Clergywomen Are Different

I wrote in 2018 about the blessings of having a female pastor. This morning I met with one of my new favorite female pastors and we compared notes on our experiences – mine as a retired clergywoman after 42 years of ordained ministry and she – a much younger clergywoman living in the thick of it while raising children, doing laundry, and serving her congregation faithfully. She loves her church. She loves her family. She is – frankly – quite wonderful. I’m also guessing that she is particularly exhausted, not just because she is a pastor, but because she is a female pastor.

When I was leaving parish ministry in 2011, I had been serving individual congregations for 27 years. In that time, I had also given birth and raised our kids, did the laundry, driven to soccer games, cooked dinners, etc. My spouse, fondly known as HH, is one of the only men I know who made professional sacrifices for his family in that he and I each worked part-time when our children were little. While his male friends were moving up the ladder, he was juggling all the things I was juggling. He is the best of men.

Nevertheless, when we were co-pastors, we started noticing something that seemed to have to do with our genders. My husband has an approachable personality. He is a good listener. He is empathetic. He is not judgey.

And yet, I was the go-to person for every personal situation our parishioners encountered whether it involved cancer, child protective services, stalkers, putting the cat down, or job changes. The walk between the Pastors’ Study we shared and the sanctuary was less than 50 steps. It took HH about 2 minutes to make that journey. It often took me 15 minutes – and that was because people stopped me along the way to share everything from news about a scary mammogram to an invitation to take a quick look at their honeymoon pictures.

Again: I was on my way into leading worship. There was no one who – in a million years – would have stopped HH on his way to the chancel to show him photos.

Are clergywomen considered Girlfriends? Church Moms? Sisters? I remember talking with a friend who happens to be a female attorney and she said that – yes – some clients talk with her like they are talking to a best friend. My internist back in Charlotte was a young mom and I asked her once if her patients talked with her differently than they talked with male doctors. For what it’s worth, she said yes.

Full disclosure: I’m making many assumptions and generalities here. Not all clergywomen are warm and approachable. Not all clergymen are taciturn and reserved. But just this week, I needed stitches in an ER after a dumb fall and every female doctor/nurse/tech and I had a friendly rapport that I wouldn’t have had with male medical staffers. The CAT Scan tech and I compared notes on the joy of never changing our earrings because we both wear gold hoops. The nurse (with 6+ piercings) overheard us and commented as we returned to my ER bay that the tiny backs on her earrings were so hard to remove. Another nurse comments on my cute top.

Does this happen – ever – with male people? Again, I am speaking in broad stereotypes.

So, aside from what it’s like for other female professionals, clergywomen are different. There are things I’ve dealt with in ministry that no clergyman I know has ever dealt with, and I know hundreds of male clergy. I might know a thousand male clergy. But every clergywoman I know has dealt with similar pastoral experiences. Not even Shonda Rimes could make up the stories that my sisters in ministry have experienced.

• Almost all of us have been in danger at some point. A scary guy once came into the church building where I was working and threatened me with a knife. I received death threats after a handful of church conflicts.
• Almost all of us have had men make comments about our clothing, our hair, our bodies. On the way out of worship one Sunday, a male parishioners said – out loud – that he had had a dream about me the night before and I was wearing an outfit that I don’t feel comfortable describing here.
• Almost all of us have dealt with an array of situations in a single morning that include quite a variety of life experiences. On a given day, I might counsel a woman whose being harassed by her supervisor, sit with a widow while she chose her husband’s casket, and pack up some housing items for a refugee family. To be clear, we had trained elders, deacons, and others who often accompanied me in these tasks. But often it was just me.

On my last day as a parish pastor, someone asked me what I would do that first week I was gone. And I said, with all seriousness, that I would probably sleep for the next month. I was exhausted. She responded by saying, “Why are you so tired?” And the answer is “Because – honestly – nobody really knows what we do all day.” Clergywomen carry the emotional weight of a congregation in ways that most clergymen do not.

In the course of my ministry, I have held the hand of a woman while she gave birth, been asked to offer my blessing before a man asked a woman to marry him (as if I’m the Father of the Bride and it’s the 1970s), calmed a sobbing military officer because her own commanding officer was threatening her if she didn’t have sex with him, mediated an unplanned encounter between married couple and his on-the-side girlfriend in somebody’s kitchen, sat beside a parishioner as he told his parents he was gay, helped a single mom review film footage of her potential child in an orphanage in Asia looking for possible health questions, sat in my study with a bipolar man off his meds while he told me he was “tired of being Jesus” and slicing his hands with a knife, dismantled an altar dedicated to me in the church’s front yard created by a man from one of the AA groups, made twenty lattes for female prisoners in a court-sanctioned NA meeting in the church parlor because they couldn’t leave the room to get their own coffees.

My breakfast companion today wondered out loud if people who staff male pastors are hired to support the male pastor, while people who staff female pastors are hired to support the mission of the church. Think about it.

Now it sounds like I’m complaining, but actually I have loved professional ministry. It’s simply exhausting.

In these first months after my retirement, I find myself sleeping more than I’ve ever slept in my life. I’m talking naps. I’m talking first coffee at 10 am. I shared this truth with my therapist wondering if it was unhealthy to be sleeping so much and she said, “Consider this: you are back from The Great War. Of course you’re exhausted.” I’m not sure that professional ministry was war, but there were battles, often involving how I use my time.

My hope is that this post generates some conversation. Are clergywomen different?

Image from Young Clergywomen International. Note: I’m using lots of binary gender words here. Please forgive me. In this context, I wasn’t sure how else to write this post.