Excerpt from
Bearing Fruit in Due Season
Feminist Hermeneutics and the Bible in Worship
Elizabeth J. Smith
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville,
Minnesota. All rights reserved.
No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the
written permission of
The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.
Contents
Chapter 1
Appendix: Sermons Using Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics
Little Gidding Revisited
How God Counts
Going into the World
Come, Our Beloved
Bridal Journeys
Select Bibliography
Chapter 1
Christians at Worship, and What They Seek
Picture a meeting room somewhere on the premises of a suburban parish church on a weekday afternoon in the late 1980s. A kettle is simmering in the background ready for tea, and plates of fresh sandwiches and home-made cakes wait to be unwrapped and enjoyed to the accompaniment of conversation and companionable laughter. The people gathered are all women, most of them over the age of sixty, some well into their eighties. This is the monthly meeting of a group that exists in theory to help raise funds for the church, but that also provides in practice a small community of strong and enduring relationships.
The youngest woman present is in her early thirties, and she is the guest speaker for the month. She has brought with her a large box of a dozen or more books of various shapes and sizes and editions, and over half an hour or so she tells her life story to the older women, presenting the books one at a time to serve as landmarks and milestones on her spiritual journey. The older women are invited to tell of similar books that they own, and of their significance. Before the tea is brewed, the group prays together. Silently or aloud, each woman gives thanks for some aspect of her acquaintance with the book, or prays for a friend or family member to whom the book is not a familiar friend and conversation partner.
For all the books in the box, and all the books in the conversation, are one Book: the Christian Bible. The young woman is the curate in the parish, ordained as a deacon in the tradition of the Anglican Church of Australia, still denied ordination to the priesthood while the synods and councils of the Church agonize over the place of women in spiritual leadership. On Sundays she reads the gospel in the midst of the congregation where she serves. On weekday afternoons she talks with other women of their lifelong relationship with Scripture. Occasionally she makes time to draft prayers, sermons, and hymns that feminist Christians would not be embarrassed to hear. But year after year she hears the same Bible invoked to refuse her and her sisters the full authority of leadership, practical and symbolic, to which many in the Church believe they are called.
From that suburban parish in Melbourne, Australia, I traveled to the United States, a part of the Anglican communion where women have been ordained to the priesthood since the mid-1970s. I began doctoral studies in liturgy, wanting to know more about what happens when feminist Christians study the Bible, and wanting to say more about what can happen when feminists work creatively with the Bible and worship. There was too much Bible in my Christian history for me to turn my back on it. And there is too much Bible in my own creative work in liturgy for me to be able to ignore the theoretical dimensions of biblical interpretation. This book is the result of my attempt to provide an infrastructure for contemporary feminist liturgical creativity in Church traditions where the Bible is part of the fabric of worshiping life.
If the liberation theologies of the last thirty or forty years have taught the churches anything, they have taught the importance of context and the authority of voice. There was a time in the history of scholarship when claims to universality were a hallmark of respectability. The more widely a proposition could be shown to apply, the more authority it seemed to acquire. This book does not offer universalizing prescriptions. Instead, I write from what I know best, as an Australian and as an Anglican. But dealing with a multiplicity of contexts and listening to a diversity of voices is also encouraging the churches to learn about our own life by analogy with one another's contexts, and to know our own voice better by listening carefully to the chorus of many voices that clamor around us. From time to time I will indicate where some of the more obvious analogies may lie between Australia and other countries, or between Anglicanism and other Christian denominations. But I hope that readers will often see for themselves possible connections, note potential contrasts, and seize on anything that may be useful in exploring the role of the Bible in the worship of churches far from Anglicanism in suburban Australia.
Some Worshipers
In today's churches worship is as far from uniform as the worshipers are varied in their cultures, languages, lifestyles, and temperaments. Roman Catholics in different lands have their own sacramentaries in their own vernaculars. For Anglicans, Cranmer's sixteenth-century prose is no longer the unifying factor it once was. Anglicans at worship are now authorized to use Prayer Books in hundreds of languages and dozens of families of revisions. Anglicans at worship may now actually be using the approved version of their local Prayer Book or the previously approved, now superseded version of it; they may be using texts and ceremonies borrowed from Lima, or Taizé, or the current or pre-Vatican-II Roman Catholic Church; they may not bother with a book at all, except of course when the bishop visits. Nostalgia for a simpler, more confident, more universal Prayer Book Age is alive and well, but so is the late twentieth century's resistance to centralized authority, so is resentment of the legacy of colonialism, and so too is the desire for local expressions of Christian faith.
