Sad and speechless

I've just posted a piece on the Women in Ministries blog at http://womenministrynetwork.blogspot.com/2010/02/treatment-of-women-in-yarls-wood.html
about the treatment of some women detained in Yarl's Wood Immigration Centre. You may have seen the hunger strike there reported in the press recently.
The events described by Mojirola, a detainee from Nigeria with three British born children, are appauling. I'm sad but speechless.
The forgein secretary seems to think it is OK to hide information about the abuse of a British resident on the grounds that it might negatively influence our relationship with another country, as reported earlier this week. I wonder what country wants to continue such a relationship. It's like a person deciding not to report her/his brother-in-law for domestic violence because he might not speak to him/her again!
Doubtless the home secretary will now find some way of fudging the issue about the abusive treatment of women in Yarl's Wood. These are our sisters.

These are our sisters,
wonderful sisters:
resourceful,
persistent.
We will not forget them.

She's a woman

If you've not already seen the poet laureate's poem for the 12 days of Christmas you must not miss it. It is at http://www.radiotimes.com/content/features/carol-ann-duffy-the-twelve-days-of-christmas/
Well done Carol Ann Duffy. It's moving, it's relevant and it's really good. I always knew we needed a woman as poet laureate.
In these snowy Huddersfield days when everything is covered in a thick blanket of white such that you can be forgiven for thinking nothing else exisits outside the warm shell you have created we need this stuff to keep us active and concious. Note the 12 drummers drumming - drumming for Cpenhagen still. If we'd gone on a few verses we might have made it to 350 ringers ringing and got further than the delegates themselves managed to.

Women, leadership and the church

Jane has been blogging about this so I thought I should get onto it too. She has 'blogged my memory' so to speak. Yesterday I meet women who are in leadership in the church. One told me about the bible studies she had facilitated using some of the RB methods that are on the Wision4life website. Another I had last seen in her kitchen in South Africa 15 years ago, at the end of our exchange period in 1994. She's now in ministry in Kent. I came home and read a bit in the Guardian about women clergy in the Church of England by Riazat Butt [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/12/women-in-the-church]. There were some interesting bits:

Of the 512 male clergy who left in 1994 when women were ordained as priests, 72 came back. What's that story?

Of the 8,423 stipendiary clergy a smaller proportion are women (1,543) than are the nonstipendiary clergy (2,588 of whom 1,247 are women). What's the story? We had a similar disproportion in the two different streams in the URC at the time we wrote Daughters of Dissent (that's it on the right: about women and leadership in the URC).


Then there were a few thumbnail sketches about the ways in which women clergy currently exercsie leadership in the Church of England, including the story of one who now chairs several important committees. The URC also does committees and we have tried to balance committee members by gender. however, what we have not dealt with is work load by gender or any other criterion.


I also wondered about the story behind the story. For women clergy to lead committees is one story but why do we need ordained clergy to lead committees? All denominations do this: clog up the church beurocracy with ordained clergy. Why? Particularly when most mainstream churches also struggle with the availability of ordinaed leadership at local pastoral level. Why do we need priests or ministers, women or men, to chair committees? Of course you are hearing from a total meetings-phobic person here. I can understand that knowledge and skills in theology and ecclessiology etc may be required of a committee chair, depending on the remit of the committee. But to struggle for all those years for ordination of women to the priesthood and then celebrate by chairing a committee, however prestigious, well I just don't get it. Please someone, tell me the story of that.


Daughters of Dissent by Elaine Kaye, Janet Lees and Kirstry Thorpe is still available from the URC bookshop via the website http://www.urc.org.uk/

Another interesting blog

Yes I'm getting the blogging bug. Every morning I look at blogs - it's a great way of passing the time when there's loads of other things to do. Jane's blog is a good source of other blog information. She told me about http://powerscourt.blogspot.com/ where Suzanne McCarthy has listed some women bible translators. As 'speech therapist theologica' language and the bible are two important things to me. Whilst I take an oral/aural approach to remembering the bible with people of all ages and abilities myself, I also admire the work of translators. I'm interested in women bible retellers and will try to list some of those in due course. Suzanne McCarthy has another brilliant blog of poems at http://silenceistheornament.blogspot.com/ that I will add to my blog list. It has some very good posts about silence.

