first question, I would want to state plainly that I don’t believe women are naturally more collaborative, compassionate, or nurturing than men just by virtue of our being women. Women are people, and we’re all different. It’s also easy to imagine the ordination of women made the priesthood more just. I believe with all my heart that God is deeply invested in making this world more just for all. But I see our celebration of this milestone as being about something more basic. It’s about faith. The women who led the way listened to how God was speaking into their lives and trusted what they heard God saying. They centered their relationship with God in defiance of what religious leaders and institutions said and saw. They invited not just women, but the whole church, to pay attention in a new and different way to how God might be at work in us. We are making a braver, and arguably more dangerous, priesthood together because we are bearing witness to the world in a powerful way that God speaks into our lives–sometimes in ways that override human-made institutions–and that together we can learn to listen and to trust.
The second question leads me to a note of sadness and caution. I have been ordained for twenty-two years, now seeing the children that I raised while in full-time ministry heading off to post-secondary school. I am still one of the younger female priests in our diocese, and we have seen a steady dropping-off of women’s ordinations in Niagara. I know how hard it was for me to accept that this was the direction I was meant to go. I know how important Bain’s and others’ witness was to me, and how much God had to niggle at me nonetheless. I trust that God continues to speak and to call into a whole variety of different kinds of lives, but we might need to learn to be a lot more intentional in how the church, together, listens. More importantly, the church must be willing to ask hard questions about systemic realities that might be preventing people, and particularly preventing women, from being able to trust that the niggling of God is real and that this vocation is for them too.
The priesthood is always evolving. It is evolving because God is living, and each one of us who has lifted up and embodied that priesthood has reflected in a unique way how God is alive in us and the people we serve. We want to make sure, together—we must do this together—that we are intentional about evolving in ways that bring us closer to the living God and attentive to how we make it possible for many different kinds of people– including women, and including young women –to hear and trust God’s call.
The Call and the Persistence: 50 Years of the Ordination of Women
We were parishioners of the Anglican church when I was growing up, but the United Church was important to me in a key way. Margaret Bain was the minister there. I saw her regularly around town: at school functions, Girl Guides, Remembrance Day services, and other public places where religious leaders in those days were invited to take part.
I spent the year that I turned 15 bargaining with God about not wanting to be an Anglican priest. I had, as a thoroughly Type A teenager, thought I had my path ahead already mapped out, and it didn’t include anything about going to seminary or preaching in pulpits. I think back to how hard it was for me to be willing to hear God’s call in my life, and how much patience God had to deploy with me (sometimes the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable must be God), and yet what wasn’t part of my resistance was the worry that ministry wasn’t something that women do. The Anglican Church has been ordaining women longer than I have been alive. That fact, combined with Bain’s witness, meant that I grew up seeing women in ministry as thoroughly normalized.
As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women this November, I have been listening to stories and considering my own. For women who blazed the trail in those first decades of women’s ordination, and for those who grew up in parts of the church where women aren’t in leadership, considering a vocation looked a lot different than it did for me. Women not only had to contend with the inconvenience of having their lives called onto a path that they themselves didn’t imagine, but then they had to push back against the systemic gaslighting that told them that ordaining women isn’t something that is done. They had to figure out how to trust God was speaking to them when at every turn they were told that God doesn’t speak that way.
In her piece about this upcoming anniversary, Canon Margaret Murray posed these two questions to us: Are we making a different priesthood together? Is priesthood evolving?
In answering the first question, I would want to state plainly that I don’t believe women are naturally more collaborative, compassionate, or nurturing than men just by virtue of our being women. Women are people, and we’re all different. It’s also easy to imagine the ordination of women made the priesthood more just. I believe with all my heart that God is deeply invested in making this world more just for all. But I see our celebration of this milestone as being about something more basic. It’s about faith. The women who led the way listened to how God was speaking into their lives and trusted what they heard God saying. They centered their relationship with God in defiance of what religious leaders and institutions said and saw. They invited not just women, but the whole church, to pay attention in a new and different way to how God might be at work in us. We are making a braver, and arguably more dangerous, priesthood together because we are bearing witness to the world in a powerful way that God speaks into our lives–sometimes in ways that override human-made institutions–and that together we can learn to listen and to trust.
The second question leads me to a note of sadness and caution. I have been ordained for twenty-two years, now seeing the children that I raised while in full-time ministry heading off to post-secondary school. I am still one of the younger female priests in our diocese, and we have seen a steady dropping-off of women’s ordinations in Niagara. I know how hard it was for me to accept that this was the direction I was meant to go. I know how important Bain’s and others’ witness was to me, and how much God had to niggle at me nonetheless. I trust that God continues to speak and to call into a whole variety of different kinds of lives, but we might need to learn to be a lot more intentional in how the church, together, listens. More importantly, the church must be willing to ask hard questions about systemic realities that might be preventing people, and particularly preventing women, from being able to trust that the niggling of God is real and that this vocation is for them too.
The priesthood is always evolving. It is evolving because God is living, and each one of us who has lifted up and embodied that priesthood has reflected in a unique way how God is alive in us and the people we serve. We want to make sure, together—we must do this together—that we are intentional about evolving in ways that bring us closer to the living God and attentive to how we make it possible for many different kinds of people– including women, and including young women –to hear and trust God’s call.
The Reverend Canon Martha Tatarnic is the rector of St. George’s, St. Catharines. Her second book, Why Gather? The Hope & Promise of the Church, will be published in June 2022 by Church Publishing, and will be available at https://www.churchpublishing.org/whygather. The Living Diet is also available through Amazon, Church Publishing and the author.
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