Rachel Henderlite interview for the Journal of Presbyterian History.

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Trinity University Press in San Antonio Texas.

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And we're going to be talking to Dr. Rachel Hendlerlite who

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perhaps you could give us your pedigree.

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Just very briefly.

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Your position now and...

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Yeah, I'm professor emerita at Presbyterian

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Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas.

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I retired about five years ago.

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Alright, OK. And perhaps let me start this

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and then we'll move in whatever direction we think appropriate,

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and that is,

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could you give us just a little bit of background about your family

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your childhood your background your parents that might be

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a help in understanding you,

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your career.

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My father was,

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he always took great pride in saying he was, grew up in southwest Virginia,

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that's not south West Virginia,

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but it's southwest Virginia.

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And he had three brothers

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and a sister, and all of the brothers became missionaries,

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one of them was. I mean, ministers,

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one of them a missionary to Brazil and the others ministers in this country.

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One of them even came to Texas

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and had a daughter also named Rachel. So we've had many interesting experiences through that.

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In fact, two of them had daughters named Rachel because

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their mother was named Rachel and they had thought she was a very wonderful person.

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Dad was pastor in two or three places,

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but in Gastonia, North Carolina for about 28 years.

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So I spent much of my life there

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before I fell out into the hard, cruel professional world

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and mother was a city gal from Norfolk,

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Virginia.

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And she

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and dad were about as different as any two people could be in lots of ways.

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She was a crow and

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they, dad used to tease her about,

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he would see a little old tiny house up on the hillside and he'd say that's where you're gonna retire.

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And mother would, you know, have a fit of course.

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I had a brother

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and a sister, and I was the middle child

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and went to school in

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Gastonia, and then to Agnes Scott in Decatur,

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Georgia, and then to,

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and then I had TB my senior year in college

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and had to leave just before commencement. I was out a couple of years, then went

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back and got my degree

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and hung around awhile

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and then went to Biblical Seminary in New York which is now New York Theological Seminary,

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and there, just as I was about to get my master's degree,

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which I was getting jointly

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with New York University's School of Education,

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I had TB again and had to leave.

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After a couple years, went back there

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and got my master's in Christian education at New York University

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and went from there to be the dean

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and teach Bible in Mississippi Synodical College in Holly

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Springs, Mississippi, a little junior college that our church was

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running, it closed up pretty shortly after I,

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I was there two years,

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I think, and it closed up I think about a year later.

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The Methodists had a great many junior colleges at that time in Mississippi

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and they began to close theirs about the same time

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and the state schools got a lot better. What date was this, Dr.

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Henderlite? Oh, I finished,

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I got the Master's degree in '36,

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got my bachelor's degree in '28.

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Then I went to Montreat College

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which was also a junior college and there I was teaching Bible and was there about 3 years.

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And then my dad got sick, he was living in Gastonia,

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and I went home to be there and taught in Charlotte,

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and commuted every day.

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And I taught Bible in the public schools, that was the days when that was right,

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appropriate and proper.

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And just over a year,

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dad died that year, and I went to Yale

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to work on my doctorate.

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And Luther Allan Weigle who you know died just quite recently

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was sort of my mentor when I

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first went and he advised me

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to go, I didn't want to do Christian education.

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I needed some background in religism

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and theology and church history

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and that kind of stuff, I had felt thinner and thinner as I was trying to teach.

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And so he said well probably the area which you ought to go would

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be Christian ethics because it would give you this broad sweep of

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subject matter that you want

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and that threw me into the arms of Richard Niebuhr, which was I suppose one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.

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I was fortunate enough to be at Yale in the early '40s when some

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of the great theological giants were alive.

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Robert Calhoun and Roland Bainton

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and Niebuhr of course,

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Latourette, Liston Pope,

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and Dr.

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Weigle himself so I

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did my doctorate with Richard Niebuhr and my other major professors were Liston Pope

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and Robert Calhoun

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and Dr. Weigle so I had four great ones.

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And when I finished that I went to the Presbyterian School.

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I got my, I didn't get my degree while I was there,

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you know I was one of the people that just, sure you can sort of whip up your

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thesis in absentia. And so I took a job

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in Richmond, at the, what was then the Assembly's training school

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but is now the Presbyterian School of Christian education.

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And went back

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in '47 for a semester and finished up my dissertation.

