Cup of Equality


Post Author: Diane Kenaston

The author wrote this within a few months of leaving traditional pastoral ministry in 2021. 


A few months after leaving my pastorate, I am never sure whether to say “I’m a stay-at-home mum” or “I’m unemployed” or “I’m a freelance ecumenist who is slowly starting a coaching business and might be working on a book while moving across the Atlantic for my spouse’s job and definitely is not earning any money.” Technically my denomination views me as on “sabbatical,” but caring for a toddler is neither restful nor soul-renewing. And unlike most sabbaticals, I do not know how long this would last or what I will do after. I’m waiting in a new setting across an ocean to discern the next step in my vocational path. 

I now find myself outside of a defined role. I have no name-tag, or title, or place in local ecclesial structures. I am sitting in a pew after ten years of always being behind the pulpit and the altar. I resonate with the psalmist who remembered the past while questioning the present and waiting on the future: 

“These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng,
and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
a multitude keeping festival.” (Psalm 42:4)  

I long for that role I used to fill. I miss breaking the bread and then meeting each congregant’s eye: “Beloved, receive what you are: the body of Christ.” I miss dipping my hand into the water and reminding us all of our baptismal promises. I am still trying to fulfill those baptismal vows —to “accept the freedom and power Christ gives… to resist evil, injustice, and oppression”— but I’m finding it hard so far from my previous place at the font. My call was grounded in the sacraments, and presiding over those sacraments brought me back, week after week, to that calling. This, this holy mystery, is why I’m here.  

In my current context, I’m ineligible to preside. I don’t have opportunities to preach. I lead bedtime prayers instead of eucharistic prayers. I struggle to hear sermons over the wiggles of a toddler. I keep my mouth shut while others address a masculine God on my behalf. I get no say in the congregational responses that are scripted for me. Even the sacraments feel far off; serving bread to others had made me feel like we were all sharing a communal feast, but now I receive my individual wafer and still feel disconnected. 

Trying to worship in my tradition becomes spiritually exhausting. So I sit in a Quaker meeting.

A white building with the word QUAKERS in blue print, with the words FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE in black print underneath, framed by foliage on the left.

Friends Meeting House in Cambridge, England

And there, with the Friends, is a blessed egalitarian silence. Everything is stripped away: sacraments, titles, sermons. We sit in a circle, listening together. Anyone is able to speak. And knowing that I could speak into the silence quells my desire. I am now choosing silence rather than being silenced. Within the Quaker tradition, there is a commitment to the lived reality of the priesthood of all believers.

I remember preaching about the priesthood of all believers. I genuinely believed I was practicing it. I now wonder if I really knew what it meant. Back when I knew who I was —when I defined myself as “pastor”— I understood my ordination as being “set apart” for a purpose. Now I am longing to be “set apart” again. Disheartened and dispirited in the back pew, I am perceiving truth that I failed to recognize before. Being “set apart” slips far too easily into “set above.” While I rarely felt powerful or privileged in the local church, I took “my” place in the pulpit or behind the altar. I literally stood above the congregation, walking up steps and wearing high heels so that I would be seen over a pulpit built for men. I was architecturally exalted, full of knowledge, and employed to share that expertise with others. 

Today I am slowly being stripped of a clericalism I hadn’t even known I possessed. During a decade in pastoral ministry, I repeatedly made this covenant with God:  

“Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.” 1

And that prayer proved prescient, as repeated disappointments led me to give up on “climbing the church ladder.” I learned to be content in my small, beloved community. I lost any desire for bigger churches with more people and more money. I stopped putting my name forward for elected positions, and I learned not to expect calls for judicatory leadership. I quietly went about my local work without any fanfare or recognition. No one seemed to know my name. I thought this meant I had given up the “clerical ambition” that is referred to in this powerful collect of St. Ammonius: 

“Drive far from your church, O God,
every vain spirit of clerical ambition,
that, like your servant Ammonius,
we may refuse to conflate ordination and leadership,
and may never confuse rank with holiness;
in the name of your son Jesus Christ our Lord,
who alone is our great High Priest. Amen.” 2

Now, however, I am seeing each of these prayers (Psalm 42, Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, and Collect of St. Ammonius) in a different way. “Clerical longing” may indeed be a manifestation of “clerical ambition.” Why else would losing a place behind the altar feel like being “brought low”? 

My frustration at losing recognized religious authority slowly begins opening me to a new question: why are clerical powers restricted at all? Why do we keep separating clergy from laity? Separating clergy from laity creates a binary that privileges one group over another. Clergy are set apart, over, and against laity. It’s similar to how complementarians place men above women by restricting them to different roles, all while claiming they view the genders as “equal.” 

Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether observed that clericalism is a manifestation of patriarchy.3 This is explicit when women are not allowed to be ordained. Although the truth is obscured when women are ordained, it is still there. We are so used to the church “laying aside” women (and queer people, and young people, and disabled people, and people of color…) that when some of us break through and are ordained in a handful of Christian denominations, we celebrate. We shout, “This church is now ordaining young clergywomen!” Then those exceptions to the patriarchal rule are used to justify the underlying division. Ordination confers a rank, a status, a credential. It becomes a site of power within the church. And this power is not shared or rotated, but restricted. All the while, clerical privilege is hidden from those who have it. 

These things I remember as I pour out my soul. I don’t want to fight for “my place” in a religious community. That would just make me the one standing behind the table. Instead, I long to gather around a new table. I want to be part of a spiritual movement in which Jesus is the great high priest and we are all a shared priesthood. Let us give and receive the water that makes us one, the bread of freedom, and the cup of equality.  

 


1 Covenant Renewal Service,” © 1992 UMPH. Wesley Covenant Service, abridged by Ole E. Borgen.
2 Collect (Contemporary Language) for Ammonius, whose feast day is November 8th. This commemoration appears in Lesser Feasts & Fasts 2018 for trial use.
3 The Ecclesiology of Women-Church: Ministry and Community,” Ch.5 in Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities by Rosemary Radford Ruether


The Rev. Diane Kenaston is a United Methodist pastor, a clergy coach, and co-founder of the Good Friday Collaborative. She serves on the board for Young Clergy Women International. Based out of Cambridge, United Kingdom, Diane and her clergy spouse have one very energetic three-year-old child.  


Image by: Diane Kenaston
Used with permission
1 reply
  1. Volker Heine says:

    This is a reply to Diane Kenaston from reading your contribution ‘Cup of Equality’ in the weekly news bit from the Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting which I had also heard you are now attending (as you write). Welcome to you and your dear child, although at age 92 and with still so much Covid around I do not now come in to Sunday Meeting.
    I was touched by what you wrote, and would like to add something that helped me see straight. I was a refugee child from Germany in 1939, and for complicated reasons our family got partly split up by WW2, so that I was taken in and loved and cared for by a New Zealand schoolteacher family with four children of their own. They were not religious but saw my need and responded. I owe so much to them. There are needs for service *all around us* — refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere, people sleeping rough in the streets of Cambridge … and maybe above all for you just now, your dear child. I shall think of you.

    Reply

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