So what do contemporary Christians seek at worship? It will depend, of course, on which Christians you ask. One writer on Anglicanism says that he finds it "much easier to identify Anglicanism with persons rather than a system," and adds that in a "people-oriented church . . . it is important that we make a concerted effort to know and celebrate our heroes." I am concerned that we should rewrite the list of our heroes so that it includes more heroines. I also wish to pay more heed to the Christians who are not celebrated as visible leaders or public shapers of the tradition but who nonetheless need to be counted among the people by whom the Church orients itself. To clear the way for this task, to orient myself with regard to Christian tradition and contemporary reality, my own ecclesial and social location must be declared.
I am a theologically-trained, ordained, white, first-world, middle-class Anglican woman. My being an Anglican at all has a lot to do with my encounters with Anglican worship in my late teens and early twenties, when I had enough literary education to enjoy Cranmer, enough youthful enjoyment of change to approve of the Prayer Book revisions then in progress in the Australian Church, and enough Christian faith and prior formation in a non-liturgical denomination to recognize an elegant, economical form of corporate worship, one that had theological depth and biblical richness. Anglican "churchmanship," the tendency to claim "Anglo-Catholic" or "Evangelical" allegiance, long remained a mystery to me, but the climate for theology and worship in which I came to feel at home is more likely to be found in mildly "Catholic" than in strongly "Evangelical" communities. I was, and am, of a temperament that prefers understatement, repetition, and economy in worship to extravagance and constant novelty, and in Anglican worship I found much that was congenial. Over the next two decades I sought these basic things in Anglican worship, along with a community to belong to and people with whom I could pray. I began to recognize in myself a desire not only to participate in Anglican worship but also to lead it, to preach to Anglicans as well as to be taught by them.
This vocation was emerging during the Australian Church's long battles over women's roles in Church life and liturgy. My feminist consciousness was slow to be raised, but in time it has added further items to the list of things I seek in worship: an avenue of access to God in which women, as women, are welcome participants and contributors; a place where God is honored in language, symbols, spaces, and actions that contribute to justice and freedom for women in the Church and out of it. Feminist spirituality has enlarged my picture of God and my words for the divine, so that the Anglican liturgy as I have received it often seems too confining for prayer, private and common, as I now practice it. Feminist theology has reshaped my understanding of Church and sacraments, so that much prior Anglican writing about worship seems inadequate to account for or to construct the kind of community in which I feel called to sacramental and teaching leadership. Feminist biblical study has opened new horizons for understanding the Scriptures I have been reading all my life, so that many of the ways, critical and pre-critical, that the Bible has been used in worship seem deprived and depriving.
I am therefore asking a great deal more of worship than I did when I first began to experience it. I ask it for my own sake, as a woman of faith who needs a Church to pray with, and forms to enable that common prayer; and I ask it for the sake of other women who do not share the access I now have, through ordination and theological education, to the institutional Church's decision-making and direction-setting. I also ask it for the sake of women who are perhaps not part of any Church, women who live in poverty with their children, or in social marginalization with their lesbian partners, or in fear with abusive husbands, or in spiritual deprivation in a culture that is often justified in claiming to find little to feed the soul in mainline Church activity and worship. Christian worship has consequences for many who do not call themselves Christian, but who live in cultures and social structures still profoundly shaped by laws and habits inherited from earlier centuries of Christian or Western domination and from biblical religion. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza asserts that biblical interpretation is important in part because it has been used both to oppress and to empower women inside and outside the churches, and such a claim may also be made about the practice of worship, especially the worship of a Church like the Anglican, that began as a national Church and continued as the Church of a colonizing nation. Those who are responsible for Anglican worship, with its memories of empire and establishment, need to be reminded also of its role, continuing though certainly attenuated, in sustaining oppressive social structures. As a contemporary proponent of Anglican worship I too need to be aware that I do not operate in a self-contained religious world, but in a world that includes people very different from myself and for whom my religious allegiances, enthusiasms, and delinquencies may have economic and political consequences as well as spiritual ones.
