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• Ms. Sentilles official site
• About A Church of Her Own
• "'He looked like Jesus Christ'"

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Author explains why women face difficulty when seeking leadership roles in church communities. (2:22)
 

Full Interview (11:42)
 

Tavis: Sarah Sentilles is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School who recently earned her doctorate in theology from Harvard. Her own experiences in trying to become an ordained Episcopal priest served as jumping off point for the new book, "A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit." Sarah, nice to have you on the program.

Sarah Sentilles: Thank you for having me here.

Tavis: My read of the text is not even so much, with all due respect, to the subtitle. It's not so much what happens when a woman takes the pulpit as much as it is what happens when a woman tries to get to the pulpit, yes?

Sentilles: That's true, that's true. From the very beginning, once women feel this call to ministry and it comes in a variety of forms, some actually feel the voice of God, some experience the call through their friends or in the pages of a book, once that moment of clarity happens, from then it's kind of downhill.

Divinity schools and seminaries are usually a pretty positive experience, but they have struggles with mentors, struggles trying to find jobs, applying for jobs, struggles with assistant ministers once they get jobs, they're often offered part-time work or work where they're paid less than their male counterparts and it's really a struggle all the way through.

Tavis: Help me understand that. Juxtapose for me the point you made a moment ago that there is some joy in the process of going through school, but it's downhill after that process. How can one be, for lack of a better word, fulfilling and then yet so downhill the rest of the way?

Sentilles: It's strange. I really think there's a gap between what people are taught in divinity schools and seminaries. We get exposed to Black theology, liberation theology, womanist theology, feminist theology, all different kinds of ways of thinking about what's possible in church communities of the twenty-first century.

But then, once you leave school and you have all these ideas about what's possible for churches to be agents of justice, then you find congregations that are more averse to change. There seems to be a gap between what is being preached and practiced in church communities and what's being taught in divinity schools and seminaries.

Tavis: I don't mean to be naïve, Sarah, in asking this question, but how is it that those obstacles still exist? It's one thing if this book were written a hundred years ago, I guess, but how in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, womanist world ever, how does this still happen?

Sentilles: Well, churches remain places that are still fairly segregated church communities. My exposure has been in white mainstream Protestant tradition and it's the most male dominated profession that there is. Even though it was one of the first professions to encounter proposals to admit women to it, it's actually one of the last to do so.

There are still several denominations that don't allow women to be ministers. I think it filters all the way through from policies to theology to the kinds of prayers to the language we use to talk about God. All of those things serve as barriers for women.

Tavis: I don't know if this question is bold or silly, maybe a little bit of both.

Sentilles: I like bold and silly.

Tavis: That's probably what it is, bold and silly. But here's the question. How is it that the church - the reality is, the church simply would not exist, as you well know, without women. I come out of the Black church tradition and God knows there is no Black church without Black women and that's quite frankly true across the board.

There is no church without women and yet women continue to be subjugated. It's almost an apartheid situation for women in the church body. I guess the question is, how does that still exist, number one, and if the women just pulled out, wouldn't the church just kind of collapse?

Sentilles: I think it would. Definitely it would collapse. I mean, there's been organized walkouts before of women. There was one in the Harvard Divinity School Chapel where Peter Gomes now is. Our Memorial Church is the name of it. But I think that a majority of churches are effectively headed by women. A majority of congregations are women.

So it's really this kind of strange minority of leadership that is having this impact, but at the same time, the tradition seems to support that kind of sexism and I think that's what serves as a barrier where call them biblical texts or tradition or what the Vatican says and what I think is the possibility of having women is that if we're brave enough to start to change those things, change the way we think about God, change the kinds of policies that we have, then it can really usher people into an adult relationship with their faith where they realize we're always picking and choosing what we believe.

Tavis: What's uniquely different then about the church that has kept women from doing that en masse? What I mean to suggest by that is that, in the civil rights movement, you know, were involved. You know, from Fannie Lou Hamer, run the list. Diane Nash. There were women involved in the civil rights movement. There's certainly women involved in the feminist movement. There are women involved in the gay and lesbian struggle. Run the list. Animal rights, anything.

What is it about the church per se or about religion per se that keeps women from engaging themselves, pressing the issue, boycotting, protesting, walking out if they must, to change an institution that they know again wouldn't exist if they left it?

Sentilles: I think women are doing that. I think that they're - one of the questions is how do you make change from within an institution or from without? How long do you stay? I think part of the problem is, a lot of people get fed up and leave. That's what's happened to me. I haven't been able to find a place within institutional religion that feels like home for me.

But I think that people are - the scary part, the story is told as if it's new that women want to be ordained or it's new within the last fifty or sixty years. But history has shown that women have always been leaders in church communities and I think that's what's important for us to claim, that textual evidence, biblical evidence, historical evidence, women have been leaders and are leaders. It's just a question of naming that and claiming that that's the case.

Tavis: I want to ask two questions. The first is more about the Sarah Sentilles story. The book, as I mentioned earlier, is really a jumping off point from your own experiences. Take a minute to tell me about your experience.

Sentilles: Well, I was an elementary school teacher in Compton, California. While I was doing that, I had what to me was a conversion experience where I started to understand that my privilege was linked up with oppression which is something that took me a long time to understand.