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Dr. Henderlite, would your family encourage you in a church vocation

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or was it something that you yourself came to?

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Well it was my decision,

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the family never made that kind of decision for us.

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But this was my decision that they,

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in particular dad of course, approved it. Did your brother

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or your sister? My sister had gone to the Assembly's training school

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right from, right from junior college.

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So she had, she was doing some church work.

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My brother became a chemist,

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a chemical engineer, and

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so the two gals went into the...

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Would this be common in your time

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for women to take the route that you were,

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that was it common for them to be teaching biblical subjects

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in small colleges and high schools?

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Yeah, this was quite the common practice

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and Virginia was a director of Christian education, my sister.

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Why do you think this was?

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And in other words was it because men were not interested in this

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or was this kind of carved out as particularly a woman's

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occupation or did the women move into this?

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I know very little about it.

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You know I'm curious as to...

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I don't know, I think I just sort of took it for granted.

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At Agnes Scott we had a woman the head of the department,

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not a good teacher at all. And I think maybe the reason I went into teaching Bible is I said,

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"For heaven's sake. It surely can be done better than that."

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Well I'm curious, though, you say when you went to Yale you were very anxious to

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expand beyond Christian education there. Were you

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at that point looking toward another type of experience? No I think I really wanted to teach.

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You still wanted to teach

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but not necessarily do, be a DCE.

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That's right, I didn't especially want to teach Christian education.

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I was in the field of Bible

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and I found that you couldn't teach Bible unless you knew something was out of the Bible.

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So I really felt the need for theology and church history

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and that kind of thing to get some undergirdings for the teaching I

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was trying to do. Biblical Seminary in those days was quite oriented to

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biblical studies and that was it,

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they had other courses, but with my degree in Christian education

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with New York University.

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It was, of my work at Biblical, was almost completely Bible study.

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And it was not too much critical Bible study it was partly

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but not really.

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So I began to feel thinner and thinner as I tried to teach.

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When you went to the Assembly training school,

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or now PSCE, what did you teach?

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I was, we had quite a time getting a title for me I

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finally became the professor of applied Christianity

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and Christian nurture.

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And what does that involve?

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That involved Christian ethics and Christian education.

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Well what size was the faculty then?

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Well, that was a little smaller than it is right now

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but it stayed about the size it was from then until just the last

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two or three years, I think. Must have been about 10 people on the faculty.

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Were you the only woman on the faculty? There was a woman dean who did some teaching, and

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shortly after I went, we got Sarah Little,

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and then we got Josephine Newberry who was teaching in the kindergarten demonstration school.

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I was interested in your selection of Biblical Seminary,

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I had two questions: one, why you happened to go there

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with other Presbyterian seminaries available,

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and then secondly, was,

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in this context of Yale.

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Now women didn't get the BD degree much,

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we didn't go much to theological seminaries.

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I suppose that's the big difference now. Ok.

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There was no place for a woman minister, but there was a place for a woman teacher.

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And Biblical was considered, of all,

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oriented to teaching. Whereas if I had gone,

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if I had been admitted even, I probably couldn't even have been admitted to one of those seminaries.

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But if I could have, it would not have been the

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kind of degree I needed, I needed an academic degree which is why I did the joint program

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with New York University instead of just taking the theological degree at Biblical Seminary.

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In other words, at the time where you were going to seminary then these seminaries weren't geared for

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even for director of Christian education,

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that type of thing.

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A few of them, I don't know whether Columbia did at that time or not,

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it would have been the only one I think that did.

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A little bit later this school put in a three year course for

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teaching.

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In other words, at that time, as far as you know,

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that any Presbyterian woman like yourself,

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who was interested in education or in teaching,

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in order to get the kind of training you wanted,

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you would almost of necessity have gone out of a Presbyterian theological

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institution, they just weren't prepared to deal with you.

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And I think that's not true just to Presbyterians.

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I have a feeling that most of the denominational colleges had little place for women,

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I mean in seminary. Alright, and although,

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again I'm just guessing on my own experience, technically I suppose at that time there

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would be no reason why one couldn't have gone to seminary except that you couldn't

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have been ordained.

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Well actually you wouldn't have been admitted. You wouldn't have been admitted?

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I remember after I was teaching in Richmond at the

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Assembly's training school a woman,

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the first woman they admitted to a degree,

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was an older woman who lived in Richmond

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and she just began taking courses sort of as auditor

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and then gradually she thought Don Miller was the greatest teacher that the Lord had ever created.

