Root canal or women’s conference?
In “My Convergence Experience” on CatE Rachel wrote:
Normally, I would prefer a root canal to attending a women’s conference, but Karlene assured me that this one would be different, so I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be a wonderful experience and I am very glad I attended.
And Julie responded:
I’m like you - usually I would rather have a root canal than attend a womens event (crazy that I’m now helping plan them!!!), but this was a refreshing and encouraging experience.
And so Jim asked a great question:
- Why do a number of women say they would rather go to the dentist than to a woman’s conference?
Comment by: Julie Clawson
1 02/1/07 11:03 AM | Comment Link |So I’ll bite. I actually heard this issue come up a lot at Convergence. I felt this way last spring when I attended the Emerging Women’s ReGathering in Indy. I was scared of it being a women’s retreat, but decided to trust it because it had the label “emergent.”
So why am I averse to women’s stuff?
-generally women’s events are christianity “lite”. The theology is very very poor (if it is there at all). Any bible study is surfacey and generally takes a lot of verses way out of context. Many women are still under the delusion that women are not allow to think critically, and so what is presented is shallow and you are looked on with conempt if you try to change that.
- many women’s gatherings are focused only on emotions. There is nothing bad about emotions (and I think a lot of other settings would do well to include personal reaction times), but emotions are not all there are. I want theology, history, science, literature, philosophy. I want scholarship, tradition, and experience.
- women can be bitches, especially in the church. The gossip disguised as “prayer requests” is nauseating. The cliques, the fights over room assignments, blah blah blah… Not an environment I want to be a part of.
- most women’s stuff I’ve attended before focus on a women’s relationship with her husband and her kids. Basically they are all about teaching women how to be pigeonedholed into certain roles that the conservative church thinks they should be in. I don’t want to go be told how I can better submit, or how to pray for my husband and children, or or to be a more efficient housekeeper.
- these events often support steroetypes and cheezy faith. The promo stuff always has flowers on it. There are “spa” options. The worship stuff is so fake and performer oriented. A bunch of women talking about a male God and not really examining who we are as women. It is a place to rubber stamp contemporary christian culture.
- and they are usually (my biggest issue/struggle) women who think women must be separate from men to develop spiritually are just hurting themselves. This is something I really struggled with as I became involved with Emerging Women stuff (and for which I still get angry emails about). We do not want to create a separate but equal setting. Women should be fully involved in all types of regular church (emergent) activities. But I have come to realize that some women need the space to question and grow into equality. They need to be empowered by other women and encouraged where they are at. Sometimes this can only happen among other women. So are there issues with it all, of course, but I (obviously) have come to see its necessity.
Anyway - sorry for the superlong post/rant.
As for gathering for women who don’t identify as Christ followers. — I haven’t been to any other events, but I know there are things like the BlogHer gathering this summer (in Chicago) that may be similiar. I know the upcoming Midwest Gathering while it will have a spiritual emphasis is open to all - athiests, “pagans”, liberal and conservative Christians… Its an experiment, but I hope we could all learn from, encourage, and empower each other.
I’ll post this over at the Emerging Women blog to get more conversation going.
Comment by: NCxian
2 02/1/07 1:22 PM | Comment Link |I don’t know that I’ve heard of a women’s conference that wasn’t pretty clearly of a conservative evangelical and/or pentocostal flavor. I think I would enjoy attending one where there was a wide ROAA (range of acceptable answers).
I do have a slight inclination toward wanting both men and women at things I attend, because I like a real mix of viewpoints. As I get older, I can better understand the idea of women-only, knowing that there are some women who can only be themselves without men around. I don’t want to miss those women’s perspectives either and wouldn’t have the opportunity to know them in a mixed crowd.
Comment by: Rachel
3 02/1/07 6:41 PM | Comment Link |Wow, Julie - You just said absolutely everything I was thinking and you said it very well! Don’t apologize for ranting - that’s what we do around here. :-)
Comment by: Rachel
4 02/1/07 6:43 PM | Comment Link |I feel the same way, NCxian.
Comment by: More Than Stone :: I’ll take the root canal, thank you. :: February :: 2007
5 02/2/07 5:00 AM | Comment Link |[...] A conversation was started at Conversation At The Edge about women’s conferences, which was picked up at Church Rater, and continued on Emerging women. The statement was made by Rachel that she would rather have a root canal than go to a woman’s conference. [...]
Comment by: Helen
6 02/2/07 6:57 AM | Comment Link |Thanks Julie - that was a great response.
I think I’d also rather go to the dentist, so I read your comments with interest and have been thinking about how my experiences with womens’ gatherings are like yours and how they are different.
I’ve been to four kinds of Christian womens’ groups:
1) BSF conference and meetings
2) The Christian Working Woman conference and meetings
3) Womens’ ministry meetings run by churches
4) MOPS
The good thing is, they didn’t all have all the problems you cite.
