Various incidents and events shape your life, some you have choice about and others seem to happen to you. Never in my early years did I ever contemplate a leadership position and particularly not in a church. When I was young, women just never had that option. Although I was an intelligent girl, I was quiet and reserved and did not cope well with speaking in front of others. In spite of this, I was elected by fellow students to the student representative council at school. Debating and quizzes as well as singing in musicals helped in building some confidence but I was, and still am, an introvert.
Our family moved from the city to a country town when I was five years old. We attended a Lutheran church and after confirmation I taught in the Sunday School. I attended the church youth group and was encouraged to take on the treasurer role and helped organise social functions. Organising seemed to come naturally to me, and maybe was learned at home. One of my high school teachers encouraged me to train to be a teacher, as I would often help others in class. However the last thing I wanted to do when I left school was go back to school and deal with teenagers! So rather than taking up that option, I chose to study science. I was a mediocre science student at Uni and after three years was unsure if science was my calling and I was still unsure about my own values. One thing I had decided – there wasn’t any need or place for God and church in my new life in the city. I paid more attention to the worldly focus of living for today and doing what my city based friends thought important.
During holidays at Uni, I worked in the laboratory of a stock feed mill. Using that experience and my Uni training, I landed my first job in research in the state agriculture department. Then from 1979 to 2004, I worked across three government agencies and in multiple contract jobs. Although I took 5 years off to have two children, I found that women were actively supported in government, and encouraged to join industry groups. I realised early on that selection for jobs was not only on merit but by people speaking up for me, so cultivated industry mentors who could guide me in my career.
In worldly terms, I guess I was successful.
However, along the way, I made some poor personal choices, and began to experience a need to work on a relationship with God. Taking on more responsible roles in my career also led to interstate travel. I found this quite difficult to manage as my husband was often not attentive to our young children’s needs. My husband, who had some awful experiences in another church, also accused me of placing God and the church ahead of him. It’s a long story, but ultimately our marriage fell apart in 1994. The positives though were being blessed with children, for whom I became the main parent managing their care and education. By then I had joined a local Lutheran church ostensibly to help my children learn about Jesus. Actually, it was my own gaping God sized hole that led me back.
At church, I met wonderful Christ-centred people, many were women, who did not judge me but helped me to understand that most important message – that God loved me and that Jesus had done the work on the cross for me. I needed to hear that message. I identify with both the Woman at the Well and the one lamb in 100 that the Shepherd Jesus sought out to bring back into the fold. The message I can share with others is “If God can love and forgive me for all that I have done, not done, and sometimes still struggle with, he can love and forgive anyone”.
As time went on, I married a second time and experienced life in a blended family. A few months before we married, my fiancé’s two sons had come to live with him. So my new husband and I had responsibility for all four children – not quite the Brady Bunch and issues did not get resolved in half an hour either! We did practical things such as built a new larger house to provide space and educated them at Lutheran primary and secondary schools. Life was full and the church was a big part of our blended family’s lives. The children attended children’s ministry at church on a Friday evening and progressed to the youth group. The eldest three children were talented musicians and got involved in bands at church and at college.
I also got more involved in ministry areas at church, and joined the leadership team for Children’s Ministry. When a new church building was about to be opened, the choir had a recruitment drive so, having sung in a church choir in my teen years, I joined that too, finding great joy in being able to use a gift for singing songs of praise. But I was still working full time and with success had climbed the corporate ladder to senior management. When my mother died in 1999, I felt I had lost the one person in my life whose love was unconditional and unchanging. Soon after this, my husband left his government job and bought into a business, and began working longer hours. With too much stress, I sought ways to slow the pace a little. Initially I reduced to 30 hours per week, but in 2004, I decided to put my career on hold. I needed to find a different path that would leave more time for my family and my church commitments.
These last 15 years have allowed me to achieve so much more, growing in my faith journey, taking on study at Masters and PhD level, teaching and researching at two universities and responding humbly to opportunities in the wider church as well as in my family. I have begun to listen more and have tried to discern God’s voice, learning from Jesus how I might serve others. That has included leading worship, being invited to preach and facilitating discussions on how the LCA can address difficult issues such as climate change, abortion, domestic and family violence, and giving voice to First Nations and other marginalised groups.
Life presents each of us with opportunities and choices. At these times, God is working in our lives, calling us by name, and sometimes seeking to bring us back into a relationship with him. I found my way back through Jesus after my two children were baptized. I filled the God shaped hole inside me with God – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit! Nothing this world offers can do that.
The Gospel message is a truthful and enduring message that has planted and grown churches for over two thousand years. In Australia, the Gospel message has sometimes been overshadowed by an insidious authoritarian paradigm which teaches male headship and orders of creation. This paradigm targets the agency of women to be legitimate messengers of the Gospel and pastors to God’s family. However, our Lord Jesus Christ came to break down the old traditions such as male headship and to establish a new creation where there is no male and female. He replaces the Law of the Old Testament with the Gospel message of life giving water, of freedom from oppression and everlasting life to all who accept the gift with open hands and freely believe in the fact that God loves them and that Christ died and rose again for them! What a wonderful message.
We should remember also that from the early days of the Christian church, Paul entrusted women to share this Gospel message with others and to grow the early church. He gave Phoebe the letter to take to the Romans and to read it to them. Just as Jesus had women disciples, and early churches had women leaders and messengers, women can be, have been and will continue to be bearers of the Gospel message. They have been and continue to be pastors and teachers in the Lutheran church as well as in their own families. Women, including me, have stories that need to be heard, and many such as me have been led back into the church by the Holy Spirit to be agents of change – not only for women who are called to then be trained and ordained as pastors, a role some are already fulfilling, but to change the focus back to the Gospel message!
God continues to call workers, both men and women, to bring in the harvest. I pray that the Holy Spirit opens the eyes and ears and hearts of those who would choose to keep some of these workers silent.