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So she began taking all of his courses

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and pretty soon she was able to say to the faculty,

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"I've taken everything you require for graduation, how about a degree?" And they were

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aghast. Did they ever give her a degree? Yeah they gave her a degree.

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And then very soon after that they began to open their doors to women,

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but there was very few that went,

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there at least. It wasn't until ordination was opened up that women began to go.

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And then your experience at Yale,

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then, would you not again be the one of the very few women in...

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But you see I was in the graduate department I was not in the BD program,

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but there were some.

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They were, it was a much smaller group

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and they made no provision for housing women students

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at all, nor did they make provision for housing married students

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so that the Disciples Church had on the campus

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what they called the Disciples House,

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a big old house they rented from the university where they housed their women students

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and their married students.

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And one year, they, well a couple years they had what they called the Presbyterian women

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because a succession of us stayed in that room

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and I lived with them one year.

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Now you were a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States?

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Yeah.

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You always have been affliated with the southern church? Yeah.

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OK. And then at the, maybe just a little more about the background before we get

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up to the actual ordination period then. In your study

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there at Yale where, again, I assume it's still pretty much

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a male world in terms of the leadership and everything else,

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did you find any particular problems

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with you being a, as a woman,

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were you simply not thought of in the same terms,

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did they accept you in the same intellectual terms as they did others?

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Yes I think they did, I think the faculty was quite

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open to that and I think the students were too.

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It was right refreshing.

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In biblical seminary, were you fairly well accepted?

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Yes, there were as many women as men,

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missionaries got their training there

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and teachers of all kinds.

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And it was not uncommon. There were several very strong women on the faculty,

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but,

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so there was nothing uncommon about being a woman in the seminary community.

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Ok so you had, you had then, by the time you had really basically completed your

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formal education you had pretty well decided that your career was going to be

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in teaching

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and particularly

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with your doctorate then in the field of ethics,

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Christian ethics and so forth. At what

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point did you really,

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or had you before the Presbyterian Church even permitted women

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to be ordained, had this, did you feel that this was something that you really

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wanted, would like to do? The only,

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I knew I didn't want to be a minister,

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I mean pastor. The only things that would have pushed me,

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that did push me, towards thinking in those terms was

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the fact that I had no representation anywhere.

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I didn't belong, I had no footing.

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And everybody else in the faculty, for example,

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belonged to Presbytery and if there were any criticisms,

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the Presbytery was behind them.

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There were some criticisms of my teaching by some very conservative missionaries in our church

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and I taught, for example, the introductory Old Testament poems

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that's when I first went there, before Wade Boggs came

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and when you get into Genesis you shake the

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students to death, you know,

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and there was a particular missionary family in Richmond that

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had retired from the mission field,

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and just sort of gathered up all the missionary candidates

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and children of missionaries

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and came there, and she really stirred up people

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against my teaching and would go to the

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president. Well there was nobody,

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nobody had examined my convictions to see what I believed and there was nobody behind me.

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So I felt that, for one thing,

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also I did not get the same salary that the men did,

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even though I was,

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had as much academic preparation as they did until we got

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a business manager who just said this is ridiculous.

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Was this a male business manager? Mhmm, [unintelligible name of a man] been my friend

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ever since. But this was just this,

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this difference in payscale which I know was common in a lot of other areas,

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this was just assumed, though, that you would not...

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You don't have a wife to support, you don't have children to support,

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you have little,

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I don't know about pension but I don't believe I had any sort of pension,

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provision made,

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this sort of thing. But a single male student, though,

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would have been actually in the same situation

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but would have been paid. They did not pay you on the basis of how many children

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and how many wives you had.

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They paid you on the basis of whether you were a man

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or a woman. That's interesting.

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So the,

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this desire or this need at a

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point to really be identified

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and supported by the church

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and your teaching. And I wanted to vote.

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This school belonged to the General Assembly,

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it was one of the few schools we had that belonged to the General Assembly

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and everybody else could go to the meeting of the General Assembly as a delegate and,

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except we don't call them delegates do we, as a commissioner.

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Commissioner, yeah.

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And vote on anything that came. I had no vote anywhere in anything that concerned my life

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or my work or anything else.

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Could you have been an elder at that point?

