August 5th, 2011
When a new acquaintance learns of my church gig, one of the first questions is usually, “How long have you been a minister?” Well, it depends. I think I’ve been a minister for a while now. My first unpaid role was team leader of a Young Life group in 1996, and I excitedly accepted my first church staff position in 1998 at Birmingham’s Baptist Church of the Covenant. I have about fifteen years of ministry experience, training, and theological education tucked away in my memory, but it was only this past spring that I was officially ordained.
Supporters and clergy friends have asked another popular question in these past months: “How does it feel to be official?” I know it is a well-meaning question that implies fondness and love for who I am and the work that I do. I get that. But part of me has felt like that’s a pretty lousy question to ask because it undercuts those other years and the ministers who have gone decades without the mark of ordination.
I have felt the sharpness of the ordained/unordained line for many years. So much so that I questioned the necessity of ordained ministry in my congregational structure and in a time in which the church is changing irreversibly. Is it outdated? Is it necessary? Aren’t we all ministers together? Does ordination really just create an exclusive, divisive club? I waited for resolution or better questions.
Until this year, seeking ordination never quite made sense for my place in life. Why would I have been ordained at any other time? For what purpose and by what people? There were times in younger years when I could only imagine my ordination as a coronation, and I knew that visualized exaltation did not reflect the servant Christ I professed. I waited for a shift in understanding.
When I took a hiatus from serving a local church to get the hang of being a mother, I felt even more disconnected from my calling. Ordination certainly did not make sense for this mother who cobbled together writing, blogging, and pulpit supply. I waited for a merging of my selves into a unified whole and a broader understanding of vocation.
Ultimately, the questions of “how long” or “being official” don’t matter. For me, ordination was really about this ongoing, growing sense of becoming a unified whole. There is the self I share with the church, the self I share with my family, and the self I always have been. The ordination process was a rich, beautiful, lush, dreamy, humbling, awe-inspiring, remarkable time of friends and mentors and family and colleagues standing around me to bless the whole “me.”
Whether it is through ordination or in other ways that we gather, we need to bless each other’s journeys. We women in particular need to whisper these blessings over one another. I certainly feel marked and blessed for the vocation of ministry, and I am unendingly grateful for that piece of ordination.
But what I hold most closely and feel most strongly is the blessing of that particular moment in my personal, spiritual, and professional journey: blessed in who I have been, blessed in who I am, blessed in who I am becoming. On days when the calling gets blurry again or the next leg of the journey is unclear, I can hold those blessings tightly and move back into that holy space.
Not a bad way to make things official.
Elizabeth Mangham Lott lives in Richmond, Virginia. In addition to her mothering job, she also serves as associate pastor at Richmond’s Westover Baptist Church.
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January 19th, 2011
More than just another New Year’s resolution, I joined the Y this month in a genuine effort to make my physical well-being a priority. I value my emotional and mental health and seek to be attuned to both, but I too often neglect care for my body. Off to right that wrong, I marched into the Y with a toddler on my hip to sign the entire family up for a membership. The practice of dropping the children off in the Y’s very fun childwatch room while I exercise is quickly becoming a favorite routine. I have savored selecting the songs for my workout playlist and am delighted to jump on the elliptical and move into a guarded, solitary space for a little while.
More than just moving my body and working to become healthier, I am moving into a sacred inner room for quiet and reflection. I am only just beginning to grasp how valuable this time is.
I’m noticing a similar theme at my dreamy new job where my office is coming together so beautifully. The walls have been painted a lovely blue, and the deep brown of the new desk looks so perfect against the pale backdrop. There’s something about that space that is powerful, special, and deeply affirming. These spaces in my life remind me of the Virginia Woolf saying about each woman having a room of her own. The full quote is really about the basic necessities for the craft of writing: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Regardless of our craft, some pretty basic life needs must be met before our dreams can flourish.
As I talk to mama friends across the spectrum of careers, many would love to have a carved out space for self without compromising their children’s needs (insert needs of congregation or any other demands on time and energy) as well as a carved out space for family without losing self. At times, it seems about as realistic to think about sitting down and writing a novel as it does to fully honor the demands around me while also honoring what I need in order to care for myself. But when I ignore the need for separate, quiet rooms of my own (both literal and metaphorical) it’s not just my dreams that start to atrophy but a central part of myself. I am striving each day to make time and space for these rooms, to embrace them when I see them, to name them and know them, and to sit peacefully in them, however briefly.