I loved that BSF was free of the “lavender table cloth and flowers” and it certainly was about serious Bible study - no concessions were made because we were ‘women’. My first impression of BSF was “Wow, these people are serious about studying the Bible” and I loved that. I also found it very empowering to women because there was ongoing talk of ‘your ministry’ and that didn’t necessarily mean ‘look after your husband and children’. Rather it was an open invitation to go do anything God has called you to do. Admittedly BSF believes the view that some roles are for men only. However in practice their top leaders are all women (I think they rationalize this by having male board members in the background) and they role-model strong smart women thinking seriously about what the Bible says and what ministries God wants them to serve in.
It probably helps that the founder of it never married, so she did not have a ‘husband and children’ focus. (Since then the Executive Directors - they are on their third - have been married women -but the focus has not changed)
The Christian Working Women does go in for lavender table cloths and flowers. However, of course being a working woman is affirmed. The founder worked for a big company for a while and is divorced with a child (now grown) so she can address many things women face from her own experiences. She has a very practical emphasis in her teaching - like how to handle being single and how to resist workplace pressure to do unethical things. I remember much more topical teaching from her than exposition of passages, but it wasn’t Bible study lite.
Neither BSF nor TCCW place undue emphasis on emotions. If anything they might feel intimidating to women who are rather unstructured, creative and emotional. Although, I’ve encountered many kind generous women through my involvement in them.
Church womens’ ministry meetings varied according to who lead them and who was speaking. They did rather like the lavender table cloths and flowers.
MOPS also was into the lavender table cloths and flowers. And the craft was never something I was very into - I quit doing them after a number of meetings and just chatted with people during ‘craft time’ instead. Our MOPS group was more mixed than many (so I heard) - only about half of the women professed to be Christians and our speakers often didn’t speak on Christian topics. When a conservative Christian speaker came one time there were some complaints afterwards about some remarks she made. I decided to write for their (local) newsletter as a sort of attempt at low-key evangelism/introducing Biblical concepts in a friendly way.
Anyway - I think the bottom line of why women would rather go to the dentist seems to be “What’s affirmed here doesn’t include me”. It keeps coming back to me, that verse in Hebrews which says Jesus suffered outside the city gates. He was an outsider. Whenever there was an in-crowd and then everyone else, he was one of the everyone else’s.
I think the church has made a huge mistake insofar as they have made him the leader of the ‘in-crowd’.
What I envisage is, whenever Jesus is in an in-crowd gathering, with in-crowd folks all trying to get to him to flatter him, instead of responding and chatting he’d have a distracted look in his eye and in a moment, he’d wander off and go start talking to someone who was off by themselves and ignored by the in-crowd because he/she is definitely not ‘in’.
Comment by: Rachel
7 02/2/07 1:48 PM | Comment Link |Well said, Helen!
Comment by: NCxian
8 02/3/07 6:28 PM | Comment Link |Helen, you said:
I’m not sure what you are saying here, Helen. Do you think that the women who attend the women’s meetings are the “in” crowd and women who would rather have root canals are “out”? In what sense?
I am thinking that I usually consider the women’s conferences I’m familiar with as being for women who are different from me in some way. But I don’t feel “out”, I just feel like a person with different preferences. If the folks at those things think Jesus is hanging out with them and not with me, I just think of them as folks with a limited point of view. And of course, I think Jesus agrees with me about that!
Comment by: Helen
9 02/3/07 7:37 PM | Comment Link |NCxian wrote:
Well, in BSF there definitely was a lot of talk about women who didn’t realize that studying the Bible i.e. coming to BSF was more important than whatever else caused them to decline our invitations to them to join BSF.
So, women who preferred other things were ‘unenlightened’.
That’s great.
They’re ‘unenlightened’, perhaps? ;-)
But of course!
Comment by: Helen
10 02/3/07 7:37 PM | Comment Link |Thanks Rachel!
Comment by: Rachel
11 02/4/07 8:09 AM | Comment Link |So would that make it a boundary-focused group?
Comment by: NCxian
12 02/4/07 12:39 PM | Comment Link |Hmmm, maybe this center vs. boundary focused thing is why I didn’t understand Helen’s first in/out comment (which I understand better now, Helen, thanks).
Perhaps because I never attend them, I think of things like BSF as places whose purpose is to “attract” a certain kind of person for a particular purpose (center-focused). Because I am not that kind of person, I’m not attracted to that particular “center” but it doesn’t bother me that some people are. Now Helen enlightens me ( ;) ) that the folks there, intentionally or not, draw “boundaries” which include some and exclude others. If I were interested in that “center”, it would certainly bother me if a fence was put up and I was left outside. (Since I’m not, of course I don’t care one way or another).
The “center” vs. “boundary” focused paradigm is explained in a very cool way in The Shaping of Things to Come, by Frost and Hirsch. I highly recommend it if you are into thinking about the way we have done, and will do, church in the coming decades.
Comment by: Rachel
13 02/4/07 5:06 PM | Comment Link |So perhaps it is a type of bait-and-switch. Come because you are attracted to the center but then if you want to remain, you must stay inside these boundaries. How often are people drawn to Jesus because he brings freedom, only to become part of a church and find themselves forced to conform and give up freedom?
Comment by: NCxian
14 02/4/07 5:50 PM | Comment Link |Good point.