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Yes. In your church. Were you, were you ever?

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No, I couldn't, no we didn't permit elders. You didn't permit elders either? No,

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we did that all at one time in 1965,

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64.

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Were there any other, any other reasons that,

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in other words, you were not particularly motivated to want to preach

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or administer sacraments

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or so forth, that was not a major... I just wanted the footing,

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a platform. A kind of power base.

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Yeah. Ok,

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and did, again we have, Lois, if there's anything you wanna,

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anything more you wanna ask, is if we get to the whole concept of ordination,

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then could you perhaps just

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tell us in your own terms how this,

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we've read some of the things about this, how'd this come about that

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you were the person that became really the first one to be ordained in

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the US church. Of course I'm speculating about some of what I was saying

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but I suspect it's pretty accurate.

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The church voted this in 1964.

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It had rejected it somewhere in the 50s,

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and there'd been much to do about it, but in 1964 it was passed

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and the elders and the deacons and the pastors were,

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and the ministers were, all three to be accepted.

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In 19-,

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well that year the committee came from

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Hanover Presbytery. Hanover is always a progressive,

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there has always been a progressive Presbytery there

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and [audio cuts out]

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perhaps I don't want to say this,

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but they, I think they, it's a peach of a seminary,

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I mean of a Presbytery and I think they enjoyed being a little

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ahead, being the vanguard.

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And they sent a committee,

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Ernest Thompson was on it,

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and I think the chairman of the minister

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and his work, this kind of folks,

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and I was working at the Board of Christian Education at the time,

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on the cirriculum, and they came to my office

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and asked me, said they had come to ask me if I would be willing to be the,

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seek ordination in Hanover Presbytery, and

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since I had been turning it over in my mind anyway I said immediately yes

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I would, would be delighted to do so

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and of course appreciate the asking me to.

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So then I had to go into care of Presbytery as anybody else did,

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had to write out all of the,

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take the examinations, and write the papers,

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and so I turned in a, for the theological paper,

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I turned in a chapter out of one of the books I had written.

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For the exegetical paper, I think I turned in an article I had written for some,

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for the Interpretation magazine, something like that.

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So I didn't have to do much of that kind of work,

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but I did have to go through the exams, and one of interesting things

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was that the chairman of the Candidate Committee was a student that I had had at the seminary.

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And I said to him, "Don't forget that I gave you an A in Christian ethics."

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Did you, you know, in this did you,

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I'm assuming now that this committee representing the

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clerical leadership in that Presbytery pretty much is what approached you,

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where, did you pick up at that time any

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or any sense of opposition to this move?

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No I really have had very little opposition to,

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people raised eyebrows a little bit

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but not much. I've had a few letters from

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people strenuously objecting on the basis of it's not biblical,

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but very few actually.

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For the most part people have been most cordial about it.

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Really surprising, I think.

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There was a little, apparently a little old man,

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who must have been a minister in South Carolina who used to write me a postcard,

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unsigned, every year in his wavering handwriting

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lamenting the fact that I had,

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this violated the canons of their own life.

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But you, did you find then that when you were

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ordained did you, did you become

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a part of the structure of Presbytery?

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Were you put on committees? Well, I left almost immediately.

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I was, I was about to leave Richmond

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and was coming here to Austin Seminary.

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So I was ordained one day

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and the next week I took off on a sabbatical.

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So I had no opportunity. I had been active in the Presbytery already

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in other capacities and had been chairman of some kind of social action committee

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there in Richmond, I mean in the Presbytery.

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So it wasn't, the Presbytery was not new to me

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but when I came down here,

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I took a leave of about six months

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and travelled around the world on a freighter,

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and I spent about three months of that in,

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at Oxford at Mansfield College

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and had a great time,

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and then came here in January of '66,

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and joined Brazos Presbytery

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at the suggestion of a, of Dean who was,

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they were trying to thicken the Pres-- they were trying to scatter us to

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various presbyteries and I was very fortunate to get into Brazos Presbytery which centers in

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Houston and there I became

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active on committees and such things almost at once

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and they received me with open arms.

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They too were wary of progressive Presbyteries.

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They invited me to do such things as lead a minister seminar

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and I had been down to this Synod

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before to preach, before I was ordained I had been down to do a series

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for the Synod of Texas, two or three years before ordination.

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I didn't do a lot of preaching but I did do a little.

