For many Christian women, a woman’s role in the church’s ecosystem has long been fixed. But Beth Allison Barr, a historian and the wife of a pastor, felt compelled to challenge the prevailing narrative surrounding women in North American Christianity using history.
This culminated in “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” in 2021, a book rebutting the idea that women’s existence in Christianity hinges on their submissiveness and arguing that it is rather the result of significant moments throughout history.
Her dreams for her daughter, who was about 8 or 9 when Barr first mulled over the idea for the book, drove her decision to pursue the project. “I just remember thinking, ‘You know what? If I want her to have choices that women don’t have, the needle has to move.’”
The book was a catalyst for Barr but, after its publication, it also unleashed a torrent of harassment.
“I was like, ‘I didn’t really want to be in this space. I didn’t want to put my family in this space.’ All I want to do is just disappear.” Eventually, the feelings of doubt subsided, in no small part because of the outpouring of support she received from women around the world, whose own interpretations of biblical womanhood were reconstructed by Barr’s words.
“I still remember this letter that I got from a young woman in China who got her professor who spoke English to email me, contact me on Instagram, DM me on Twitter …,” Barr recalled. “I remember one of the things that she said in it: ‘For the first time, I realized that Jesus is for me and not against me.’”
More women and LGBTQ+ people are looking within themselves and their church communities and stepping into leadership roles. Corrie Aune, a photojournalist, set out to document these leaders.
“I wanted to highlight the diversity within church leadership that often goes unrepresented in media coverage, especially coverage of Texas,” Aune, who grew up in Texas, told The 19th in an email.
She added, “I also wanted to acknowledge the barriers that women and LGBTQ+ people often face in seeking leadership, belonging and full participation within the church.”
Here are the stories of some of the pastors in Texas who are helping lead the charge.
Babs Miller
The first time Babs Miller stood before their congregation at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, they were bathed with warmth. They saw the same kindness that they preached about in their sermons reflected in the faces that stared back at them.
Ministry was a calling they had fervently rejected for decades.
“I did not figure out I was a lesbian until I got to seminary, and I didn’t get to seminary till I was in my 40s,” said Miller, who is now 83. “So by the time I figured out that I was a lesbian, it’s my second year in seminary and I thought, ‘I can’t get ordained. I finally have my evidence for God that this is a mistake. I kept telling you this all my life.’ God and I had battled over my going to seminary since I was 17.”
It was at 17 years old that Miller had their first brush with ministerial duty. It came by chance at church camp, after they and a group of children listened to excerpts from the 1949 stage play “Death of a Salesman,” in which the central figure takes his own life at the end of the production.
“This girl who was in the class who was so quiet I did not even know her name, comes up to me and says, ‘Can we talk?’” Miller said. “She asked me point-blank what I believed about suicide.”
The question marked a turning point for Miller.
I want them to feel the love that is here for them. And to share that love with others.”
Babs Miller
“Well, I’m 17 years old. I’ve got all the answers. I know what the Bible says about suicide, but the words that came out of my mouth were not my words,” Miller recalled. “I absolutely felt like I was sitting up in the tree watching this scene take place below me, and there was a person there who looked like me talking to this girl. But I really have no idea what I said to her, but whatever I said to her let her know that she was okay. Her dad had committed suicide as it turned out, and apparently I told her that it was okay.”
When Miller went to staff to inform them of the interaction, “They say to me, ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a minister?’”
Miller’s position at St. Andrew’s today is a far cry from where they were at 17 years old, when the prospect of leading a church seemed out of reach. Now, they are among a number of members of the LGBTQ+ community who are reconstructing how Christianity is taught.
“I want people to have hope and to not lose sight of that,” they said. “And I want them to feel the love that is here for them. And to share that love with others.”
Janice Bryant
For many women like the Rev. Janice Bryant, 76, the idea of leading a congregation seemed improbable, bordering on taboo.
“I came out of seminary with that belief that women could not be preachers, that women should not be preachers,” she recounted. Bryant serves as an associate pastor at Ebenezer Third Baptist Church in Austin. “So having gotten a call spiritually, it was sort of embarrassing. And that’s a strange way to put it, but it’s sort of like, ‘Why would you call me into something that is so controversial, something that is probably not going to happen anyway?’”
Her religious background was conservative, and a woman’s role was clearly defined by the church. Still, Bryant became a minister at Ebenezer in 2000 and, in 2003, became the first ordained female minister in Austin, a feat that was met with opposition from traditionalists and became a significant point of contention within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
“I don’t know if it’s a lack of enlightenment or if it’s just been a tradition for so long, or if it’s the thing where men have the authority and are not willing to relinquish it,” Bryant said about the Southern Baptist Church’s refusal to ordain women. “I can only guess at why those things don’t happen. I go to a place and they say, ‘All ministers, raise your hand.’ I don’t even bother, because they’re not going to recognize me anyway.”
As a matter of fact, it’s almost a source of pride that they do have a woman minister.”
