The United Reformed Church has appointed the Rev Roberta Rominger as its general secretary. She becomes the first woman to hold the senior post in the URC, or in any of its predecessor denominations. Congregationalists, Presbyterians and members of the Churches of Christ have come together in a series of unions since 1972, to form the United Reformed Church. None ever had a woman as its general secretary or most senior, staff member, although the Congregational Union of England and Wales was the first mainstream denomination in Britain to ordain a woman, as long ago as 1917. Thus reads a recent press release and the URC now looks forward to Rev Rominger taking up her post this summer. A first woman to hold the senior post in the URC! I am glad that we have come this far, especially as many churches are still struggling to give women equal status to men in all positions in the church. And this made me think of my grandmother, Henriette Visser't Hooft-Boddaert who, from the 1930's onwards, passionately advocated for the God-given humanity of woman and the necessary mutuality of men and women. She wrote several essays and articles, and corresponded with Karl Barth, a famous theologian of the 20th century, who was rather dismissive of her feminist thoughts. “Does woman exist for the sake of man?” was the question she asked Karl Barth, on the basis of his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God… … … For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” She could not accept the domination and submission theory of the apostle Paul. “Should a woman then serve two masters with opposing wills, God and man?” And answering with the words of Jesus she wrote, “No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6: 24)” And she noted that there is a woman`s problem in that women have assimilated themselves to the world men have made and the problem will remain until women and men discover together that it takes two sexes to build the world that God wants to see from the human beings God so created. Then my grandmother wrote a letter to Karl Barth, a friend of her husband, in which she asked his advice: “Female responsibility to God is obstructed and determined by the male responsibility everywhere. Has Christ not made us free: is not every person, male or female, now directly related to God? How can Paul so thoughtlessly condemn half the human race....?” But Barth explained to her in his response that Paul used the superiority of man over woman as a representation of the “superiority of God over human beings” and therefore there was no mutuality between man and woman as “there is no mutuality between God and humanity but only superiority!” Later my grandmother met Barth and she wrote of the conversation she had with him: “….he believes he must hold fast the Pauline chain: God-Christ-Man-Woman, each link being the lord of the following, and who sees therein an order which is given with the fact of Revelation. I said to him that I understood less and less how a Christian, even the most believing one, could accept that hierarchy. He remained silent for a moment, and then said gravely: ‘But do you not understand, then, that it means a heavy burden for us men?’" She was first touched that a man honestly testified to his “tragic situation” but a little later thought, “No, no, that is not possible! How can God through Christ place a heavy burden on one half of human kind of which to a large part the welfare of the other half would be dependent?” And then she became angry: “The woman sinned against God and against man that she accepted the dominance of the latter and, with that, negated her own life-task”
Over the past decades we have seen more and more women taking up their own life-task; they have fought for and gained their human rights and equal opportunities and responsibilities. And I am happy that women have been and are called to the ministry, as I have been, and that the way has opened up for women to be ordained and to take up senior posts in many churches, with other churches certainly to follow in the future! For together, men and women, in mutual relationship, are called to serve the church whose beginning we celebrate at Pentecost!
With best wishes, Leonora
