get beyond leaving the conversation to women

in a previous comment on someone else's blog i suggested that women should have the space to talk and then be listened to. this isn't the only thing i thought should happen but it was an idea.

well maggi has convincingly argued that is not what needs to happen!!! so i eat my words and think she has a much more persuasive argument.

I plead with you, emerging people, do not move forward on this by organising conferences for women to talk to other women. We don't need men to sanction our meeting each other to talk about ministry. We already do that, a LOT. My fear is that the men of the church will think (and perhaps, good-heartedly, believe) that by giving us 'space' to talk to each other, they have done something to solve the problem., When actually, what we will all have done is to allow the church as a body to disengage from the real issues.

Comments

[maggi]

hi again. i heard from alan, mark and dave who all said something to the effect of "don't let's have a conference, let's just get on and fix this." Sounds good to me. How are we going to do that?

[jonny]

alan, mark and dave who?....

conference may sound formal, but i think what you were meaning was creating space to talk about stuff with a wider group? that seems a pretty good idea to me.

it depends on where in their journey people are at, but i remember when we were talking about this stuff (about 15 years ago now!) we had a group in the church i was in then who really tackled all the issues - theology, power stuff, feelings etc etc and it was amazing to be in that situation. it was exactly what we needed. i feel like i resolved a lot of the theory issues and jen and i then settled how to both work and do ministry together in partnership supporting each other.....

so what i am trying to say is that for a lot of people having a space to talk is incredibly important even if other people have already resolved the issues in their own minds. there is alos something assumed in the church that it has sorted this one out when clearly it hasn't! so there also needs to be some strategic thinking about how things can change...

let's talk some more ths week. i'll try and think more about it meantime. cheers

[maggi dawn]

you're right, jonny - I don't care what we call it, but I detect in these converstaions the fear of becoming "an organisation". Perhaps we need to re-cast the 'conference' as 'conversation space' (really, that's what conferences are)
But we can't actually exist without some shades of organisation... that's a sociological impossibility.