Chapter 11: Take Me to Church
Hymn #496
Oh victory in Jesus, my Saviour forever. He sought me and bought me with His redeeming blood.
He loved me 'ere I knew Him and all my love is due Him. He plunged me to victory beneath the cleansing flood.
Eugene Bartlett (1939)
I went to church for as long as I can remember.
It was joy.
Truly, it was my second home and often I wished it were my first home. My dad was a deacon and mom in the women’s auxiliary. My sisters and I were at church Tuesday nights for girls club, G.M.G., Girls Meeting God. Or when we were feeling particularly rebellious, “girls motorcycle gang” or better yet, “girls meeting guys.”
FYI — there were never any guys there and as an elementary aged child, I had no interests in boys whatsoever.
Wednesday night prayer meetings… Thursday nights, my dad sang in the choir, and I joined him when I was a teenager and young adult. Saturdays were often work days in and around the building and we were there two times on Sunday, three if you included Sunday School.
As a teenager, Wednesday and Friday nights became youth nights, Saturday's we would often hang out at someone’s house or at the local park. Three times again on Sunday and then Sunday nights after church we would pile into one another’s clunky cars, turn up the music (seatbelts were optional) and head to the beach or McDonald’s or both. And we loved Jesus, a very white, very male Jesus but we loved him nevertheless and believed a life of following him is what we were all called to do. The calling looked a little different, I soon found out, depending on your gender.
Women were called into roles as secretaries and helpers, missionaries and choir leaders, children’s Sunday School teachers and hospitality stewards.
Men, well they were called into anything they wanted.
And these were my only options.
I had, it seemed, the unfortunate luck to be smart, spiritually intuitive, well spoken, gifted with leadership acumen so much so that I was the first female president of our Youth Group (much to the chagrin of my arch rival “B”). Okay… we weren’t really arch rivals, but we did go toe to toe more than once.
My dad raised me as a politically involved child and teenager, taking me door to door canvassing, signing me up as young Conservative and attending my first national convention political convention at our nation’s capital at 15.* Civic, social and spiritual duty ran through my veins and into my vocation, my callings. And my pastors could see this in me as well. Yet as much as they applauded my ambition and insight, as much as they encouraged me and deeply cared for me, by virtue of their narrow interpretation of godly leadership, they continued to exclude women, exclude me, as a full participant in this thing called leadership.
So what’s the big deal Brenda? You might be thinking — Go and do something else.
Well I did.
I went on to study Criminology and Political Science. I worked for the federal government and provincial political parties, PR firms, and then I found myself hired at my church in my late 20s.
While I knew that God had created me to be bold and brave, to use my intellect and my creativity intertwined with my deeply-rooted faith, I could not reconcile the inner voice that felt that there was more to God, more to truly belonging in the body, than what I had known all my life, even what I was experiencing on staff early in my ministry vocational work.
Surely the Creator had not made a mistake by making me who I was?
Then why was it so hard to be myself at the one place I was supposed to belong?
* FYI — I am definitely no longer conservative in my politics. I jumped that ship about 20 years ago.