People outside the churches will probably not have ready answers to questions about the nature and purpose of liturgical worship, but many Church people do have answers and opinions on the matter. These answers and opinions will vary. Once again, when it comes to contemporary Christians and what they seek at worship the answer will depend on which Christians you ask.
Ask someone like Shirley, a middle-class Australian Anglican in her sixties. She is, let us say, married and a grandmother, and she attends Sunday worship regularly, without her husband, who has never been much interested in religion. An important part of her church participation is her membership in the Mothers' Union, that women's organization found almost everywhere around the Anglican world that asks its members to pray and to support Christian teaching on marriage and family life. Her private prayer may include daily Bible reading with the help of published notes, and probably includes regular petitionary prayer for her family and friends. When she was Mothers' Union Branch President she happily led the group's devotions at meetings, using the book of clergy-approved M.U. prayers and services. At Sunday worship Shirley seeks continuity, relative quiet, and simple ways of expressing religious truths that she believes to be fairly simple, at bottom. She seeks worship that reflects her ideal of a community that has much in common with a well-adjusted traditional family, where fathers are quite properly the figureheads if not always the wielders of actual power. She may occasionally bring a grandchild to church—after all, it was she who insisted that the little ones be baptized; she hopes that being in church for the service will somehow make an impression on the child. Some of the parish children receive communion, but Shirley rather hopes her grandchildren will not notice this, let alone ask for it. She does not really expect that the parish priest will do much with the Scripture readings in the course of the sermon, but she has not expected that for years, and of course she has her Bible reading notes at home to make up for it. She enjoys singing the hymns, and hopes that the tunes will be good ones this week, but she does not expect the words of the hymns to say very much of importance, though she can remember days when a fortuitous combination of words, tune, and life circumstances really touched her. After some resistance to the idea, twenty years ago, she has grown accustomed to the current Australian Prayer Book, though at her age she does not much look forward to having "Them" change all the words again in the next round of Prayer Book revision now underway. These days you can hardly give your godchildren a Prayer Book for their Confirmation, lest it be out of date before they are old enough to be married!
Or ask Margaret what she seeks from worship. Margaret is in her late forties, married or perhaps divorced, with children who generally come home to visit only when the laundry has piled high enough to threaten their independent lifestyles. Margaret has a university degree and years of experience as a professional in the workplace, and is dabbling with the notion of taking a class or two at the local theological college or perhaps a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, now that she has completed the four years of the Education For Ministry program with a group in her parish. Margaret is increasingly aware of and disturbed by the gap between what her parish's Sunday worship could do and what it actually does. The small-group prayer she experienced in E.F.M., and the occasional informal house-eucharist the parish priest came in to help them celebrate, have opened her eyes to previously un-guessed-at possibilities for common prayer. She wishes the Sunday sermons had half the teaching in them about Scripture and theology that you get in a chapter of E.F.M., and she is also sure that the language of the Prayer Book, let alone the tunes in the Hymn Book, are not nearly contemporary enough to get through to her children. And given what the Church has been through recently over the ordination of women it seems ridiculous to keep calling God nothing but King and Father. Margaret wonders whether, if the parish gets an ordained woman assistant, they can do something about inclusive language, though who knows what bureaucratic upheavals or resistance from the parish priest that might entail. After a hard week in the secular workforce as a professional woman, fighting the inevitable battles she faces out there, Margaret is not sure she has the energy for controversy, however desirable its outcome might be. Maybe she will just grit her teeth and wait, and hope that the next Prayer Book is better; it may be in time to help her grandchildren, even though it will almost certainly be too late for her children.