Every woman, mother, sister, minister or not, needs a room of her own. How do you prioritize the ways you nurture your dreams and care for yourself? Or do you find yourself in a place of denial and atrophy? What can you change today to move toward new practices that balance and nurture you? Where do you find a room of your own?
When Elizabeth Mangham Lott is not exploring the world with her two young children, she serves as associate pastor of Richmond’s Westover Baptist Church.
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September 30th, 2010
Reading about Al Mohler’s embarrassment that he once advocated for female clergy brought to mind the great Anne Lamott story about shopping with her friend. Pam had cancer and just three weeks to live when the two went shopping to find a new outfit for Anne. Anne walked out of the dressing room and asked her best friend, “Does this outfit make me look fat?” To which Pam replied: “Oh, Anne. We don’t have time for that.”
As a daughter of the moderate Baptist movement born while Mohler was a student at my alma mater, Samford University, the only narrative I have ever known about my calling and the moderate Baptist body with which I affiliate is that those other Baptist folks over there do not support me.
Last week’s reminder of Mohler’s position is not really about those other Baptist folks but is about the story I have inherited and the reframing it requires. It is easy to allow the naysayers to shape my own story. After all, I was told by a Southern Baptist pastor as a 17-year-old high-school senior that I should be aware that the devil might try to convince me to preach.
The reality, however, is that no matter our calling or career path someone will always disapprove of what we do and how we do it. When we give too much credence to voices that dismiss our calling from God, we begin to focus on those voices instead of the need to reshape the story we have inherited for the 21st century
While Al Mohler was scouring the books in the library at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, baby girls were being born. Those girls are now old enough to attend moderate Baptist seminaries and divinity schools and stand in pulpits around the world. How should we reframe the narrative for them? How do we shift the story from one of opposition to one of affirmation?
Young women who are now preparing for and entering into ministry need more than a pat on the back of vague affirmation. We must respond with intention. Setting up scholarships for women entering seminary and offering them encouragement along the way is a first step. But the next step is to put them to work. Invite them to lead retreats, welcome them as guests in pulpits and call them to be your pastors.
The story is no longer about who should and should not serve, but about the stories that merge together and unite us in the daily tasks of ministry. We no longer have time for that other story because:
– Mandy is standing at the center of the labyrinth holding the bread and the cup.
– Suzanne is lighting a candle with a mother who held her son as he died.
– Helms is living simply, loving generously and welcoming us into the way of Christ.
– Suzanah is advocating for the safety of mothers around the world who are preparing to give birth.
– Sarah Jane is loving those who never thought they would meet one another over the communion table.
– Lindsay is walking children home from school who are afraid of the kidnappers who wish to sell them into the sex trade.
– Erin is inviting seekers and doubters, people of deep faith and sometimes no faith, to sit together with big questions.
– Nancy and Lynn are walking the prison halls to visit, to bless and to listen.
Letting go of that old story will require us to better know ourselves and give words to the ways God is moving among us. It will require us to bless the past and embrace hope for the future. It will require us to let go of a decades-old paralysis of spirit and pay attention to the life-affirming movement of God’s Spirit at work among us. We don’t have time for any other way forward, because there is Kingdom work to be done.
Elizabeth Mangham Lott is a preacher, writer, wife and mother living in Richmond, Va. She serves on the board of Virginia Baptist Women in Ministry.
This article is used with permission of Associated Baptist Press.
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July 26th, 2010
An annual trip to the doctor this week meant answering the usual questions to update the medical records. Is this still your health insurance? Are you still at this address? Has your email address changed? And you’re still a homemaker? I paused and bristled a bit with that one. Well, I guess so. . . . among other things. The patient coordinator just looked at me. “Okay, yes, I’m still a homemaker.” She was satisfied. I needed to fill that box in her annual survey.