While I was doing that and understanding that poverty and wealth are linked and oppression and privilege are linked, I became a member of All Saints Church in Pasadena. I decided that churches could be agents of justice that could help bring into being a place where the fear and greed that's created in the same cities of Compton and Beverly Hills could combat that kind of injustice.

So I decided I wanted to be a priest and do that kind of work, but when I moved across the country to Cambridge to attend Harvard, I couldn't find a church that was engaged in that kind of work and it seemed to me that actually churches were fighting against justice work. So my journey was kind of one fight after another where I eventually decided I couldn't do the work I wanted to do in the world within the institutional church.

Tavis: How did you navigate? How have you and how are you navigating your life post that reality? Because it must not feel good.

Sentilles: No. This book emerged out of that experience because, when it happened to me, I thought it was my fault. I really internalized it. I thought I wasn't Christian enough or faithful enough or didn't believe in Jesus the right way or I was too political. But then I started paying attention to what was happening to the women I went to school with.

They were all having similar experiences, so this book really emerged out of my attempt to try to figure out what was happening to women. Why were these bright, faithful, creative women leaving ministry or struggling as ordained ministers? I actually emerged much more hopeful. There are some extremely powerful ministers working and it seems like we're on the path forward.

Tavis: Which is question number two, at least in this vein, which is what - the book, of course, details this, but what are the women saying who you are talking to about the struggles that they are having?

Sentilles: They're having struggles on every level. They're experiencing struggles with their senior ministers. A lot of times it's known as the stained glass ceiling. Women are only hired to be associates or assistants and it's really hard to - the larger the church, the more wealthier the church, the more resistant they are to hiring women.

But they experience difficulty in what clothing they're allowed to wear. They experience difficulty with their politics or the kind of language that they use. But at the same time, they feel really supported by their sense that God is calling them to do this work and they're just so incredible that I have hope that the church is going to be transformed by their work.

Tavis: There's a fascinating example that you offer in the book. I think it's Catherine and Jesse.

Sentilles: Um-hum.

Tavis: Tell the story about them.

Sentilles: Catherine and Jesse met each other in seminary in New York, Episcopal seminary, and they applied for jobs at the same time. It's kind of similar to experiments that are done where you submit resumes that have typically white names or resumes that have stereotypically Black names and see what happens. They did it except in terms of gender. They're almost identical on paper and they did the same kind of application process.

They went through the process and it just exposed sexism at the job search level where Catherine would get one-line emails asking for her to submit her resume and Jesse would get two pages single spaced from the priest who just couldn't wait to meet him. At the end of the process, Jesse was offered six jobs and Catherine got no offers at all, even though they're practically identical.

Tavis: Take me inside. I've been at a couple divinity schools in the last year myself speaking, but I'm just a guest speaker. I haven't had to live the experience. Take me inside divinity schools and tell me what they're doing these days, what they're saying, how they're training, how they're teaching, how they're aiding and abetting the problem or helping with progress.

Sentilles: I think that they're helping with progress. By at least in my experience, I was exposed to a wide variety of liberation theologies and that was really powerful for me and helped me claim God in a new way.

But I think what's not happening is sexism isn't being named overtly and women aren't being told, "You're gonna experience sexism, you're gonna experience racism and this is how you name it; this is how you align with others so that you don't internalize it and feel alone and isolated, and this is how we're gonna help congregations prepare to receive the young female ministers that we're training."

So I think that's a big part of the problem. It hasn't been named and there isn't institutional support around what women are going to face.

Tavis: Specifically, when you name it in a book called "A Church of Her Own," how likely is it and how hopeful are you that progress is made if there are folk on the inside who may view this as an attack on them?

Sentilles: I hope that they don't view it as an attack. I've gotten a lot of letters and emails and phone calls. People have actually called me that I don't know to tell me what a powerful story it is for them. I think women ministers and a lot of Protestant denominations have felt really alone and, for them to read this story and to find themselves within it, has emboldened them and empowered them to be stronger in their ministry.

So my hope is that it will get a new kind of conversation. And if people get upset, that's good. I think we can have a lot of progress with conflict.

Tavis: For the guys inside the church, the guys who don't get it, what's it gonna take for them to get it, if anything?

Sentilles: Well, I'm hopeful that they get it. The funny thing about that - well, not the funny - the tragic part is that a lot of the ministers that I interviewed, the most violent sexism that they experienced was at the hands of other women, which is something that I think women need to work on. How do we support each other? How do we strengthen each other?

I think that, when you start to shift your understanding of women in the church and the role of women in the church, your understanding of God will also shift and that can be scary for people. So my hope is that people will be brave enough to do the work that's required.

Tavis: You hopeful?

Sentilles: I am hopeful. What gives me hope is the fact that there are little boys and little girls sitting in pews now seeing the kinds of ministers that I interviewed and that's normal for them to have a woman minister. It's something that's normal. It's not unusual. So one of the women I interviewed said, "The train's already left the station. There's no going back" and I really believe that's true.

Tavis: I think it's a text written out of courage. It's called "A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit." It's written by Sarah Sentilles. Sarah, thanks for the text. Nice to have you on the program.

Sentilles: Thank you for having me here.

Tavis: My pleasure. All the best to you.