Ridin the Bronco

It’s like ridin’ the bronco, I’ve often said when describing my over twenty years at United Seminary, a freestanding graduate school affiliated with the United Methodist Church yet more relationally-nuanced and Evangelical-United-Brethren in its ethos than most of the current teaching faculty know to perceive.

We are a small graduate school, though our enrollment puts us in the upper echelon in terms of enrollments in the other twelve UMC seminaries/div schools. In those seas, my husband and I speak of United as a pirate seminary, sailing the unsafe waters of denominational politics that also cannot imagine a primarily relational ethos known historically through the EUB. Even Evangelicals who love United have spoken of this character as an EUB “hangover,” disliking its relational challenges to doctrinal sureties.

I landed here over twenty years ago at Spirit’s beck and call, really wanting to serve in a southern PCUSA seminary whose president was a woman (at the time I interviewed). I would have died on the vine there, I know now, but I could not see the professional advantage in coming to a struggling UMC seminary back in my originating-home-state of Ohio, far away from the monied and networking halls out of which I had come. I had left Ohio in 1987 for a reason, never looking back. I made sure to live in Minnesota, then metropolitan Los Angeles, and the New Jersey corridor. Anywhere but Ohio, my woman’s liberal heart opined. All that was back in 2004, riding high from a Princeton Seminary administrative job and a successful $861,000 Lilly Endowment grant. I was not that interested in becoming a seminary professor. Who wants to land in an academic post when everyone knows the stultified oxygen hardly available in such ivory towers? Yet I knew I was headed to United, even before I got there for the interview. I read Ken Pohly’s book and I prayed with it in a pew of the Princeton Catholic Church I would sometimes walk to. I cried, knowing Spirit was leading me right there. It was confirmed when I literally saw Jesus, the laughing Jesus in front of which I had written my dissertation. For weeks I had prayed to see Jesus, and there he was. Sigh.

July 2004 my husband and I moved to Ohio, for me to accept the pre-tenure practical theology job, him to enter into his first installed-congregational-call in a small town outside of Dayton, Ohio, just a small city. Neither of us felt this would be where we stayed…but clearly, what did we know?

A couple years after my arrival, there were a couple white male Evangelicals who also arrived–one for teaching theology, another for teaching New Testament. As each of us faced the pre-tenure journey, we became companions along the way of balancing the old-guard faculty liberalism(s). It wasn’t an easy marriage, of course, given the inherited woundedness of the liberals on the faculty, slowly to become today’s Progressives. And the unresolved woundedness of most white men in Evangelical America today, let alone back then.

Living into the relationality of the whole, as I (as an Enneagram Two) am wont to do, I fared the pirate seas fairly well. I drank beer then whiskey with the younger colleagues, who were sometimes joined by a couple of the older ones. I walked alongside the older colleagues deeply formed by the EUB ethos, the Core Groups they had had to participate in (alongside students as companions, not evaluators). My Holy Spirit/human spirit inheritance found language with the Evangelical men and relationship with the elders. The bronco wasn’t comfortable, but it was interesting.

As the years passed, however, I saw the grief patterns begin with the young Evangelicals, losing power and voice they’d been accustomed to having. One example: their refusals for an Inclusive Language Policy grew. I could feel their point, even as it was a blessing they were finally beginning to feel what so many of us have for ages–what it feels like to be a minority, as a white man? Good spiritual fodder for them. But trying to police students’ spiritual expressiveness wasn’t anything I was interested in either. I did not agree with legislating intimate spiritual language, even if it excluded me, as it usually did exclude any sense of the F/feminine. So I enabled the growth of a soft, listening Evangelicalism, because I understood these guys as spirit-friends. I cared for them. I felt fierce for their own spiritual hearts, advocating and ‘teaching’ them as informal encounters allowed. “Professor Large Labia” was one story I won’t write about here–showing some restraint!--but it communicated their exclusion of the F/feminine with startling accuracy. I understood us to be colleagues, spirit-friends, which (to me) meant they would advocate for my values as well. A faulty assumption, these many years later…but do I regret loving them as I did? No. Today I recognize I was functional to them, not a spirit-friend. So we learn…again and again…?

