c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As the United Methodist Church marks 50 years of women’s ordination, here are the stories of five women who became ordained after initially thinking they would never land a job in a pulpit.

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(RNS) The Rev. Betsye Mowry, pastor of Oneida (N.Y) First United Methodist Church, first felt called to ministry in 1957 at a Billy Graham crusade when she was 13.

“I thought I was called to be a missionary because that was what women did,” she said.

She majored in Russian studies and zoology at Syracuse University, married, went to graduate school and had three children.

Beginning in the late 1960s, she sought a parish appointment.

“I kept getting turned down by bishops who weren’t willing to travel the uncharted course,” she said.

In 1971, a bishop appointed her to two rural churches, and she was ordained an elder in 1974. Among female United Methodist clergy in upstate New York, she is one of the longest-serving ministers.

The early days were difficult, said Mowry, 62.

“There weren’t other female pastors around,” she said. “Men were waiting for me to fail.”

One memory stands out.

“I had one man tell me I had ruined his life because after his wife saw I was a pastor,” Mowry said, “she thought she could work outside the home.”

_ Renee K. Gadoua

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(RNS) The day Elizabeth Quick moved into the parsonage of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Oneida, N.Y., she got a phone call from a local funeral director. A woman in her 90s had died, and Quick had to prepare the funeral.

Welcome to her world.

In the three years she’s pastored at the Oneida church, Quick estimates she’s presided at 30 funerals and about 20 baptisms and 20 weddings.

That’s a lot of life and death for a 27-year-old. But the rites of passage are central to the career she set her sights on years ago.

In June, Quick was ordained in the United Methodist Church. Her official job description, according to the church, is “a lifetime ministry of service, word, sacrament and order.” Duties include preaching and teaching God’s word, administering the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion, and ordering the life of the church for mission and ministry.

To Quick _ call her “Pastor Beth” _ her life’s work is a vocation, a calling that she first felt in the sixth grade.

In 2003 she was commissioned a minister and assigned to St. Paul’s, a congregation of about 400 people with an average Sunday church attendance of 100.

When she first started preaching, Pastor Beth wrote her Sunday sermon on Tuesday. “I’ve slacked off in the last three years,” she said. “Now I write them on Fridays or Saturdays like most pastors do.”

Quick says most parishioners don’t assume her status _ young, single, newly ordained _ means she has no wisdom to share.

“For the most part people know I’m filling the role of pastor. They’re willing to come to me,” she said.

Finding time for herself may be her biggest challenge.

“It’s hard to compartmentalize, “this is me as pastor, this is me as not pastor,“’ Quick said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

_ Renee K. Gadoua

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(RNS) When the Rev. Ellen Brubaker graduated from high school with an eye toward serving her church, only men could become pastors. It was 1955, and the United Methodist Church was still a year away from its historic vote to open full clergy rights to women.

“Being ordained as a pastor was not one of the things talked about for women to aspire to,” said Brubaker, who is now semi-retired and serving part-time at Trinity United Methodist Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., and teaching at Albion College.

Brubaker, then-president of the youth group at her Methodist church in Muskegon, instead hoped to serve as a missionary.

After she met her first husband, who was on his way to seminary to become a pastor, Brubaker decided to pursue an education degree and taught part time while raising four children. She hoped to teach full time when her youngest child entered first grade, but there were few jobs.

“I was doing a lot of thinking and praying,” said Brubaker, who met other women considering going to seminary and decided to join them.

Brubaker made a seven-hour commute once a week to Dayton, Ohio, for classes at United Theological Seminary. She graduated in 1975 and served as an associate pastor with her husband.

Even in the 1970s, she met resistance.

“A couple fairly prominent white male pastors said, `Well, don’t hurt your husband’s ministry,”’ she said. Her husband, who died in 1987, was supportive.

Brubaker, 69, since has served as an associate pastor, pastor and district superintendent. Today, she said, the church has a 50-year history to answer any critics who might question women’s ordination.

“It’s an influence in the Christian faith,” she said of the milestone. “We’ve now had good experiences of women in leadership.”

_ Patricia Mish

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(RNS) Growing up, the Rev. Laurie Haller described herself as “the kind of kid who always wanted to go to church.”

Haller knew from the time she was a young girl she wanted to serve the church. But as a youngster growing up in the 1960s, it never occurred to her she could become a pastor, she said.

“In my denomination, women were not allowed to be pastors,” said Haller, 51, who grew up Mennonite and pursued a degree in sacred music at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Conn. There, she had her first contact with the Methodist church and women clergy.

In retrospect, Haller realizes her “true calling was not to be a musician but to be a pastor.”

Haller stayed on at Yale and received a master of divinity degree. In 1982, she became one of the first Mennonite women to be ordained and moved to Michigan with her husband Gary, a United Methodist pastor.

She transferred her credentials to the Methodist church and has served at West Michigan churches for 25 years. On July 1, she became a regional district superintendent.

“God always has been calling me to work in the church,” Haller said. “I never wanted to do anything else, and I still don’t.”

_ Patricia Mish

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(RNS) Kennetha Bigham-Tsai began her path to ordination in midlife. She grew up Baptist and intended to become a doctor when she attended Harvard University in the early 1980s.

There, she became involved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and decided to pursue a social work degree. She later married, and moved to Florida and Texas before landing in Michigan in 1999.

Bigham-Tsai, 47, first heard the call to ministry while attending a conference on black women in ministry. While living in Texas, she was active in a Baptist congregation supportive of women in leadership.

She began studies at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, where she received a master of divinity degree in 2003.

“As I began to find myself theologically, I was theologically not a Baptist,” Bigham-Tsai recalled. “I felt the United Methodist Church was where I would be best supported as an African American woman.”

She now is a candidate for ordination and will begin her job as an associate pastor at University United Methodist Church in East Lansing, Mich., on July 1. She will be eligible for ordination after a three-year probationary period.

Bigham-Tsai believes the 1956 decision to ordain women “recognized what God intended in the first place _ absolute equality of people despite gender, race or sexual orientation. It’s the church catching up with the Holy Spirit.”

_ Patricia Mish

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(Renee K. Gadoua writes for the Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y. Patricia Mish writes for the Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Haller, Brubaker, Bigham-Tsai and Quick, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

See related stories, RNS-WOMEN-ORDAIN, RNS-WOMEN-STATS and RNS-WOMEN-BAPTIST, all transmitted Oct. 11, 2006.