Or ask Kathy, who is in her early twenties and working at her first job after finishing college, and in her first apartment after moving out of home. She is also in her first parish, where she is a member in her own right rather than being there on account of her parents' belonging. She does not go to the nearest Anglican church, but travels a couple of miles to one where the priest in charge is a recently ordained woman, one who has been working full-time in the Church as a laywoman and as a deacon for almost twenty years. Kathy expects to see herself, her energy, and her intellectual curiosity mirrored in the parish's Sunday worship. She was taken to church regularly as a little girl, took communion quite a few years before she was confirmed, and served as an acolyte in her early teens, and she now expects to see other children and teenagers doing the same, while she herself may read a lesson, write the intercessions, or serve as an authorized lay minister at communion time. She is aware that she has a lot of power in an aging Anglican population—people see her as "the future of the Church"—but she also knows that she generates a lot of anxiety; in her outspokenness and seeming lack of respect for authority older churchgoers sometimes have difficulty seeing the Church of the past that they knew and loved. Kathy approaches worship seeking an expression for her spirituality (words like "spirituality" are much more a part of the vocabulary for women of Kathy's generation than for their grandmothers). Perhaps she looks for some consistent rituals and language that will help to stabilize the rapidly changing world of a young adult, but when she wants to learn doctrine or theology she will probably read a book rather than listen to a sermon. She has recently been through the Cursillo experience and takes pleasure in more spontaneous and informal expressions of common prayer and praise as well as the structured ones of the Anglican Eucharist. She goes to a Taizé service in another parish once a month, and she knows that some of the best praying and singing of the last five years of her life has been done in the street outside the cathedral of the diocese, protesting the Church's reluctance to do justice to the gospel by ordaining its own women. She can quote biblical chapter and verse as long as it has to do with arguments for and against women priests and female submission, but she does not often look to Scripture to sustain her devotional life.
Or ask Sophie, aged seven. Her parish has never had a woman deacon or priest but Sophie has seen their pictures in the newspaper or on television, and sometimes her own mother helps distribute communion. When Sophie goes to church she likes to look at the pictures in the windows and the candles on the table, and she has been singing along in the "Glory to God in the highest" and the "Holy, holy, holy" since long before she was able to read. Now she sometimes sits with a grandmotherly parishioner, Lois, in the choir, and Lois lets her snuggle up and helps her find the pages in the Prayer Book and the Hymn Book. She and Lois were paired up when Sophie was six and was doing her preparation for receiving communion. Sophie really likes communion, and she was not impressed when at the church they went to on vacation the priest almost failed to give her any, in spite of her having made the sign of the cross very nicely and clearly before putting her hands out, just the way she had been taught. Sophie likes the ministers' robes (at home she sometimes dresses up in a sheet for a robe, and does communion for her toys). She likes the quiet of the church building and the big dark space that echoes, but there is also a family story about how she danced in the aisles one Sunday as a three-year-old, when the youth group brought their electric guitars and jazzed up the music a trifle. The boring parts of church are when people read out of the Bible so that you can hardly hear or understand it; her teacher at school can read the math book better than that. Sophie usually practices reading the Hymn Book during the sermon, though at the family service once a month, instead of the sermon, they have a special thing for the children when Sophie and the others act out one of the Bible stories for the rest of the congregation to see and hear. She does not know what to say when her grandmother asks her what she has been learning in "Sunday School"; you could not put Sophie out of church and into a Sunday School without great protest, though she is beginning to look forward to the days when she'll be old enough for Youth Group and the acolyte rota.
Or we could take our question to Christians under greater stress than the ones we have described so far. Perhaps Sophie's aunt has just spent some weeks in a refuge for battered women and comes to church seeking people who will not judge her or fear her as a threat to their own domestic equilibrium. Perhaps she seeks an encounter with a God who, if he must be fatherly, is at least gentle and faithful, and a Jesus who listens to the prayers of poor people, because heaven knows this woman and her three small children are going to be poor for a long time to come, now that they have left the relative economic security of that violent marriage. Perhaps Kathy's sister spent some of her teenage years on drugs and in the street, but has recently found a church home and some hope at an inner-city parish with a youth outreach program, charismatic worship, Bible studies that verge on the fundamentalist, and almost no time for the Prayer Book, since so few of the street kids can read at all. Perhaps Margaret's colleague at work is a lesbian, now with her partner raising children from a previous marriage, fearing for her job or for their custody of the children if too many people find out. Perhaps this woman occasionally goes to church for the worship she grew up with, seeking a community whose self-image might reflect something more diverse than the traditional family and a God who loves and welcomes and works with the unexpected as well as the predictable. Perhaps Shirley's successor as Mothers' Union president has a twice-divorced daughter, or a grandchild born out of wedlock, or a son with AIDS, or an alcoholic husband; perhaps this woman comes to worship both fearing and hoping that in the Church's Scripture and prayer and hymns and preaching there will be something that will help her to understand these things, and perhaps even help her to speak to these people about the faith she cannot imagine living without, though she can barely say why she must live with it.
