Episcopal News Service Thursday, October 5, 2006
Women must form alliances for mission and transformation, conference told
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[ENS] Panelists and participants at an October 4 session of the "Imagine: Claiming & Empowering Ordained Women's Leadership" conference agreed that women need to stand together and create alliances across perceived boundaries in order to move in the Episcopal Church's leadership positions and transform the Church.
The conference is the first church-wide gathering of ordained women in the 32 years since women were admitted to the orders of priest and bishop. The conference, which also includes some lay presenters, runs until October 6 at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Presenters at the session included Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies; Bob Cowperthwaite, rector of St. Paul's Church in Franklin, Tennessee, and a member of the Executive Council's Committee on the Status of Women; Angela Ifill, the Episcopal Church's missioner for black ministries; and Jennifer Linman, a priest serving at Church of the Epiphany in New York City.
Ifill urged the participants to keep searching for the commonalities they hold with other.
"It's hard to 'dis' someone -- it's hard to not want a relationship with someone -- if you share some little commonality because in order to be nasty to one another, in order to be ugly with one another, we have to set the other up in a very awful way," she said.
Cowperthwaite said his "awakening" came 25 years ago in New York City while working at Bellevue Hospital when he saw the food tray of an AIDS patient being left on the floor at his door. The man could not eat unless someone was willing to pick up the tray, bring it to him and help him eat.
Full story and photographs:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_78453_ENG_HTM.htm
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