The ministry of service, justice, and love has long been far less important to us than power, security and certainty.
Anna Ellison Butler Alexander
Matthew 10:40–42
Welcome
I’m often moved by the idea of welcome. We define the word in such a small way. Our minds make the idea narrower, more minute than it really is.
Welcome. It just sounds so passive. Befitting a doormat.
I think of a door, always unlocked, a screen flying open whenever a person lets herself in. The kind of place people just wander into. There’s something about it that only seems passive because the action seems to be taken upon it.
My sister and I both have memories of friends coming to our house when we weren’t even there and not really to see us. They’d sometimes come to see our parents. They had parents, of course, and they weren’t making friends with 40-somethings. But, you know, sometimes you could use extra parents.
I remember one time, my best friend had been in my house for over an hour. I was up in my room, totally ignorant of it, and when I came down, he was leaving. It was just…normal.
The activity of welcome is about cultivating what seems natural.
Not every house feels that inviting.
We obviously make this mistake with church. Thinking people will feel welcome without our welcoming. But we do the same with ministry and mission work. What we often refer to as social justice: which includes both the feeding of people and the building of feeding programs; the teaching of people and the support for schools and teachers; the healing of people and the expansion of healthcare.
But this image is so arresting—of giving “a cup of cold water to one of these little ones”—arresting and so natural. Cold water for a child who is thirsty. Anyone doing that “in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
The background
Before we can talk about Anna Ellison Butler Alexander, we have to understand what kind of world she walked into.
The church she was born into was predominately white. Even as “white” as a concept was still quite new, the whiteness of the church was painted as eternal.
Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t race conscious back then—as if we’ve somehow gone backward through progress. Its that the concept of white as we know it isn’t even 200 years old. But virulent racism goes way back.
But a lack of whiteness isn’t the only thing to say about Ms. Alexander. She was also a woman. Which, much like race, provides a prejudice that predates our modern understandings of gender.
The church that Alexander grew up in was no doubt hierarchical. Men ran the show. At least political and legally. And women found other ways to influence the state of affairs.
One such example, far from the southern Georgia of Alexander’s life, up along the Saint Lawrence seaway, in a town in which a person could look across the river and see another country, the women of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church desired to move the rectory. To put it on logs and roll it up the hill a bit. The vestry, full of many of the town’s most powerful men said no. Probably something about it being too expensive. That was always the reason. It was hardly days later when the house went rolling up the hill, paid for by the women’s guilds.
The truth about our hierarchies is that they, in the end, are full of people. And people have a way of not caring very much for hierarchies when they get in the way of what they want.
The Deaconess
Episcopal hierarchy is the mixed media equivalent of church leadership. Some offices have great authority, but we want to believe they’re all of equal stuff.
In the 19th Century, there was a movement to honor the ministry of women—without giving them equal power, of course. It was pretty sexist all the way around. There’s no avoiding it. There is no coincidence that the work these women were honored to do just so happened to be things men thought women ought to do: teach and care for people.
And because no hierarchy worth its salt wants people running around simply helping people, they need to find ways to make it count as “real ministry.” So they established licenses and orders. So these women were licensed and given a style of dress. And they were sanctioned to do the work of the church. Which also happened to be so-called “women’s work.” Which, if we think about it now, also happened to be the most important work.
As the role of deaconess was rising in other churches, it rose too in the Episcopal Church. As a vocation, the deaconess was purely about ministry. They weren’t allowed anywhere near the liturgy—a function that distinctly marked them as different from deacons.
It wasn’t until 1970, when authorized by the General Convention, that women were first allowed to be deacons. All deaconesses were officially swallowed up into the order of deacons. But not without some protest; particularly from those who worried it would diminish their work for social justice.