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Reverend Pauline Stewart has been the minister at St Heliers Presbyterian church for four years - ably assisted part-time by her husband Stan, who is also a minister but, at age 70, is poised for retirement. Yet despite the fact she is a well-respected and long-serving minister, sometimes Stewart's gender gets in the way of her calling.
"Even for people who love me and are part of my ministry, some families say: 'Oh, Pauline, when I die could I have Stan because I want a man minister'," she says. "In some situations, in some segments of our society, a man is seen as a 'proper' minister. I get over that because if I let that hurt me I could become bitter and twisted and I don't want to be." Stewart may not always be in demand to officiate at funerals but her gender was only a minor issue when she was democratically elected to her current position.
One lone parishioner voted against St Heliers Presbyterian having its first female minister on the basis of sex discrimination. "I guess that person left. I don't know who that was," she says. With freshly blow-waved hair, gold hoop earrings, red lipstick and high heels, 55-year-old Stewart isn't your traditional religious leader. She refers to one of her ceremonial stoles as "my bling", she survived cancer in her mid-40s and her adult son became a Muslim for his Javanese wife. Stewart is the modern face of ministry - razor sharp, enthusiastic, tolerant and determined to avoid becoming "terminally nice", as is the wont of some women ministers.
Today, women are being ordained and leading congregations in unprecedented numbers. New Zealand's first woman Presbyterian minister was ordained in 1965 and at last count, 60 out of the country's 299 Presbyterian ministers were women. Almost 30 per cent of the 97 Methodist ministers are women; the first female Methodist minister was ordained in 1959.
Last year, five of the nine Anglican priests graduating from Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership were women. And although the Anglican church in New Zealand didn't ordain women until 1977, it appointed the world's first female Anglican Diocesan bishop when Penny Jamieson was consecrated in 1990. So how is the proliferation of women ministers affecting the face of the various churches? The reverends and rabbi Canvas spoke to all believe they bring a high level of inclusivity, hands-on pragmatism and talent for multi-tasking to their respective churches or synagogue. And although, by and large, they reject glib gender stereotyping it seems they do naturally embody the nurturing characteristics.
Yet empathy can be a two-edged sword in the ministry. While it's a benefit to be able to relate easily and compassionately to the frailties of the congregation, a female minister especially must also try not to become too caught up in their woes, according to Stewart. "If you become emotional, they'll say it's because you're a woman," she says. "If a man cries or something, that's okay, but a woman must never cry. I try to do it with the door closed. Once, when I buried a boy, a little boy ... I closed the door in between the funeral and outside the church and bawled my eyes out." It seems to be a case of being damned if you do and damned if you don't.
While a high degree of sentimentality is roundly frowned upon, Stewart has identified a male contingent frequently present within church hierarchies who'd like their female minister to display helplessness. "The men who are very prominent in the church often want the woman minister to be a needy person. They need you to be needy - or to be girlish.
Well, I can't be that," she says. "They're good men and they're egalitarian, they're generous, but they want to save people. And I don't want to be saved." This staunchness has served her well all her life, even as a young girl growing up in Caboolture, Queensland. It's the attitude that led her to regularly worship although her parents weren't church-goers. From age 4, a neighbour - an older man, a bachelor and "totally honourable" - took her to church every Sunday. She recalls being struck by the sheer peacefulness of the services and soon was asked to help hand out hymn books. By the age of 10 she was organising church fundraising events and thoroughly seduced by the feeling of usefulness imbued by the church community.
Stewart believes her gender can work for her in her role as minister and gives the example of being able to meet privately with female members of the congregation with impunity. "Now, for a male minister there'd be some difficult pastoral situations, you know visiting a woman. Whereas a woman [minister] has more freedom," she says. "There have been so many litigations where our ministers haven't done the right thing.
Now they're very nervous about visiting a woman in their house on their own. So I have more freedom. I have less worries and society is less harsh on me." She subscribes to the view that the gathering presence of women ministers has brought a positive accessibility and vulnerability to the church. "Women have made the church softer and more open. We'd like to think men are just as caring - they are in their heart - but I think the way we can demonstrate it and model it, it's easier for us," she says. "I have some wonderful friends who are women ministers ... and some women ministers I don't think have a high regard for me." Why? "Because I'm a bit too aggressive, maybe. I probably should not wear high heels or something."
Reverend Sarah Moss is the Anglican priest at Diocesan School for Girls, a private school in upmarket Epsom, who became a church-goer of her own volition as a teenager. Her first-hand experience of the concerns that typically plague adolescent girls gives her invaluable insights into the minds of the students she leads in worship. Forty-year-old Moss sampled a variety of Christian denominations before embracing the Anglican tradition in her late 20s. "It was that feeling of coming home," she says. "The Anglican church in New Zealand has certainly been at the forefront with regard to women. Those [early] women, they were the real pioneers.
My generation coming through - we've had the benefit of growing up in the era [of] 'girls can do anything.'" But 32 years after the ordination of New Zealand's first Anglican women ministers, few women are breaking through that notional stained glass ceiling to achieve truly elevated positions within the church hierarchy. "In 30 years of ordination we've still only seen two women bishops in this country. But then again the question for me is: are we mirroring other institutions in society in that, anyway?" says Moss.
Following a discernment process in the Diocese of Nelson, Moss trained at St John's College in Meadowbank. She graduated with a Bachelor of Theology from the University of Auckland and then completed her post-ordination training in Blenheim. Her role as chaplain at Diocesan School for Girls neatly dovetails with her early training as a teacher. She has adolescent girls well and truly pegged. "So much of their sense of spirituality, or just their identity and who they are, is tied up in relationship and so it's really, really important ... that you're not just a face behind a pulpit, but that you're engaged in the life of the community and present." Moss won't be drawn into critiquing the respective qualities of men versus women ministers.
