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Worship Service Honors Women's Ministries

Episcopal News Service. September 7, 1994 [94149]

Barbara Ogilby, Director of Communication in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, Virginia Nagel, Editor of The Deaf Episcopalian

More than 6,000 people attending the 71st General Convention of the Episcopal Church flowed into the Hoosier Dome on Sunday morning, August 28, to celebrate the Eucharist and honor the ministries of lay and ordained women. In a setting more commonly used for football and basketball games, bishops, deputies, and visitors worshiped God in a service that was both traditional and innovative.

Text for the liturgy was a combination of the Rite 2 service from the Book of Common Prayer and Supplemental Liturgical Texts that include the phrase, "You made us in your image, male and female," and compare the love of God for humanity to a mother's love for her children.

A highlight of the service was the Ingathering of the United Thank Offering, founded by Ida Soule in 1889 to raise money for missionary work. Diocesan representatives presented their offerings to Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, celebrant at the Eucharist.

A Litany of Women's Ministries, written for the service by the Rev. Dr. Ruth A. Meyers, celebrated the work of Soule and other women, known and unknown, who were "steadfast in the faith, bearing witness to God's love." Among the women remembered were Pocahontas, one of the first Native Americans converted to the Anglican Church; Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, "liberators and prophets" in the struggle of African-Americans for freedom; the 11 women deacons ordained to the priesthood in Philadelphia in 1974; women who serve on parish altar guilds and teach Sunday school; and women working in business, government and the arts.

Participants in the service honored in the litany included the concelebrants, the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris of Massachusetts, first women bishop in the Anglican Communion; and the Very Rev. Martha Horne of Virginia Theological Seminary, first dean and president of an Episcopal seminary. Also recognized was the preacher for the service, Pamela Chinnis, president of the House of Deputies.

Chinnis addresses women's challenges

In her sermon, Chinnis celebrated the long and varied ministries of women and addressed the issue of divisiveness within the church. She presented a balanced exposition of the three Scripture readings for the day, offering a closely reasoned comparison of the teaching of Jesus with the seemingly revolutionary understanding of the Scriptures which has led to the extraordinary changes of the status of women in the Episcopal Church. She emphasized that, even today, many feel caught between "the decisiveness of law and the adaptability of love."

Chinnis noted that many people in the church today worry that "we may be adding to, or taking away," from the commandments of the Lord, contrary to the charge Moses gave to the Israelites on their journey. But Jesus, she said, "neither made a god of tradition nor dismissed it as irrelevant," but rather "used the whole of tradition as a guide for living in the here and now." For us today as for Jesus, said Chinnis, this means that we must look below the surface of apparent conflicts for the core meaning, the point of unity, between opposites which seem irreconcilable. The emergence of women from the "shadows of institutional life" to join in the full life and ministry of the church is a case in point, she said.

Chinnis labeled the conflict over the role of women in the church as "deep and long-lasting," noting that for centuries the church has been nurtured by "a near-invisible female workforce" doing much of the real work under the direction of male clergy and vestrymen. "Even the money often came from women," she said, "beginning with those who provided for Jesus and his companions out of their own means."

Chinnis added that for 50 years, laywomen were denied seats in the House of Deputies, a condition which finally ended in 1970 when the Constitution of the Episcopal Church was changed to permit them to be seated. Six years later, the General Convention authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate.

"We are on the way," she said, "but we have not yet arrived."