FireFall Vol. 14: A Mighty Chorus
Rev. Dr. "Florence" Li Tim-Oi, 17th-Century Trolling, Lent Resources by Women Pt. 2, Rev. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes and Rev. Dr. Carmen Kampman, and the World Christianity Conference
Friends, how is it in your body, mind, soul, strength? How is it in your circle of neighbors, loved ones, community?
I’m struck this week by the gift of women’s voices in the past and across miles. Sometimes when I sift through the riches of testimonies and wisdom, proclamation, scholarship, and story, it’s like I can hear a might chorus building that stretches across time, across oceans. It’s very hard to stay discouraged in moments like that.
The voices of women echoing across millenia, across decades, through print, in paint – they’re like hands holding up your arms while the battle rages below (Ex. 17:8-15).
God, feed us on Your faithfulness as we bear witness to the ways You have worked in the lives of the saints, living and dead, and strengthen us as we find ways to sing along and add our voices to the chorus. Amen.
Celebrate: Rev. Dr. Florence Li Tim-Oi
This week on January 24th in The Episcopal Church in the U.S., Rev. Dr. “Florence” Li Tim-Oi is celebrated with a Lesser Feast. Rev. Li Tim-Oi was the first woman ordained a priest in the Anglican communion – about 50 years before women could be ordained to the priesthood.
Her remarkable story started with parents who, despite living in a culture where boys were prized, named their daughter “Much Beloved.” Her life was shaped by a call to be ordained a deaconess, years of wartime ministry, her extraordinary ordination to the priesthood, and long, hard decades of persecution for her faith, including hard labor and “re-education” attempts. (Read a bit on her ministry experiences here.) Thankfully, she lived long enough not only to experience some freedom again, but also to be honored for her groundbreaking ordination and for her dedicated ministry.
You can read about Rev. Li Tim-Oi at several sites, and you can honor her by donating to the Li Tim-Oi foundation, which equips majority-world women with ministerial training. After Rev. Li Tim-Oi’s move to Canada late in life, she traveled back to China with Rev. Dr. Robert Browne to make this short documentary – what a gift that we have video interview footage of her!
Is There Anything New Under the Sun? Old Satire Reminds Us Trolling Is So Seventeenth-Century
Recently I was browsing digitized archives and found this…gem…of a book cover. If you skim the text (it’s old, so all the lower-case s’s look like modern lower-case f’s), you’ll find this publication was not complimentary toward women preachers, concluding that Bedlam (a famous English asylum) would be a good place for them.
What’s amusing is that it’s nearly 400 years old. It’s from the 1600s. So I’m inclined to thank the sharp-tongued author (who seemed amused by their own cleverness) for accidentally commending these women to us as reminders that no, women preaching is nothing new, and neither are narrow-minded bullies who paint women preachers as drunken, nagging shrews.
Read more about the women named on the pamphlet above and the history of Baptist women preachers here in Pamela Durso’s paper, “She-Preachers, Bossy Women, and Children of the Devil: A History of Baptist Women Ministers and Ordination.” (Here’s an academic journal article from 2016 on “The Ministry of Women Among Early Calvinistic Baptists.”)
Lent Resources by Women, Part 2
If you missed last week’s Lent resources by women, check them out here! Here’s a new handful of books by women for you to browse as Ash Wednesday nears. It’s also an ecumenical collection:
Small Surrenders: A Lenten Journey, Emilie Griffin: “Lent is a time when we deepen our faith in a journey not of grand gestures but of small surrenders. We are converted not only once in our lives but many times, and the conversion is little by little and often imperceptible. But Lent gives us a time to move the process along, intentionally, by a series of small surrenders. When we choose some exercise for Lent–daily worship, daily prayer, abstinence from one thing or another, it is not so much the practice that transforms us, but it is our willingness to change.”
Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture, Kat Armas
40-Day Journey with Julian of Norwich, ed. Lisa E. Dahill
The Art of Lent: A Painting a Day from Ash Wednesday to Easter, Sister Wendy Beckett
A Just Passion: A Six-Week Lenten Journey, ed. Cindy Bunch
Two Meaningful Substack Reads: Rev. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes & Rev. Dr. Carmen Kampman
This past week, Rev. Dr. Walker-Barnes and Rev. Dr. Kampman shared reflections that I continued to reflect on after I’d closed the browser window, so to speak. In some ways, the essays from these leaders are quite different; in other ways, I find myself tracing overlapping lines. I appreciated both.
Read Dr.
’ “Is Academia Toxic for Black Women?” here, and ’s “Embracing Your Calling: A Christian Woman’s Journey to Spiritual Leadership” here.
News: “Revisiting Women and Gender in World Christianity”
The World Christianity Conference issued a call for papers (proposals due last fall) on the theme “Revisiting Women and Gender in World Christianity.”
While there are multiple world Christianity academic centers, organizations, and gatherings, the upcoming 2024 conference is the “fifth international, interdisciplinary conference” convened and co-organized by departments of Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Ghana.
It will be held in March 2024 at the University of Ghana. For information on the academic research scope of the conference, visit here.
Thank you for reading FireFall! This ecumenical weekly newsletter was launched in fall 2023 to amplify the voices of women in pastoral and academic leadership by boosting resources across denominational silos, through algorithms, and around complementarian search results.
Your call matters and you’re not alone in ministry. Your current context or congregation? They don’t define your calling.