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Fleming Rutledge is a preacher and teacher known throughout the mainline Protestant denominations of the US, Canada and parts of the UK. She is the author of seven books and has received a grant from the Louisville Foundation to complete a book about the meaning of the Crucifixion.
One of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, she served for fourteen years on the clergy staff at Grace Church on Lower Broadway at Tenth Street, New York City. Fleming and her husband celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2009 and have two daughters and two grandchildren. She is a native of Franklin, Virginia.
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RuminationsTuesday, November 01, 2005What about the men?My husband and I have been worrying for some time about the disproportionate numbers of women now going into the ministry. If the Christian ministry becomes more than 50% women, that will not be a good thing. I just looked at a photo of the candidates for ministry from one of our major Protestant churches and five out of six were women, most of them middle-aged. Some mainline Protestant seminaries are already more than 50% women. The heterosexual male is an underrepresented species. As for the disproportion in the pews, it is a situation of long standing. A book that strongly affected me when I read it in the 70s was Ann Douglas' now-classic work, The Feminization of American Culture. She traces the way that the Protestant ministry changed from one of power in the community to one of mere "influence," and she notes how the 19th-century ministers spent most of their time with women in domestic settings. In a striking article in the Wall Street Journal on October 21 (their "Houses of Worship" column every Friday is frequently a must-read), Christine Rosen cites a book called Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. "Church is sweet and sentimental, nurturing and nice. Women thrive in this environment. Men do not." Ms. Rosen also cites another author, Charlotte Allen, who states, "The problem is that men love ritual and solemnity, and women, influenced by our all-pervasive therapeutic culture, bring a therapeutic style to the liturgy." That sounds right to me. There are other aspects of this WSJ article that I do not necessarily agree with, but the column highlights the fundamental problem in a stark and arresting way. This problem is not even being discussed, let alone addressed, by our church leadership. Unless and until prominent, respected lay men step forward to recruit promising boys of high school age to think seriously about the ministry as a career, I don't see this trend changing.
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