"I think gender stereotypes can be unhelpful. I just think that by having men and women in the church there is a more equal representation of the community in leadership." But she concedes that her gender can only be a bonus in her particular role - charged as she is with the spiritual guidance of around 1600 girls from years one through to 13. "In terms of someone that girls might identify with, having a woman is a helpful thing. I love working with girls in particular because ...they're on such an incredible journey ... and having a little bit of insight in terms of what that means for a girl can only enhance their experience."
A working mother, Moss brings pragmatism to her chaplaincy as she juggles raising two young sons, aged 12 and 10, with the demands of her role. She makes light of any gender discrimination she's encountered along the way. "There've been a couple of times, when, for example, somebody didn't want me to take a funeral because I was a woman and they wanted a man but that's been the absolute minority," she says. "I think you have to be fairly philosophical about it."
In 1983, when the Reverend Dr Mary Caygill was appointed as the first woman minister at Mt Albert Methodist Church, the community - bless them - arranged for a new state-of-the-art sound system to be installed. The fear was that her dulcet tones would not be audible through the existing technology.
Although it could be viewed as an endearing gesture, Caygill, perhaps sensing an unspoken patronising note, still seems somewhat taken aback by this move. "The assumption was that you can't hear women clearly. In actual fact all they needed to do was to change the tone because there's a different [voice] quality," she says. "But they put in a new sound system."
Like Stewart and Moss, 54-year-old Caygill has endured people's dismay when they realise the minister they've asked to take a funeral isn't a man. "I would turn up on the doorstep ... and there'd be this look of shock and horror and they'd say: 'Reverend Caygill, you're a ...' and I would say: 'Yes, I'm a woman. Is this an issue for you?"' Although she would have done so willingly if required, she counts herself fortunate for never having to call on a male colleague to take her place.
Caygill grew up in Christchurch and worshipped at St Alban's Aldred Methodist Church. She trained as a maternity nurse, then moved into social work at Christchurch's Methodist Mission where she responded brusquely to her colleagues' well-meaning suggestions that she become a woman of the cloth. "I didn't want to have to wrestle with any of those questions about women in ministry," she says. But family tradition triumphed over personal concerns; Caygill is from a long line of Methodists (both her father and her maternal grandfather were ministers) and, at just 26 she, too, offered herself as a candidate for ministry. The stained glass ceiling, said to hinder women advancing through the church hierarchy, doesn't seem to have stymied Caygill.
In 2000 she was elected president of the church and in 2004 she became the first female principal of Trinity Methodist Theological College - a position she held for four years. This month she takes up the role of acting head of the University of Auckland's School of Theology. Caygill has taken her rise through the ranks in her stride. She attributes both the Methodist church in general and her own family in particular with an open-minded stance towards the role of women.
Additionally, the church had had a strong tradition of women lay preachers and so it was a relatively short hop to allowing ordination. But it's not a totally rosy picture. Caygill believes that some of the debates between the lay leadership of the church can become "very aggressive", that some women are still not being listened to; it's behaviour she metaphorically describes as "violent ways of relating within the church which are still very patriarchal." And she doesn't believe the playing field is quite level for women ministers either. "I still think women ministers live with this kind of almost shadow over them, an internal kind of shadow, that still for many women is the feeling they've got to work harder."
Forty-year-old Johanna Hershen-son has been the rabbi at Temple Sinai, home to Wellington's Progressive Jewish Congregation, since 2006. She never takes any sexism she experiences in her role to heart, always attributing it to either "ignorance or maybe a sort of edgy humour." And she feels only compassion when members of her congregation are embarrassed to admit to having a woman rabbi in front of their more traditional family members.
"I understand the pressure of pleasing parents or trying to keep your adult child from drifting too far away. I totally get that," she says. But the tousle-haired Hershenson is more likely to encounter the opposite reaction, a type of reverse sexism in which she is, in a sense, viewed as a trophy rabbi.
"I've had many occasions in which somebody really wanted me [as their rabbi] because I was a woman, because it showed they were modern. It showed they were liberal," she says. "So it works both ways but I haven't experienced anything that I would take someone to court on." Hershenson frequently uses humour to disarm nervous or hesitant interaction. "I bend over backwards to make people feel comfortable," she says.
One strategy is to mention the unspoken elephant in the room - or rather, in the synagogue. She might say something like, "We could use some testosterone on this pulpit today" or casually drop the word "girly" into her address. "In a way, that sort of names it so people don't have to, like, have all their thoughts that they have," she says. Washington, DC-born Hershenson completed her studies at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, in the 1990s and took up her first rabbinic post at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, a large synagogue in Los Angeles. The prospect of being a rabbi didn't cross her mind until she was in her mid-teens.
"I went to a weekend with a Jewish youth group and saw a rabbi wearing blue jeans, playing basketball," she says. "And that for me was a really important moment. I thought: 'I didn't know that Judaism could be relevant to life as I knew it'."
Married with two daughters aged 11 and 8, Hershenson is very much a family rabbi. She believes that, by sheer virtue of their biology, women rabbis have a humanising influence on their communities. She knows from first-hand experience that when a rabbi is pregnant or has a child in a sling strapped to her front, "a congregation is forced to deal with the humanity of this clergyperson ... and I think that makes a huge difference in terms of accessibility that people feel to their clergy". She says having children gives a woman rabbi a profound connection with worshippers.
"You're forced to deal with a woman's humanity and sexuality for that matter. I think women [clergy] have closed the gap between the pews and the pulpit."
