FireFall Vol. 8: Women and the Communion of Saints
2024 Conferences & Fuego Descendió; Rev. Jennifer Layte & The Winter Solace Retreat; Inés Velásquez-McBryde on Embodied Community; Dr. Priscilla Pope-Levison on women evangelists; The Modern Saints
I like the weekly jumble of sermons by women preachers, books by women scholars, denominational work carried forward by women in leadership, and so on; I try to resist the urge to trace a theme in any given week, but I can’t escape the quiet thread through this week’s newsletter: the call of community. Or maybe, the call of the communion of saints – across languages, nationalities; time itself.
If you live in the darkening hemisphere, protect some time if you can this winter to spend some snowy evenings conversing with women who walk the planet now - or who did five hundred years ago.
God who gave a human stretch marks, let us continue to make space for You in our midst. Come, Holy Spirit, fall on us as You did when Mary shouted her Magnificat. Let Your fire fall again, here, now, on the women bearing Your Word into the pulpit every Sunday, equipping ministers in seminary classrooms, and bringing good news to people who are poor. In the long line of acolytes who carry Your light, let us glimpse behind us and see the fire that falls through every human age that You’ve never let extinguish. Let us see the light we carry in the long line before us and rejoice. Amen.
Updates: New FireFall Pages
If you’re scheduling 2024, be sure to browse the new 2024 Conferences for Women in Ministry page. None of these are specific to any one denomination. Most of the events included at this point are scheduled to be held in the United States; I hope to add some from other countries around the world.
(In particular, note the gathering that CBE International is holding in Denver in July. For multiple reasons, that conference is strategically vital.)
The next new page delights me; thanks to the skill and generosity of Pastora Daniela Galindo-Cabriales, the FireFall archives are gradually being translated into Spanish: Fuego Descendió. The first Spanish page content posted this weekend.
(Be sure to check out Pastora Galindo-Cabriales’ podcast, RedRoom Conversations, here!)
Rev. Jennifer Layte & the Online Winter Solace Retreat
As you glance at your December calendar, do you wish for a post-manger, affordable, no-winter-travel-required space to renew and retreat after the holidays?
Rev. Jennifer Layte, pastor, spiritual director, chaplain (FireFall subscriber: hello
!) and – I have to mention it, ordained Baptist pastor! I love this! – is partnering with other leaders to offer some space in an online retreat wittily named “Winter Solace.”“Winter Solace is a time to take a breath…and also gently acquire some inner resources and practices for the year ahead. This year we will be contemplating the idea of Home. Home has so many connotations–for some a place of safety, for others the opposite. What makes up a diverse-Christian perspective on Home, and how can we ground ourselves there in preparation for whatever we meet as we travel forward into 2024?”
In Winter Solace, “pastors and spiritual caregivers from various Christian traditions will present large-group teaching and smaller-group workshops and spiritual practices over the course of the weekend.”
As she shares on her website, “Jennifer’s background in both literature and theology give her imaginative ways of retelling the stories of the Bible and of others, encouraging people to live within their own stories better.”
Ahhh. How do you need to live within your own story in the coming season?
This entirely online retreat runs from 7 PM Eastern on Friday, January 12, to approximately 2 PM Eastern on Sunday, January 14. Register here.
Listen: Inés Velásquez-McBryde on Embodied Community in English and Español
The fall of 2020 was not an easy time – to put it mildly. Yet in October, a few months before violence in the nation’s capital and Covid filling ICUs, Inés Velásquez-McBryde preached a prophetic word on embodied community in both English and Spanish. She preached for Fuller Seminary’s virtual all-school chapel that fall, when so much still needed to be virtual, on community. And she warmly modeled one statement that grabbed me: “It is the job of faith leaders to describe reality.”
So many American pastors and church leaders are still recovering from those difficult days. Maybe it’s her description of her Grandma’s black bean soup, maybe it’s because she names things properly, maybe it’s simply the Holy Spirit’s anointing on her.
