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Email to FriendSt. Margaret's lecturer calls on Episcopal Church to 'redefine vocation'
Oppression must be confronted to achieve communion, transformation, Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook says
"For all the attempts to diminish or dismiss their vocations, women still managed to profoundly impact those around them precisely because their lives had so much meaning," said Kujawa-Holbrook, academic dean and the Suzanne Radley Hiatt Professor of Feminist Pastoral Theology and Church History at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her lecture, titled "Deeper Joy: Women and Vocation in the 20th Century Episcopal Church," stemmed from reflections on the research into vocational formation and women's history which resulted in a book of the same name that Kujawa-Holbrook recently co-edited.
"The study of women and vocation outside the institutional church, reminds us that indeed most Christians are not called to work for the church professionally. Rather, they are called…to exercise their ministry in daily life," Kujawa-Holbrook told more than 100 people in attendance.
Early in her lecture, she argued that one's vocation does not result from "God looking down from heaven and dropping a job on our heads." Instead, she said, "vocation is particular; our vocations are inextricably linked to our personal identities and social contexts" because "from the moment of our births, perhaps before, God calls forth in each of us a unique set of characteristics and possibilities."
"In Christian terms, vocation leads [one] to experience Christ's presence in our daily lives, relationships, institutions, and cultures," Kujawa-Holbrook said.
Many of the lay women who received training at schools such as St. Margaret's House, which the annual lecture honors, "believed at the most basic level that their vocation was to be Christians in the world, and they sought ways to earn a living which brought integration, meaning and wholeness," she said.
Kujawa-Holbrook also outlined the tension between lay and ordained vocation, especially in terms of lay women who have "felt marginalized and undervalued in their vocations, often more so since women's ordination became a reality," even though many lay women advocated for that reality.
She suggested that the church must "redefine vocation in a way that is inclusive of the priesthood of all believers."
Kujawa-Holbrook also argued that it is critical for those who are seriously concerned with women's leadership in the Episcopal Church to "address the impact of racism (among other forms of oppression) on our history, as well as on our future."
Her experience has taught her that "progressive, predominantly white, organizations" resist doing "the power analysis required to dismantle racism within the church."
"But unless the white leadership of the Episcopal Church, women and men, come to terms with the implicit and explicit racism faced by people of color, we will continue to fall short of our call to live in communion with each other, to be transformed for the sake of one another and the world," Kujawa-Holbrook said.
"Church structures built on models based on the subordination of women, people of color, and other marginalized people are deeply inscribed in our denomination, and most others, and cannot be changed simply through the election or appointment of a few individuals into traditional structures," she said. "The role of ordained leadership will need to be transformed away from inherited forms of clerical privilege into a new style of ministry committed to evoking the priesthood of all."
Kujawa-Holbrook is the author of numerous books and articles in the fields of church history, congregational development, and ministries with young people. Her recent works also include "Freedom Is A Dream: A Documentary History of Women in the Episcopal Church." She is working on two book-length projects for the Alban Institute: a book on congregations engaged in interfaith relationships, and a book on the ministry of the baptized in vital, small congregations.
Kujawa-Holbrook served as the chair of the Executive Council Committee on Anti-Racism for seven years. Most recently, she received the Adelaide Teague Case Award from the Episcopal Women's History Project at the General Convention in June 2006.
The annual St. Margaret's Lecture honors St. Margaret's House, a historic CDSP-associated training school for deaconesses and lay women, and supports the seminary's efforts to establish the St. Margaret's Chair for Women and Ministry. The chair will be the first faculty position of its kind in an Episcopal seminary or the Graduate Theological Union, the country's largest ecumenical and interfaith consortium of seminaries and graduate schools, of which CDSP is a founding member.
The chair will continue the vision of St. Margaret's House, begun in Berkeley in 1909, some 16 years after CDSP's founding, to train women for the church work of the day -- as deaconesses and lay church workers. The permanent faculty position will focus on women's lay and ordained leadership in the church.
The lecture series is sponsored by Every Voice Network.
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