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It was real sure in those days the difference between a lecture

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and a sermon. I had done that.

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So I was known a little bit but.

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Now, when you say you had worked in the Presbytery at Hanover, and we'll go back

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to Hanover, if I'm figuring right,

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you started teaching in about 1947.

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I started teaching in '44.

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Forty-four? And you were ordained in '65.

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So we're talking about 21 years that you were not ordained.

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Right. Some time during this. I had been teaching since 1936,

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well I skipped one year of teaching English in the Belmont,

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North Carolina, Hospital before I went to Biblical Seminary.

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There was a long period of

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time that you were not ordained but at some point you did start being brought into

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the Presbytery in some sort of advisory capacity then. Well,

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working on committees and leading discussion groups

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and such things. Well they recognized your credentials

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and your abilities before the ordination.

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Yeah. But you had no vote,

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in other words, you were just simply a co-opted member of the committee.

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That's very interesting. Well about

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1955, our church set up its work on,

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to develop a new curriculum and Charles

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Cramer [Kramer?] was the chairman of this committee

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and Longwood Kelly was on it and

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Dr. Billy Cheryl and Alex Nelson

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and all those folks. And I was on that committee,

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the original study committee to do that.

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And then they asked me about '57 or 8 if I would go to the Board

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for a year, if I'd take a sabbatical and go to the Board for a year

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and help them get some ground work done for the curriculum.

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So I took the leave

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and went to the Board

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and then tried, in going back to PSCE,

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they asked me

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if I could give half time to the Board and half time to PSCE,

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which I tried for a year.

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And that is, you don't have any such thing as half time.

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So I gave up the teaching

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and went to the Board full time about '58 I think,

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and was at the Board until

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65 when I left as the Director of the Cirriculum.

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That's the Faith and Life? No, Covenant Life. Covenant Life,

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I'm sorry. Go ahead. Like I said,

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if we go back there, I'm interested, we can go back

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and focus on this ordination. Again I noticed there were there were some things

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about this that interested

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and intrigued me. First of all was the very setting that you chose

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for this ordination,

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or I assume you chose it,

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could you tell us a little bit about. You mean the church in which I was ordained? Right.

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The committee sort of wanted me to be ordained in Presbytery meeting

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and I had been a member of this

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interracial church for about ten years by that time.

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Back in about ten years before they had felt Richmond was changing rapidly

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and closer and closer to Ginter Park where the seminary and PSCE and the Ginter Park Church

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were, the black community was moving in,

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a professional class of black people.

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They were professors at Virginia Union University, and they were in the

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state department, and all sorts of people like that.

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And the Presbytery began to, they had, the only Presbyterian Church in the in town was a little

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mission church, the 17th Street Mission,

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where the Seminary students and the PSCE students had gone for years.

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And for the PSCE students it done,

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at first, just little piddling things like playing the piano for seminary students,

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but then they had gotten more of that [unintelligible]

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but that was the only church we had for blacks,

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so Presbytery was very eager to start another church

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and felt the need of it very keenly.

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They had discovered that many of the blacks in Richmond were

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staying home from church

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and were listening to the Grace Covenant of television hour

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and radio hour

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and so they called Mr.

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Lawrence Bottoms up to do a survey of that new community that was developing to

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see whether they wanted a Presbyterian church and they said [unintelligible].

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So a Presbytery started this church

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and it was suggested that I go down

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and help them get started

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with the Sunday School stuff and a couple of us

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did so, Mary Louise Crane who was working in one of the

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[unintelligible] and we got Mike Elligan,

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Irvin Elligan to come be the pastor,

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we stole him from the United Church.

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So since I was working there,

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it made sense for me to put my, both of us to put our membership there,

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which we did, and Mike asked us not to

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until after the church had gotten started.

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He said, "I think we'll have better support from the Presbytery if

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you all are not members until

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[unintelligible]." So that's what we both did,

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and I stayed a member of that church

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and taught leadership classes and that sort of thing for about ten years

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and it was a it was a great church.

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I suppose they had more doctors degrees in that church than any church in town.

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They were the friendliest kind of people

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and seemed to want us to be members of it,

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Aubrey Brown put his membership in the church,

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of course a minister doesn't have a membership, but I mean he began to attend

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and he did a good deal of substitute preaching for him

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and occasionally I preached from him.