Janice Bryant
She recalled an order that was enacted by the SBC in Austin at one point that attempted to prevent women from becoming ministers. But for Bryant, her congregants’ faith in her ability to lead has never wavered.
“My thing is, when God calls a minister, God calls a church also,” she said. “So this was a church of acceptance, and this is a church that accepted me. And right now, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in this church who would have a problem. As a matter of fact, it’s almost a source of pride that they do have a woman minister.”
Irie Session and Kamilah Hall Sharp
Dr. Irie Session, 66, and Dr. Kamilah Hall Sharp, 49, are co-pastors and founders of The Gathering in Dallas, a church that centers on womanism, a term coined by author and activist Alice Walker in 1982 to specifically acknowledge the overlapping struggles experienced by Black women.
“We center the experiences of Black women in our preaching and our things,” Sharp said.
The church has prioritized equality and equity as core pillars of its teachings. The church is also concerned with eliminating what it calls P.M.S. — patriarchy, misogyny and sexism.
“Womanists are concerned about the survival and wholeness and wellness of entire communities — male and female, and so all marginalized people,” Session said. “We are advocates for their full flourishing and survival, right? Whereas when feminism was what it was, what was centered really was the experiences of White women.”
We center the experiences of Black women in our preaching and our things.”
Dr. Kamilah Hall Sharp
The use of womanism in theological studies dates back to the late 1960s among Black seminary women, according to Session and Sharp.
“There’s no Black liberation without Black women, and so where’s our voice?” Session said. Black seminary women used Walker’s definition of womanism to create a “methodology for preaching” and centered on its four tenets: radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self love and critical engagement.
There is no senior pastor. Rather, their services — all of which are conducted from a womanist lens — are informed by the church’s members, who play an equal role in advancing its mission.
“Me and Dr. Irie are co-pastors, but everybody in our church is a ministry partner,” Sharp said. “They have a voice and all the ministries that we have, it comes from people asking to do the things. There are certain things that we believe as a congregation, but things like that, it comes from the community and their experiences and what they want to do.”
The church’s values of equality include the LGBTQIA+ community. The minister of congregational care is a Black lesbian who preaches regularly, the pastors shared. The former minister of worship and arts was a transgender woman, who has since found a position in Boston. And the minister of music is a gay Black man.
Session said. For Session and Sharp, the importance of supporting the LGBTQA+ isn’t something they just preach. It’s something they actively apply to real life.
“When trans Black women in Dallas are murdered or beaten, we show up physically to advocate for them, to pray with them, to be of support to them,” Session said. “We’ve been a part of press conferences around the violence toward Black trans women. So, you know, we do the best we can to make what we say we believe a live reality.”
Fernanda Casar
Fernanda Casar’s call to seminary wasn’t a spectacular revelation. “I remember it was nothing supernatural,” she said. “You know, I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t see a cloud or anything like that.” Rather, it arrived as a messianic passage — Isaiah 61.
It was about “rebuilding and restoring the ruins and and serving the poor and serving the blind and all that,” she said. “I felt like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And it was just a conviction within myself that I was going to do it. Whether here, there, I didn’t have any idea, but that was just a conviction.”
The United Methodist Church (UMC) granted women full clergy rights in 1956, which meant that women in leadership roles at the church was not a new phenomenon to Casar, now a 39-year-old associate pastor at Bethany United Methodist Church in Austin. But, as she advanced beyond seminary, she realized just how different their experiences were.
“I started to question a lot of things and to see that, despite having women in ministry, almost all of them were very relegated to rural communities, small churches with very few salaries,” she said.
Later when she became a teacher at the seminary, she said, “I started to notice that the female students were assigned to churches that needed children’s ministry or you know things like that, and male students — they were at the pulpit, preaching and doing stuff. I started to notice all these disparities and to question and that’s when things started to get a little tough.”
In 2020, she was laid off from her position teaching at seminary because she was “too progressive and too feminist for them.”
“It was tough because I grew up there, so I knew almost all the pastors. I knew their kiddos. I grew up with their kiddos and now I was like the black sheep,” she said. “I was the one bringing all these ideas against the Bible. I was starting to talk about inclusivity, and that was from Satan, you know, and all that.”
Casar also encountered resistance at several of the churches she later went on to teach. “I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, but the majority of them struggle a little bit with the fact that I was a woman, and not only a woman, but I was younger than the majority, and also I was an immigrant, right? So those three things, one way or another, they become like a struggle for some people.”
I pray that I can serve, that I can show God to them through what I do.”
Fernanda Casar
Casar said her identity as a woman has not hampered her experiences in her current position at Bethany United Methodist, largely because she’s the latest in a considerably long string of women ministers. But she feels there’s a responsibility that accompanies preaching as a Mexican-born immigrant in the UMC.
“I feel that sometimes people don’t have any idea what that means, what it represents, and all the birth and mental burden that we carry every single day,” she said.
As a leader at a predominantly White church, Casar said she and her congregation are looking forward to her ushering in more diverse voices.
“This is different. But I pray that I can serve, that I can show God to them through what I do.”