There are other Christians, too, whose lives are almost beyond my capacity to imagine and who worship in languages and cultures so remote from my experience as to be almost inaccessible; what would they say if they were asked what they seek in worship? Though I know in theory that these women exist, and that they too continue to come to worship in search of what they need, I can barely describe them, and I certainly cannot speak for them: the poor Hispanic woman celebrating the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe in an Anglican church with a Spanish translation of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer; the Ugandan woman whose church was founded by the Church Missionary Society a century ago, and whose village population has been halved by the AIDS virus in the last five years; the Palestinian Christian with her daughters, part of a tiny religious minority in the midst of an area of great religious tension and violence; the Sri Lankan woman who has experienced a lifetime of Anglican worship through a Tamil translation of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and who has lost a son to terrorism, and whose faithful Anglican daughter is married to a Hindu.
In first-world Christian contexts we will catch glimpses of other such women and their worlds through the stories of immigrants, the witness of missionaries, or the exchange of visitors. The glimpses do not entitle us to speak for these others, but even the little that we do know of them should prevent us from claiming too much territory for ourselves and our religious and social experience when we come to define "Christianity" or "Roman Catholicism" or "Anglicanism" or "worship." Liberation theologies insist that oppressed and marginalized groups must be allowed to speak with their own voices, and that those who have power, those who are articulate, those who are the gatekeepers for ecclesial or academic utterances must make some space and keep silence so that those other voices may be heard. Feminist theory insists that there will be, as there must be, many feminisms, and not a single feminist history or agenda, as women of different classes, races, and faiths articulate their own experiences of oppression and their own hopes for a liberated future. These feminisms are linked by a common commitment embodied in innumerable forms, a commitment to the flourishing of women. Anglican experience, in its own way, testifies to the possibility of just such a pluralism and mutual acceptance of difference with relationship: the Anglican Communion continues to call itself a Communion and to value its interconnections, however tenuous these may sometimes be at institutional, doctrinal, or liturgical levels.
In the course of this book when I speak about "Christians and their worship" I will be speaking primarily about the middle-class, first-world Christians—Anglicans, in my case, whom I know best. I know that they—we—are not the whole picture, but I do not claim to be able to see or to paint the whole picture. My contribution to feminism addressing Christianity (Anglicanism in particular) and Christianity responding to feminism can best be made by presenting the part of the picture that I do know well as vividly, accurately, and persuasively as I can, and by acknowledging that many other people's work will be needed to extend the picture if a complete account is ever to be provided of the liturgical forms that will benefit the Christian community's worship.
Not all those who have written about Anglican theology and worship approach the matter or ask the questions in this way. Books that have "Anglican" in their titles often contain a great deal of English history, and many quotations from Anglican divines such as Cranmer, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, F. D. Maurice, Charles Gore, and William Temple. The stars of the Anglican firmament tend to be bishops or academics, or preferably both; the stories of Anglican popular memory tend to be about kings, bishops, and parliaments. Queen Elizabeth I is one of very few women to appear as a significant force in Anglican history. Other women, who have not been academics until this century, or bishops till this decade, simply do not appear in general histories or accounts of theological development. For example, John Moorman wrote in England in the 1980s, and the index to his book includes the names of only six English women: two queens, one countess, one medieval and one modern mystic, and one nineteenth-century nun. William Wolf and his colleagues, in The Spirit of Anglicanism, focus on the writings of three male theologians as sources for describing the Church to which they belonged. Stephen Neill was a missionary, and he begins his More specialized collections of articles on Anglican themes sometimes do a little better than the general surveys. A volume of "Anglican Reflections" from North American writers is noteworthy in that it contains three essays by, and two essays about, women. Peggy R. Ellsberg considers Victorian women novelists' attitudes to Roman Catholicism, and Fredrica Harris Thompsett examines the women portrayed in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. These two monographs are a welcome indication that the "Anglicanism" industry is beginning to recognize that the Church cannot be adequately described without reference to women's participation over the centuries. Two American women edit No Easy Peace: Liberating Anglicanism, which includes many pieces by and about women, raising and responding to contemporary feminist questions. But there are other collections, purporting to cover Anglican territory, that are slow to show this influence. While The Identity of Anglican Worship, a British collection published in 1991, does include articles by two Third-World Anglican men and two ecumenical contributors, also male, it has no articles either by or about women, and in the main it is left to the ecumenical contributors to hint briefly at some of the issues being raised by feminists within the Anglican communion. The book falls far short of disclosing the true scale of liturgical change and development that Anglican women are bringing about. Similarly, in 1993 a collection of essays with the subtitle "Christian Initiation in Anglicanism Today" presents as an afterthought its one and only article about the roles of Anglican women. Perhaps these indicators point to a time in Anglicanism when the academic and ecclesial gatekeepers realize that they can no longer shut women out, but they do not yet know how to invite women graciously to enter, or where women will belong once they are present.