But If you’re carrying some old, maybe unacknowledged grief – especially from two or three years ago – will you let Pastora Velásquez-McBryde reorient you, in this space between all that’s come at you the past year, and Advent? I believe this sermon will minister to you.
Listen here:
As you can discover on her website, Inés Velásquez-McBryde is a pastor, church planter, and reconciler. She is co-lead pastor of The Church We Hope For and has spoken around the country on topics including: multiethnic church planting, racial reconciliation, justice, and the full inclusion of women in pastoral leadership. She is also a contributor to She Is…Biblical Reflections on Vocation, a digital workbook from Fuller’s De Pree Center, “designed to help people engage questions of vocation through the stories of various biblical women. This collection of diverse perspectives shares the unique lens that each author sees these biblical women in.” This downloadable resource includes nine beautifully illustrated devotions for individuals or small groups.
Women Evangelists: NTS’s Interview with Dr. Priscilla Pope-Levison
This past fall, Dr. Priscilla Pope-Levison gave the 2023 Whipple-Lunn Lectures on Evangelism at Nazarene Theological Seminary. NTS featured this interview with Dr. Pope-Levison on women evangelists, drawing on her scholarship that led to books like Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Women Evangelists and Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era. You can watch her lecture “Turn the Pulpit Loose” here.
Excerpts of the interview are included below.
“My interest started 28 years ago when I taught evangelism at Duke Divinity School. While preparing lectures on the history of evangelism in North America, most of the books at that time followed an all-male trajectory, which went from Jonathan Edwards to Charles Finney to Dwight L. Moody to Billy Sunday, and finally to Billy Graham. As an ordained minister who thought much about women’s issues—and taught classes in women’s studies—I asked a simple question: ‘Were there any women evangelists besides the well-known trio of Kathryn Kuhlman, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Phoebe Palmer?’ And what I uncovered was this amazingly rich, diverse treasure trove of women evangelists. My research has taken me across the country, even to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and to the Nazarene Archives in Kansas City, where I worked with former denominational archivist Stan Ingersol on the early evangelist and pastor Mary Lee Cagle.”
“These women brought out concerns and illuminated biblical texts resulting in a fuller and more robust understanding of faith. In the late 19th and early 20th century, women had to defend their right to preach. In 1896, Mary Lee Cagle penned this great sermon, “A Woman’s Right to Preach.” Almost every woman I’ve studied had some stock sermon in which they start with women in the Bible—going from the Old Testament to the New Testament—like Deborah, Phoebe, or Mary Magdalene, and the Samaritan woman, and so on.
For more of this interview, visit here.
Painted Women, The Modern Saints: A 21st Century Twist on Iconography
You don’t have to be Orthodox to appreciate the beauty of icons or even to experience the riches of contemplative formation by meditating on the story of our faith as lived by saints across time – saints captured in paint the way the epistles were captured in Greek letters.
I am not Orthodox, though I have deep respect for Orthodox Christians. This artist from Ohio appropriately named Gracie is also familiar with iconography – and, with respect for what it is, has re-envisioned how the saints might look.
I’m so glad she dove into this project, because since I first learned of St. Felicity and St. Perpetua, they’ve always captured my heart and mind; and I cannot escape Gracie’s Perpetua.
When you can picture a saint as someone you might bump into on the subway, the challenge twists: they are not so far off, so distant, so – inaccessible – as we might like to keep them. If I can picture Perpetua or Felicity as someone I might pass on the sidewalk, then I can’t escape the call to live with that same boldness.
How do we picture women in the history of Christianity? What if we could plop them somewhere in the world today?
I love these interpretations, especially The Holy Family, Joan of Arc, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Felicity, Mary, Julian of Norwich, and so many more (like St. Cyprian, St. George and St. Anthony of the Desert).
Visit The Modern Saints shop for prints, stickers, and prayer cards.
Please remember: For the rest of November, for any free subscribers who bump up to an annual subscription, 50% will go as an honorarium for our Spanish translator!
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