c. 1998 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ As a young girl, the Rev. Paula Maeder Connor dreamed of making social change by becoming an ambassador. Today, she is the pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lakewood and a spiritual ambassador to her congregation and the community.

Reluctant to follow in the footsteps of her parents and grandparents, the Rev. Gena Thornton didn’t make her mark in the ministry until a decade after she married and had five children while the Rev. Laurinda Hafner thought she was destined for a career in law and politics but found her passion for social justice directing her toward the ministry.

These Cleveland-area women are part of one of the most significant changes in church life in the 20th century: the movement of ordained women into American Protestantism.

For centuries, clergy were male. No one thought anything about it. In recent decades, however, the situation has changed. Today, more women are serving as pastors and clergy leaders in Protestant churches despite job discrimination, disparities in pay between male and female clergy and resistance from congregations.”Churches are opening up,”said Hafner, 44, who recently became a first-time mom when she and her husband adopted a baby girl from China.”They are starting to discover the value of women pastors. We can be great preachers and great nurturers. However, the situation is far from perfect.” Perfect or not, women are entering the seminaries in record numbers.

According to The Association of Theological Schools, the number of women entering seminaries has more than tripled in the last 23 years.

When the association began counting seminary enrollment by gender in 1972, women comprised 10.2 percent of enrollment. In 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available, women made up 33.9 percent of the total enrollment.

On the surface, the numbers are impressive. However, Patricia M.Y. Chang, co-author of”Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling,”cautions against becoming too optimistic. According to her research, including surveys of both men and women in 15 denominations, the percentage of women clergy in the work force averages 10 percent. By comparison, the 1990 U.S. Census reported 21 percent of all doctors are women and 25 percent of all lawyers are women.

Chang said the major reason for the relatively low percentage of women clergy is that the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States exempts religious institutions from having to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act outlaws discrimination of the basis of sex or race.”It is perfectly legal for churches to bar women from attaining full ordination to the ministry,”Chang said.

According to the book,”women are more likely to leave the ministry after ordination because of discrimination and few employment opportunities. Women who find themselves called to ordained ministry may eventually switch to other helping professions because of greater opportunities, higher wages and legal protections against discrimination that secular organizations are able to offer.” One of the most glaring discriminations is the gap in pay between women and men clergy.

According to the research, women clergy suffer from financial bias even when they have the same level of education, type of training, years of experience and hold the same type of clergy job in a similarly sized church within the same denomination.

For example, in 1994, male clergy in the United Methodist Church received an average of $45,536 annually. Women clergy received $38,016 annually. That same year, women clergy in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America earned an average of $33,362, while their male counterparts earned $40,152 annually.”There is a 9 percent difference between the salaries of women and men clergy,”Chang said.

Edward Lehman, a retired sociology professor from the State University of New York, has done extensive, related research. His work found that in two denominations _ the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) and American Baptist Churches _ numerous disparities between men and women clergy existed. In every case, male clergy were favored over the women clergy.

For example, housing allowance, expense account and monies allocated for seminars and workshops by congregations were all greater for men clergy than women clergy.”Men are still looked at as the primary breadwinner,”Lehman said.”And congregations pay their clergy under that assumption.” Regardless of the obstacles, women pastors, such as Connor, Thornton and Hafner, have persevered.

Even before Connor ever spoke her first sermon as an ordained minister, she had already encountered problems at the seminary. She says Lutheran seminaries, especially the one she attended in Columbus, Ohio, were ill- prepared for women. The first woman ordained in the Lutheran Church was in 1970. Connor, 49, was ordained in 1978.”We had no mentors,”said Connor, who is married, with two teen-age girls.”Women theologians had just begun to write, so we couldn’t get any of their writings. The secretaries, the only women at the seminary, were our friends. The seminary didn’t even have work-study positions for women.” Finding a job can be difficult in any profession, but entering a male-dominated field such as the clergy can be hard. Just ask Thornton.

Thornton, 59, was ordained a Baptist minister after receiving her education from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tenn., but her job hunting yielded no results.”No Baptist church would call me. I basically had three options,”said Thornton.”I could start my own church, change denominations or get out of the ministry. After praying a lot, I decided to become an African Methodist Episcopalian minister.”Thornton is now the senior pastor at St. Paul AME Church in Cleveland.

Lehman found that even when a majority of members in the congregation feel a woman is as qualified as a man to serve as a pastor, these same members may also perceive that hiring a female pastor would cause conflict among some members of their congregation.”In order to avoid conflict, hiring committees usually choose a man over an equally qualified women in order to preserve peace,”Lehman said.”They do so even if their personal preference may be for a female candidate.” At the same time, Lehman insists the degree of resistance is not deep-seated.”There is very little difference between the acceptance of women and men clergy. The degree of rejection is extremely small. In fact, most women clergy say their major opponents are women and not men. However, that occurs because the women are doing most of the talking as opposed to the men.” Hafner, however, said it was difficult for others to accept her as a minister.”It took a long time before people didn’t see me as a wedding coordinator, Sunday school superintendent or a pastor’s wife,”said Hafner, who received her doctorate of ministry from McCormick Seminary in Chicago, Ill.”I once worked at a church where the congregants wouldn’t come to church because I was a woman pastor. Some of them didn’t even want me to baptize them.”

DEA END GONZALEZ