Female Mentors

by Caitlin
I am a lot of things. I am a Christian, a sister, a student, an employee, a wife, a daughter, a pastor in training, a child of God, and a woman. Human beings are complex multi-faceted beings, no one role or trait can define the whole of an individual, as Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We are told as children that we are one of a kind and this is what we desire; but at the same time it often seems like the only thing we might want more is to find someone enough like ourselves to make us feel a little less confused and alone.

All of our multivalent thoughts and aspects of ourselves that we strive to hold together in order to form a cohesive image sometimes threaten fall apart and leave us wondering who we really are and what we are really called to be. It is at times like these that we turn in desperation to prayer, a prayer that often sounds something like this:

“God, I know that you are always with me, that you know my innermost being and love me for who I am. I know that you are the rock that is foundation of who I am. But God, please if you could just give me one person in my life who is like me, who understands what I am going through, who is older and wiser and will guide me along the path of being myself because they have been that way before. Please God, send me a mentor.”

I would venture to say that this is the cry of many pastors in formation, but I think it applies particularly to young women seminarians like all four of the Presbyristas of this blog. We want and need to hear from pastors who have made it through, who are ordained, who have fought the battles that we face and understand what it is like to be a woman in her twenties attempting to find her voice as a prophetic leader in the church.

It is this desire, embodied in the voice of my Presbyrista sisters that prodded me into doing the research represented in the graph below. I wanted to know, with so many young women in seminary, both here in Austin and around the country, how many female faculty members were there who could serve as role models and mentors for us.

So I began by comparing the number of female faculty members at nine PC (USA) seminaries and three other seminaries located nearby Austin (Truett Seminary at Baylor, Perkins at SMU, and Seminary of the Southwest our neighboring Episcopal Seminary). This is not a scientific study, the numbers were taken off of seminary websites which are likely to be somewhat out of date and I did not differentiate between the different tiers of the faculty ladder or between women who have pastoral experience. But the numbers I found are interesting nonetheless.

You can clearly see from the graph that Austin Seminary has the lowest percentage of female faculty members of all of the Presbyterian (USA) seminaries. In the comparison with other Texas seminaries Truett and SSW are also low, which doesn’t say much for this region with the exception that Perkins which exceeded my expectations with flying colors. But the sad fact is that no matter which seminary you look at only McCormick in Chicago meets the 50% mark. And here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary we have a student body made up of more than 50% women, and many of those women are younger and in desperate need of role models.

This disparity does not only affect seminarians. The PC (USA) as a whole includes 60% female membership. If our church as a whole is majority female, how much more important is it to have confident, well-trained, well-mentored female pastors.

I want to say in closing that I can and do have male clergy who I look up to and strive to emulate in many ways. But at many points in my journey through seminary even these men who I have learned so much from have encouraged me to connect with female mentors. There is a sense that there is a certain set of obstacles and issues that only a woman can really say she has really dealt with. And with so many female students there is a huge sense of unbalance and the impression that the masses of young women who need to know what it is like to be a mom and a pastor or how to gain a sense of authority in the pulpit are overwhelming to those few females on the faculty.

What should we do? I have come up with two ideas so far that are within my grasp. 1) Band together in a way that may be the blind leading the blind but nevertheless gives us a hand to hold on to. And 2) raise awareness in the hopes that the women who are out there will realize that they have something valuable to offer and encourage them to share it with us.