One bias in presentations of Anglican history (and the history of other denominations as well), then, has been the preference for the clerical and the male over the lay and the female constituents of the tradition. One further example of this tendency is that, while histories often note the reintroduction of men's and women's religious orders to Anglicanism through the labors of the clergy who led the Oxford Movement, not one history I have read makes any reference whatsoever to the nineteenth-century founding of the Mothers' Union by Mary Sumner. This is in spite of the fact that the Mothers' Union, with its traditions, its spirituality, and its range of activities, all developed and sustained by lay women, touches far more Anglican lives today than any Anglican religious order could hope to do. An adequate history of women in Anglicanism, or even in the narrower field of the history of the Church of England, has yet to be written. In this book I will attempt to maintain a focus on the historical experience of those who are not ordained, and on women such as those whose pen-portraits I have offered above.
An English-church bias of much writing about Anglicanism is also evident, and to some extent inevitable. It is their common English origins rather than their common contemporary practices that keep so many churches around the world claiming Anglican allegiance. It is to England that the bishops go every decade, to meet at Lambeth Conferences. There students of world-wide Anglicanism do not fail to note the numerical preponderance of Third-World bishops, mostly now indigenous rather than missionaries from older, more affluent parts of the Communion. The image of hundreds of robed bishops, a minority of whom are Caucasian, all of whom are clad in traditional episcopal attire, processing into Canterbury Cathedral, is a powerful visual symbol. It is often presented as the face of contemporary Anglicanism.
Lambeth Conferences, however, provide a woefully inadequate symbol of Anglican identity, not only because to date all the bishops have been male, but also because contemporary Anglican Church government throughout the world increasingly enfranchises the laity, just as contemporary Anglican liturgical theology locates the Church's fullest identity in the many who are baptized and not in the few who are ordained. In this book I will attempt to speak out of my Australian experience, and to a lesser extent out of my observations of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and I will endeavor to sustain a baptismal basis for my Anglican ecclesiology.
Another bias in accounts of Christians and their liturgy has been toward liturgical texts and their famous writers, and away from the unsung users of those texts. There have been frequent investigations of "Anglican worship" drawing on the published intentions of its ordained leaders and the creators of its liturgical texts and rubrics. Less frequently have worshipers been asked about their actual experience of and expectations concerning the worship they attend. It is probably easier, and historical scholarship has long preferred, to examine liturgical texts for their theological content rather than to question worshipers about what they seek, receive, or believe in their use of those texts. Texts will not answer back to challenge the scholar's assumptions or agenda; worshipers probably will. This bias toward texts and away from their users also makes it possible virtually to ignore the chronic disagreements about what the texts mean for theology, and how the texts ought to be realized in worship settings. Anglicanism's tensions among Evangelicals, Catholics, Charismatics, and Liberals are nowhere as evident or as unresolved as in the ways worship is understood and undertaken. Classic and contemporary Prayer Book texts conceal, in their synodically-approved uniformity, enormous variations in their diocesan and parochial implementation. In this book, I will try to attend to the impact of liturgical forms on all who use them, not just those who create, exegete, and regulate them, and I will not assume a high degree of uniformity in the ways that worshipers appropriate the liturgical forms available to them.
Each of these methodological choices is intended to be a choice that brings me closer to solidarity with the women of worshiping communities: Shirley and Margaret and Kathy and Sophie, their Australian or American sisters and cousins and aunts, and their sisters in Christ around the world.