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He was always teaching a class,

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either leaders or the adults or something of the sort,

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and Mary Louise was, too.

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So we felt very close to it, and when the time came for ordination,

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they were so excited about it that I knew that most of them would not

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be able to get to the meeting of Presbytery for this purpose so

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I insisted that we have it at the church where they could.

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I felt like Presbytery could get to the church,

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but they couldn't get to the Presbytery. And many of them wouldn't, even if they could.

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So that's why where we had it.

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And you say, we were wondering how the people in the church did feel about it,

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then they were generally enthusiastic,

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excited crowd? Yes, as a matter of fact, they wanted to make a ruling elder after

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I entered into the process of becoming a teaching elder.

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They said, let us, we would like to elect you a ruling elder in this interim,

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but I didn't want to do that, I didn't think that made sense,

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being a temporary assembly member. I don't understand

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the article, that you were ordained under the extraordinary clause,

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I do not understand that terminology. That means I did not have Hebrew. You did not have Hebrew.

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That church requires that you have both Greek and Hebrew,

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and I had had Greek but I had not had Hebrew. And that's the only reason for that? That's the reason. I was actually

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wondering a thing about the service, and this may jump ahead a bit in what I want to talk

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about, but I'd be interested in your reaction to it in the article,

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one thing that struck me was that, and this is the article in Presbyterian

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Survey and it mentioned in the serves

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and it said that friends sang together the hymn of joyous praise

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God Himself is with us.

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And I was wondering whether now,

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you know we look back are so much more conscious of quote sexist language

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and so forth does that sort of thing meaning much to you then

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or now? It didn't, well not as much as it does to some people

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but I do see the importance of it.

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But at that time nobody was talking that way at all. It didn't bother anybody.

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And so you wouldn't be thinking in those terms at all?

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No, I wasn't. What about now,

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do you think that. Well,

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as the ladies say my consciousness has been raised to that point.

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I think it hasn't bothered me as much as some because I was accepted

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as an ordained minister

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and really didn't have any problem with it as many people had had

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died without automation as I said I didn't get the same salary

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or any of that business until this young fella took it upon

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himself to see that I did.

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But it is much more important to me now to,

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I find it very difficult to say anything

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but He if not God.

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But I think that's pure habit.

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I was leading a, it happened to me at communion service yesterday,

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and I did one the week before at the COCU meeting, and

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the prayers in the COCU service keep saying Father God,

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and I found myself wondering whether I ought to say Father

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and Mother God or just every now and then say Mother God instead.

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But somehow I don't really feel the need to go that far.

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Although I do try to at every point to say humankind instead of mankind.

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That gets me, when it's talking about us,

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far more than it does when it's talking about God.

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I think partly that's because I had such profound love

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and respect for my father.

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He was just about all you could ask of a parent,

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male or female.

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I was wondering, too, another thing strikes me as,

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and I'm trying to [unintelligible] your own experiences,

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would this be a factor in your, both your acceptance

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and your participation in the life the church,

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that you really are an exceptional person.

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That is you came with exceptional credentials as you say you're being examined

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by the students you taught you you're submitting articles for

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your ordination, I just I can't think of very many ministers that I know have ever

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done that, and I'm wondering.

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Well of course I was older. Right, but even so I know lots of older ones who who

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are were taken in simply because maybe they had experience in business

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or something like that. That they were they wanted their experience

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but they were certainly not looked upon as being equals in any way.

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And you know I'm wondering how much were you conscious of this at all,

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or if you ask it another way do you think a woman

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at that time simply meeting the minimal requirements

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and so forth, do you think her reception would have been much different

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or much more difficult? I think with that Presbytery it would have been.

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Now take somebody like Pat McClurg in that church.

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And Pat just says very frankly I've had all kinds of opportunities

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for service that the men students in my class have not had at all,

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simply because I'm a woman.

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And I think that's been true of Pat. She was also a member of Brazos Presbytery

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and they were progressive

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and it became the thing to do to

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have a woman on a committee or even a chairman of a committee.

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And so Pat just moved into that.

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No, I don't think that that was unusual for that time.

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You know there is always the question,

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again, of how much tokenism that you're raising that is involved in

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a lot of these things, and you know

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I'm sure that there's bound to be, when everybody's first

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or it starts, there's always some of that in the people,

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you see the Presbytery wanting to be progressive.