I also saw the grief patterns of the elders, losing their liberal center and groundedness for sustaining United as it faced seemingly overwhelming financial challenges. (As folks may remember, liberals/progressives do not tithe nor donate in more unified fashion, quite diverse amidst ideological nuances. Or at least they don’t give like Conservatives do, whatever that term may come to mean). I saw older faculty men get angrier in their expressions, their mentoring of young faculty. I saw older faculty women grow bitter, refusing to sustain any affiliation with the institution as it evolved with the financial resources and the funders that made it possible for United to survive. 

Over a decade, I navigated all this with both a political indifference and increasing detachment. My own conscious feminine awakening was unfolding, after all, and I had no patience to be present amidst dynamics I could not change. My solution was to become as un-present on campus as I could get away with, which worked well enough. For years. I have sizeable, previously unconscious habits of caring for emotionally wounded white men. They served me well to build consensus with the listening-Evangelicals, until they didn’t. Then I simply detached myself and lived on the periphery as the old woman no one listened to. We have lots of examples of that, after all, so I made it work for me: I created my own social purpose business within a local community of writing women. I navigated the personnel-political challenges of it by caring for the needs of the white men around me. It worked. I lived my calling to support the voices of women in my small business. I kept my day-job alive by doing what was asked of me, no more. 

The last three years seeded a different pattern, truly begun when the Faculty voted me in as their representative to the Board of Trustees. No one was more surprised than I. But it gave me role and voice to serve my colleagues, listening from my own primary relational frame (which has Trinitarian language, of course, so to be understood by them). Together, the Faculty began to co-create a both/and pathway forward through the debacles of UMC political decisions, all of which ultimately resulted in the creation of the Global Methodist Church, a separate denomination to tend to the values of the Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Charismatics, the Global South, and rural America.

Our co-creative work offered a whole stream of meaning and contribution that I could get my teeth into, something that I actually believed in. A way to be connected across irreconcilable (in the church) differences. A way to companion one another more deeply than ideologies, theologies or voting legislation. We modelled a companionable way path that the larger church could not. Until the Board of Trustees hardened their hearts. The Evangelical colleagues left en masse, one to become President of a competing seminary not too far south of United. 

And today, I’ve given up the vision that had grown within me these last couple years. Higher theological education today is hopelessly transactional, functional, as it apparently needs to be to survive in a post-capitalistic market economy. I stand by the relational framework within which I enabled, then detached from, the soft-listening Evangelicalism of United Seminary these last many years. But I no longer fool myself that any spirit-friend reciprocity will ever grow with white Evangelical men. Best plan seems to be to withdraw from formal and informal contacts with such folks, encouraging them to be blessed to be a blessing where they serve, but honor that they have little to no capacity to recognize the damage they continue to do a world on fire with their rigidities. 

All of this makes me nearly unbearably sad. Expecting the impossible, or the improbable, from the theological men I’ve loved for years has been a foolishness of hope. Do I continue into such foolishness, where Spirit leads, asking me to trust the larger Flow? I don't know. Today, I no longer trust my capacity to connect across difference, seeing that my gifts for doing so have landed me in an absent, abandoned Christian communion unwilling or unable to hold the vision that used to hold us.

The spaces and places where I can sense the Spirit leading me have little to nothing to do with traditional spaces largely determined by men and masculinized women. I know I can be present in just about any environment that welcomes me, regardless of ideology and theology. I can find the value in communities that cannot find the value in me. But my sadness has an angry edge I cannot soften quite yet. Not regret. I know I loved wholly and led faithfully. But it does hurt to become unseen and refused once again, particularly when I sacrificed so very much for a vision or pathway we had once co-created. It touches my abandonment wound, I suppose. 

I know our global awakening selves canNOT leave the white men behind, but I’m quite content to release most whom I know, but for those in my family, immediate and extended. I married one of them and do love him fiercely, knowing we are soul-hitched for reasons beyond both our ken. Perhaps he'll be my one-heart-at-a-time partner in the transformations of the shitshows of today.

So a silly song from my paternal grandfather filters into my awareness, which I sing to all the academic theological men I know today:

Little fly,

ain’t you got no blouse or skirt?

ain’t you got no shimmy shirt?

God loves you.

Go to God.

[And yes, a violent squashing action follows]