Women

Since we had the Women in Ministries meeting in Windermere (should that be Womendermere?) I've certainly done more blogging and connected with more women this way. This has helped me feel more connected. Ministry is about connection but so often as a minister I have felt isolated: no wonder then that it has often seemed very hard. I was struck by my friends blogs: Sarah wrote very personally about a pastoral situation. Now Sarah is a wonderful woman. One I admire a lot in the calm and careful way she goes about ministry. Through her blog I feel more connected to her given that I don't see her as much since we moved to Huddersfield. I was struck by my friend Kate's blog in which she wrote about using remembered versions of the bible, Kennings and also the remembered stories of ministry. Kate is a wonderful women who's creative and warm approach to ministry I admire. Once again I found it very affirming to connect like this and see us tackling similar issues side by side even though on different sides of the Pennines. Jane's blog is always a source of inspiration and fun. For me her 'prix choc' should have been about the price of chocolate. But there's always something on her blog that reminds me of Jane's great facility with laguage and her ability to make connections across so many subjects. So here's to wonderful women.
Of course, not being Superwoman either, I know I don't find all women so affirming or all encounters with women so positive. So these words are to spur me on, to help more look at all women as I look at Sarah, Kate and Jane, and to go on trying to connect to the wonderful in all women.

Here’s to women

Here’s to women, wonderful women:
warm women, cold women,
working women, creative women,
wild women, wistful women,
watchful women, mindful women.

Here’s to women, wonderful women:
reminding me who I am,
encouraging me how to be,
waiting alongside of me,
bringing love to birth in me.

Here’s to women, wonderful women,
both known and unknown.
As the world turns
may we turn to each other
and affirm what we discover there.

Communicating with bloggin wimin

I like communicating with bloggin wimin. I think I'm getting more of the hang of it. I often speak to my friends on the phone but bloggin is a bit different. Yesterday I went to St Mark's Wynthenshaw (I will find out how to put that link up on my blog) where my friend Kate and I talked about 'remembering the Bible' and all the exciting workshops we're going to do later this year. This morning I read the blogs on the WIM blog and got excited about the fact that in just a few weeks so many more of us are bloggin. When we put bloggin in the plan for WIM I thought it would be good to have Jane get us started and so it has been. Now loads of us are bloggin. I already feel more connected to Sarah - who I see in Sheffield ocassionally, and Jacky - who I see once in a blue moon - because I can read their blogs and send them comments. So bloggin is workin. It is helping us to connect up our stories. Keep at it bloggin wimin. If you're reading this and not yet bloggin, why not start?

Women who blog

Last week at Windermere I meet some other women who blog and that got me started again. Actually I already knew these women. Jane and I trained for ministry together, and Kate and I have been colleagues for some time but this was a special week and it got the blogging thing going again.
We were working on Remembering the Bible (or RB) which is a way of working with the Bible with ordinary people that I have been developing for over 12 years now. There is some more stuff about it on the women in ministries blog, which you will find listed on my blog list on this page (note to self: well done for creating blog list).
We were about 20 women in different ministries and it was good to work together on connecting stories in different ways: biblical, individual and communal stories. Our methods included RB, scrapbooking and blogging.
Over the next few months I have to prepare to work with some other groups of ministers using RB. I think this got the year off to a good start and next time I want to concentrate on the role of RB in building community.

A long time

It's been a long time since I did any blogging. In fact I had of course forgotten my password. I wonder if any bloggers have good tips for this contemporary problem.
I have got excited about blogging again since a conference with Women in Ministry this week in the Lake District. We created a blog for this meeting. Please visit it
http://womenministrynetwork.blogspot.com/
My new year's resolutions are:
I will try to blog more often and get more into the blogging community.