Virginia Baptist Women in Ministry hosted their second annual FEAST event this Spring, and Elizabeth Melton Bartley shared a powerful reflection on the need for more Home Makers in the world. There are quite a few of us minister mamas who are cobbling together work to supplement our primary job of home making. Making home. She spoke of the lessons learned of embracing that home making identity and carrying it with her in her pastoral work of making home in all places. When church gets broken, when church starts to look like corporation, when church loses its way, we need good Home Makers to lead in a different way.
But I still bristle when I find myself in conversations about vocation that leave little room for nuance and discussion. I heard myself speak out of anxiety last month as I ran into old friends and colleagues at Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s General Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina. The question I most dreaded was typically the first: So, what are you doing now? I tried to stop myself but heard the paragraph come flowing out of me almost every time: “Well, I’m home with the kids while they’re still little, but I’m also blogging and writing curriculum and doing a lot of supply preaching. Plus, the housing market’s awful, so we couldn’t sell our house, and there aren’t many great part-time jobs in my area.”
Good gracious, woman. Breathe!
Sure, there are still the folks who don’t get my life and feel the need to say, “Oh, so you’re not doing anything.” See, I need to fill that box in their annual survey, too. But in my better moments, I know otherwise. I know that I am learning more about vocation than ever before. Some mothers describe the task of raising children as a calling. They felt called to jobs, called to motherhood, and then called back to jobs. That doesn’t really resonate with me, though. For me, the idea of vocation has shifted to an understanding of who I am continually called to become; my pastoral self and my mothering self are but two parts of the whole of my vocation. When I move into the center of who I am uniquely called to be (for my life, not anyone else’s life), only then am I able to move best in the world in all the myriad tasks of doing that are sure to come.
Is there a box to check for that?
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May 21st, 2010
Julia Ward Howe lived from 1819-1910. The mother of six children, she was also an author, poet, preacher, teacher, and activist. If you do not know Julia by name, you likely know her by song. First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, she wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” after visiting Union soldiers in Northern Virginia during the Civil War. She reclaimed the tune to a song they had commonly sung at the battlefield.
In addition to raising six children, keeping a nineteenth-century home (and tending to a nineteenth-century husband), advocating for women’s suffrage, opposing slavery, and pushing for education and prison reform, Julia “was instrumental in creating Mother’s Day, which she envisioned as a day of solemn council where women from all over the world could meet to discuss the means whereby to achieve world peace. They would also convene as mothers, keeping in mind the duty of protecting their children.”
In response to the continuous bloodshed of the Civil War, Julia penned her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. With it she “called for an international Mother’s Day celebrating peace and motherhood” to “protest what she saw as the futility of their Sons killing the Sons of other Mothers.”
Her letter declared:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.
In the United States, a declaration of peace birthed Mother’s Day. Women gathered because they believed each human being bore “the sacred impress” of God—each man, woman, and child was made in the image of God. Julia’s vision was a day for mothers, literal and metaphorical, to use their mothering voices for the needs of the world. For those who have a voice, remember Julia’s vision by uniting those voices to speak for the voiceless. For Julia, the natural way to live out the truths of who God is and how God loves was to mother the world. Male or female, children or no children, all are called to this type of motherhood. Truly, it is a motherhood for all.
For full quotes and more information on Julia Ward Howe, visit www.juliawardhowe.org.
Elizabeth Mangham Lott is a preacher, writer, teacher, mother, wife, and aspiring activist living in Richmond, Virginia.
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When a new acquaintance learns of my church gig, one of the first questions is usually, “How long have you been a minister?” Well, it depends. I think I’ve been a minister for a while now. My first unpaid role was team leader of a Young Life group in 1996, and I excitedly accepted my first church staff position in 1998 at Birmingham’s Baptist Church of the Covenant. I have about fifteen years of ministry experience, training, and theological education tucked away in my memory, but it was only this past spring that I was officially ordained.
When I took a hiatus from serving a local church to get the hang of being a mother, I felt even more disconnected from my calling. Ordination certainly did not make sense for this mother who cobbled together writing, blogging, and pulpit supply. I waited for a merging of my selves into a unified whole and a broader understanding of vocation.
But what I hold most closely and feel most strongly is the blessing of that particular moment in my personal, spiritual, and professional journey: blessed in who I have been, blessed in who I am, blessed in who I am becoming. On days when the calling gets blurry again or the next leg of the journey is unclear, I can hold those blessings tightly and move back into that holy space.