Every kid loved and respected Mrs. Pat.
Each Sunday morning, I and every other kid less than 13 years old in my church, went to our respective Sunday School classes for 45 minutes. These were divided up among grade levels and had small groups of 5-10 kids in each class. After these small group lessons, all kids ages 5-12 went to “Children’s Church”.
The adults didn’t want a bunch of antsy kids being loud and moving around during the adult worship service. At some point, they had the great idea to create “Children’s Church” so they could have an hour of sermons and songs sans kids. Of course, that meant that someone would need to be in charge of the kids, make sure they didn’t run out into the street and perhaps even provide some quality education for them. Cut to Mrs. Pat.
She was a perfect mixture of silly and serious. She had puppets, the old fashioned kind inspired by Jim Henson’s muppets and widely embraced by the Christian culture of the 1970s and 80s as a tool to reach children. She used animated voices when she talked and every Sunday, she had an imaginative and impressive Children’s Church lesson prepared for the very large congregation of fidgety kids.
To be an authority figure for so many, she was relatively small in stature. She was a smaller woman, always in make-up, always in a dress and always ready to deliver a Bible lesson. Her hair was that always perfect bouffant of the time period with a little bit of blonde always trying to turn to gray.
Children’s Church was her domain and she ran a tight ship. There was a schedule and routine of events that was almost military in its precision. She had done her research and she knew exactly what kids in this age range needed in order to retain information. She was also surgical in her behavior management. She was a badass.
I was not always the easiest kid to manage. Quite distinctly, I recall the first few songs and activities allowing us to move our bodies, to be loud and to have fun. Near the end of this time, she brought the energy down noticeably and when she began to move into the listening time of the service, even I knew that it was time to be quiet. When I would get restless or start talking to my neighbor, it only took one stern look from Mrs. Pat to shut me up.
When I think back on the years I spent in Children’s Church some 40-50 years ago, I don’t find it the least bit odd that Mrs. Pat ran things so efficiently. What I do find odd is how she was even in charge of Children’s Church in the first place. You see, this was a Southern Baptist Church and she, if you haven't guess it, was a woman. (I guess you've noticed this post isn't about art or running. I hope you'll stick around anyway.)
I’m not really even sure this is still news because it’s been a known thing in the churches I grew up in for my whole life, but the Southern Baptist Church recently had their annual meeting and said again, officially that women should be quiet in the church and definitely not have any leadership roles. I’m not the least bit interested in your opinion about this decision. If you’d like to discuss the theological background for such a rule, I would welcome that conversation. I’d love to discuss with you how many Biblical scholars do not believe that Paul actually wrote half of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament and how it’s dangerous to take a single line written 1000+ years ago to a different culture and attempt to apply it literally out of it’s original context. But that’s not why we’re here today.
When I was in the Children’s Church age range, I have vivid memories of playing in the nursery rooms across the hall from the church office while my mom kept up with the business of the church. She was the church secretary and in addition to logging the minutes of every church business meeting, she also had other business responsibilities that helped keep the church physically afloat while I stacked blocks next door or simply played under the giant conference table in the office. Looking back now, it’s difficult to balance how important my mom’s role was for the church and how unfit for leadership they viewed her.
We also had Mrs. Helen. (Baptists apparently love calling a female Mrs. and then her first name.) She took care of the younger children during the worship service times. Mrs. Fay was in charge of Vacation Bible School each summer and did all the planning and organizing for that including the long range planning and the day-to-day planning. Then there were the nursery workers. God bless those longsuffering ladies! Every Sunday they held crying, sick babies dumped off on the nursery while parents (and all the men) sat quietly in the service on the other side of the building.
Let’s not forget the many, many women who served each Sunday as Sunday School teachers. For kids, obviously, because how could they possibly teach men, right? Unless the men were just young boys, then it was ok. My mom was one of these too, teaching 5th and 6th grade girls as far back as I can remember. Many of my Sunday School teachers were women until I made it to the teen years.
Mrs. Pat had a daughter my age. As my friends and I moved into our teenage years, our friendship with Mrs. Pat’s daughter allowed us an open window into her life outside of Children’s Church. The church wanted to move to a more modern system of handling Sunday morning worship services and this meant moving Mrs. Pat out of her role. It was easy to feel the secondhand sensitivity involved when you saw someone so dedicated and serious about her leadership role for so many years get told that she was no longer needed. The expression I learned in church years earlier was “rode hard and put up wet” in reference to the mistreatment of work horses. Mrs. Pat spent many years in service as a work horse for her church and was quickly cast aside when the church decided she wasn’t their future.
She hid her hurt feelings well from us as we were socially around her house for a few years during high school. She never said a negative word about church to us. Still, we knew. Just like we knew there were mixed messages in the rules of the church. We sat through sermons about how women shouldn’t be deacons, pastors or paid staff ministers. Then we saw women doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes in the church. It was no secret that any strict adherence to such a rule about women not leading in the church would reduce the number of weekly events at the church down to one. The sermon. There would be no music because that took the work of women on the piano (Thank you Robin.), the organ (Mrs. Peggy) and more than half the choir. No Sunday School because men wouldn’t be caught dead corralling all those wild kids. No covered dish lunches because, duh. No one would get paid because even after my mom stopped being the secretary and they actually started paying someone to do it full time, she was also a woman (Mrs. Francis).
Echo chambers are tough places to hear new voices. When a group of boys get together and make a “no girls allowed” rule, you can kind of understand that they just want to be left alone and maybe it’s innocent enough. When a group of adult men get together and make a “no women allowed” rule, you have to start wondering what that’s about. If you believe that comes from a literal interpretation of something written to a middle eastern church over 1000 years ago, you should also wonder why that particular letter got voted into the approved texts and why many other letters that mentioned the important leadership roles of women did not. And if you want to be truly objective, you have to at least consider why men would want to keep women out of these positions. Do the men have something to gain? Something to fear?
Just don't look for answers to those questions in your echo chamber. You'll only get the same rhetoric and dogma that has the old stamp of approval on it. Questions are bad in echo chambers. Education is frowned upon. Echos are simply the same thing repeated back again and again in systems completely built by likeminded people. Maybe you are a very learned individual with a PHD or some other letters behind your name. I think that's great, as long as you understand the curriculum you studied was built around a very specific interpretation of the Bible. The professors who mentored you had to sign a covenant agreement to not speak, teach or conduct research outside of the established and approved system of beliefs. They taught you what they were taught from the same system. And now you believe that's the (capital T) Truth and that every other Bible scholar is wrong. Hello! (Hello, hello, hello, hello).
If you adhere to a different flavor of Christianity, you probably think this whole topic is goofy. I mean, didn't the church notice that Mrs. Pat had a perfectly capable husband? Why wasn't he the one with all the God-given talent for teaching kids? Surely Mrs. Pat wouldn't have been gifted leadership skills if she wasn't supposed to use them.
If you lean towards being a Southern Baptist, you should know the Southern Baptist Church has a bit of an image problem that doesn’t stand up to close inspection. And you have to wonder whose image they are currently bearing. I have to wonder, in the end, did Mrs. Pat feel loved? Or just used? And after she was no longer needed, did her church even care?
