I can't even remember the names of all the men on my #ChurchToo list
What I remember is the office they held and the power they assumed.
Reading Ruth Everhart’s powerful and painful #MeToo article, I have to say that the time has come to add male clergy of every theological stripe to the growing list of gropers, tongue-thrusters, ass-grabbers, and sexual predators. I have been ordained for 43 years, and many of the ministers on my list of less-than-spiritual encounters are now dead. I cannot even remember some of their names. What I do remember is the office of ordination that they held in the church and the implicit power they assumed over a relatively small number of women who shared that office a few decades ago.
My first experience of an unwanted advance involved my professor of pastoral care who began an appointment with the line, “Before we talk about your paper, I think we need to deal with our mutual attraction to each other.” There was none. Next was my professor of polity, a local minister, who tried to grope me in his office. The final evaluation of my internship in hospital chaplaincy included the head chaplain and my immediate supervisor imagining taking me to a carnival and stuffing my mouth with hot dogs, followed by a scary roller coaster ride to make me hold onto them for dear life—this because I overstepped my authority by attending a consultation on a patient without asking their permission.
Once I was ordained, there was the minister from my college town who visited me in my new church and put the same moves on me that apparently he had been trying with a number of women in his congregation; the tall-steeple minister and father of a graduating senior, whose college chaplain I had been, coming at me with his tongue while pinning me against my apartment door; the theologian-in-residence for my denomination fondling my breasts after we had reflected as theological equals on the business before a synod meeting; the regional executive and former moderator of the denomination who announced to me, as I was exiting the elevator on my hotel floor rather than on his, that he had never spent so much time with a woman and not bedded her. My Weinstein moment was with the head of the committee on theological education in the denomination, who begged me for an hour to do something that I cannot bring myself to type.
