What It Is Really Like Being a Female Pastor

 

Not My Plan

I love being a pastor.  I never thought I would.  This was not my plan.  Being ordained as a minister was going to be one step in the process to becoming a licensed Christian counselor.  But then —  I fell in love with pastoring people in the local church.

The church is not perfect— understatement of the decade.  Still, I find a sense of fulfillment in ministry that makes me feel complete.  So I choose to stay despite the many flaws of the institution and the human condition.

There have been some momentous milestones and heartbreaks through my nine years of serving as a full time pastor.  A few of those were caused by my gender.

Not Unique

Not unique to the institution of the church is the fact that women make up less than a quarter of its leadership and less than five percent of its senior leadership.  However, it is unique to the religious realms that you can be discriminated against because of your gender.  While there are federal laws regulating this issue in business sectors, in the private world of non-profit religious institutions (the original 501-C3) there are no such protections.  This fact alone creates an environment of vulnerability, harassment and oppression for all women. This causes significant structural issues that plague the church’s ability to see women as fully equal to our male counterparts.    

Then there are the day-to-day issues like, being the only full-time female pastor sitting at the table, in the meeting, at the planning session, etc.  The large UMC church where I served had, thankfully, other associate female clergy before, but this is not the case for many churches.

Day to Day

The hope that I carry of serving as a senior pastor at a large church seems like a dream because of my gender.  There has never been a woman as the senior pastor in any of the “top 10” churches in our conference ( The “top” churches are denoted by conference statistics on size, not by what I think God deems is “top”, Remember this is still an earthly institution).

Along with worries and anxieties about the future due to the systemic gender bias of the church, I’ve had some challenging one-on-one experiences because I’m a female pastor:

• I was cussed at and told off by a stranger after a worship service when they found out I was a pastor.  They quoted New Testament scripture at me and spit on the church aisle as they walked out yelling, “God shall NOT call a woman to preach to me!”

• When I was nine months pregnant and just a few weeks from my due date, I was told by an individual — with significant authority in the institution — that they “Just were not sure how I was going to be able to be a full time mom and a full time pastor.”

• While working alongside a staffer who came from a Southern Baptist background, I was told that they just “didn’t understand why the Methodists let women be pastors. It was just wrong.”

Full-Time Female

Since becoming a full time pastor I have sought out other female clergy I can learn from.  Thanks to an Eli Lily Grant I studied with a group of inter-faith clergy women for four years and then, thanks to another UMC grant, I was a part of an intergenerational United Methodist women clergy study group.  Both were intensely rewarding, encouraging, and illuminating.

Through these connections I have learned that my experiences as a female pastor are not unique to me.  Every female pastor I know has had to face harassment, abuse, or degradation because of her gender.   It hurts to admit this, but it is the truth.

However, being a female pastor isn’t all bad.

In fact, I love my vocation and find it to be immensely fulfilling.  I have men, women, and transgender individuals come to me because they “wanted to talk to a woman.”

While pregnant I experienced an increase in persons opening up to me and seeking pastoral care, individuals that had never before been willing to see me as their pastor or come to me for spiritual counseling prior to my pregnancy.  Partly, I think, because they now saw me as a parent and more able to relate to their personal trials, but also because it made me seem more motherly and nurturing.

To be sure, there are moments when it is easy to be frustrated about my gender but the rewards have far out weighed them.

Some of my most awesome experiences as a female pastor have been young girls expressing to me that they can see themselves being a minister or in full-time ministry because they know a “woman pastor.”

The lack of parity in salaries and opportunities for senior leadership roles is deeply troublesome but neither one define for me the reality of my calling.  I love being a woman and a pastor.  I hope that my service as a minister is a blessing so that everyone, both women and men know that they are loved by God.  In the end, I believe that this is all that really matters, whatever a pastor’s gender is.

Application:

L1: Do you know any female pastors/rabbis?  If not, go online and find one that you can see preach and lead a service and go worship with them.

L2:  Invite some friends to go along with you to hear a female pastor/rabbi lead worship.  Introduce yourselves to them after and say something affirming to them.

L3:   Identify some female clergy you respect and share their names with others and recommend them to your spheres of influence.  Write positive notes of affirmation about their ministries to their institutional supervisors.

May the Road Rise Up to Meet Y’all,

Rev.Wren