Poster Child

For most of my career, I have wittingly or unwittingly been recruited as a poster child for issues the church has trouble confronting. 

In 2003, I began one of several pastorates as the first female church leader. In my little moderate Baptist world, I was one of just a few women leading churches. We stuck out like sore thumbs. 

That eventually led to 2014, when I became the first woman to serve as senior minister at The Riverside Church in the City of New York. That great honor led many to think the question of whether women could be pastors was settled once and for all. 

It was not. 

In 2009, my marriage of almost 20 years unexpectedly ended in divorce. At the time, I didn’t know any pastors who had been divorced. As I lived through that pain, many people called to ask how to navigate such a turn of events, especially as a woman in the pulpit.

In 2016, I published an article about abortion in USA Today. This rushed many angry people to their keyboards to carefully explain what right I had or didn’t have to make decisions about my own body. (To be fair, many grateful people reached out, too.)  

No one, it seemed, had ever heard of a woman pastor talking about reproductive choice and her own experience. But every woman who has occupied a pulpit has had her journey around issues of childbearing or not because we are human beings, too.

And in 2019, when my five-year employment contract at The Riverside Church expired, I was summarily ushered out the door. As I exited, New York Post “reporters” were screaming in the church narthex about vibrators. I write about that experience in my book Beautiful and Terrible Things. 

That orchestrated “scandal” derailed a beautiful process of community transformation. In many circles, it also placed me firmly on the “canceled list.”

And it has been since that particular “poster child” chapter that I have, unwittingly, become a go-to resource for women leaders removed from their leadership positions for legitimate or illegitimate “moral failures.”

Over 20 years ago, when asked what I thought future church leaders needed, I tried to make the case for strategic leadership training for women. I could see the trend unrolling. 

Increasingly, churches were in decline. More women were in seminary. There was more fear, scarcity and institutional dysfunction. With fewer men serving, more women took the arrows always aimed at leaders. 

Add all that to a general dis-ease with the topic of women’s sexuality, and I’m sorry to say that assaults on women leaders at the hands of institutions they serve have become a regular turn of events. 

And most of us are entirely without the resources to respond.  

Some of these challenges are warranted because leaders are people, and people make mistakes.  With that said, almost every instance of severe consequences I have seen or heard of since 2019 would not have happened if the leader in question had been a man. The gross inequity and violation of that reality should outrage us all.

Still, every call, email or story about a woman leader being censured for moral failure that crosses my desk leads me to wonder: is anyone in our institutions even thinking about what a modern institutional expression of the gospel might look like? Are institutions that are moored in purity culture, unable to distinguish between moral failure and women’s sexuality (even women in leadership), able to shift? 

Where might we find reconciliation and restoration?

Does an institution that claims to follow Jesus deserve the commitment and investment of the next generation’s best women leaders when that institution continues to bring down its leaders in unjust ways? 

I am a pastor myself and I have been the victim of much abuse within the system—I would never discount the legitimacy of a victim’s experience. And yet, my answer to that last question is a resounding “no.”

You don’t deserve us or our gifts, church, unless you are willing to be honest about the inconsistent standards of censure you impose on leaders of different genders. You don’t deserve us unless you are willing to see us as real people whose sexual lives and identities are never fodder for your faux outrage. You don’t deserve us until you are ready to make space for our humanity in all its fullness.

And you don’t deserve any gifted leader unless or until you’re willing to get serious about what the church is meant to be doing in this moment: changing, shifting and working to reflect the gospel.

We know, of course, that Jesus was crucified for his efforts to move a community toward lives of inclusive love. When he outraged the institutions around him, he did it because the rules they held sacrosanct were strangling people within inches of their lives. 

But sometimes, I think we never learn from a story we tell year after year. The way of Jesus is a way of entering honest conversations about our humanity. 

It is about making space for people we never imagined would inhabit that space. It is about redemption, reconciliation, new life, and yet one more opportunity to keep up the work of making the world better.

Or did I miss something?

I never set out to be the poster child for non-sex sex scandals of women pastors, just like I didn’t want to be the one whose story became so publicly tied to so many controversial issues in the church. Honestly, I just wanted what so many of my colleagues so desperately desire– respect for our training and gifts and freedom to live into our leadership roles while also being the humans we are created to be.

Maybe “poster child” was always meant to be an expression of my call. I guess I won’t know until this life is done. But in this case, the difference seems to be that the church doesn’t show much interest in working to quell its violence toward women in leadership. 

Like the world around us, for reasons of false piety, ongoing misogyny or an arrogance that will not allow us to feel the urgency of this moment, institutions and the fear-fueled people who run them just won’t stop. This is incredibly unwise for an institution generally struggling to find leaders of any kind, not to mention the skilled leaders it needs to see and move toward a future it cannot yet embody. 

More importantly, it is not reflective in any way of the gospel that has drawn us to these communities, this work and to a courageous, hopeful future.

I’m almost scared to think about what my next poster will address. Regardless, I just can’t stop calling the institution that bears the name of Jesus Christ to begin acting like him. 

I would gladly be a poster child for that.