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Do you, do you see?

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Well you see seminaries want to have a woman on the faculty now

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and if you don't the people will look at yourself cross eyed.

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But they want one up here at this seminary.

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I'm not on it anymore, you see in an active capacity

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and they really feel that they are lacking

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and it's not just token they really feel they are lacking a feminine point of view,

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but this came after the tokenism,

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I think, this followed the tokenism rather than preceding it.

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And it's still very much,

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is it not, true that the woman is thought out more in terms,

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you say, a feminist view where they don't they don't think of representing

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male views on the faculty that is.

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Well they've already got 'em, that's all they've got. Right, but I mean it's,

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yeah, it's the it's the idea that it's,

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you need a female representation.

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You know what I'm trying to say is they don't even hire the other people in terms of any

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kind of sexual orientation they hire them because they're good professors

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and they want them but they still think in the hiring of the woman in a sexual

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way that they don't

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with the men, am I making sense? Yeah.

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So I'm saying that we're still at that stage are we not?

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That's right.

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It's still a problem. Ok were there other,

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anything else, were there any,

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you know, any other experiences you think in connection

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with that ordination, with people,

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or with the event itself that you think of when you think of that

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that we haven't talked about were there any other

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encounters or? Perhaps we could just describe the whole evening.

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I've read about it in this article but how you viewed the whole evening.

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Well, I don't know that

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I can answer that. I don't have any particular,

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I mean it seemed to me to be a very normal kind of service.

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Well let me say this, was it in the evening?

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I don't know where I got that. Yes it was in the evening. It was in the evening.

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Was it on a weekday? Primarily so that people could come. I think

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it was a weekday.

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Who preached the sermon, Dr. Thompson, is that correct? Uh huh, uh huh.

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Was he [unintelligible], was it having to do with the women or.

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On the church, the nature of the church.

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And then you preached your that same evening?

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No, that,

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I was, the Presbytery meeting. At the Presbytery meeting?

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This particular sermon I through that he did not go that one,

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the Presbytery.

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I don't remember if that was the same do or whether it was the day before.

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Ok.

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Do we get, are there any other things you can think of,

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else we want to ask about the ordination,

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the service itself,

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or anything connected with that particular period because we

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thought we would also like to see how you,

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we started on this,

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is to how you see a lot of the contemporary problems

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or aspects of women in ministry

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and women in the church today let's see,

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just like, we've talked about most of these is the choice of the

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career and why you wanted to do this

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and your feelings as to how you operated in the

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church after ordination as compared to before.

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And do you see, well we've touched this a little bit,

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but do you see how,

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is there any significant change in women

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who devote their career to the church today,

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in terms of your own situation?

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Do you see any real differences in terms of them being accepted

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or being involved?

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Yeah, I find myself wondering what's gonna happen now that we've got

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so many more in seminaries.

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As long as there were just a few,

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the church could assimilate them without too much strain,

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there are not many congregations yet that will call a woman.

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And some ministers

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or some people in sort of executive positions are saying

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that the first job a student gets out

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of seminary is relatively easy,

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but the second job is always difficult.

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And I think some of the women have found that to be true.

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That once they get out they may be placed tokenly

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or maybe not but as an associate pastor

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somewhere and then to be called as the pastor

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of the church is a much more difficult thing for a woman because there is still this

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stereotype that she can't quite handle it, and that nobody will trust her in it.

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So I'm waiting to see what the next two

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or three years are gonna bring forth.

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I think of the women that have graduated from this seminary,

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of course I've been interested in watching,

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and most of them who have actually

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graduated have been ordained,

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I guess. Certainly half if not more.

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And they apparently have had no serious problem

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getting jobs.

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They feel very uneasy about it

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about what's gonna happen.

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And particularly once they're married complications have arisen.

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We had one couple that finished here about 5 years ago,

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maybe as much as seven years ago, both of whom

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finished at the same time

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and he was ordained

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and called immediately. She worked as a Director of Christian Education partly

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because he didn't much want her to be ordained

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and now

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she has just been ordained this last summer.

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But the question arises to what extent can she accept

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a call somewhere because of him.

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For the two to be called to the same church is quite unusual it happens to some

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of our graduates and to other people

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but there are not a great many congregations that are gonna call two young things the same age.

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Rachel Henderlite interview for the Journal of Presbyterian History.

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