tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3275445539769671222024-03-15T08:24:29.733+00:00We Mixed Our DrinksThe blog of Hannah MudgeHannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.comBlogger276125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-86371728053741780522018-04-03T22:32:00.001+01:002018-04-05T16:09:42.316+01:00Ten years of feminist activism<p dir="ltr">I haven’t blogged for a long time because I was pregnant and then I had a baby and young babies take up all your time and energy. I keep thinking that I miss blogging as it was, before ‘influencers’ and #content, before feeling like each post had to be perfectly crafted and perfectly nuanced, for the book deal, for the brand, for guarding against the accusations of ‘ranting’ or ‘lacking grace’ or ‘not having researched the subject matter sufficiently’. Blogging as it was, then, when people made the leap from Livejournal et al to setting up public, personal blogs and things weren’t quite so strategic. I guess that’s got something to do with the fact I’ve hesitated once or twice while writing this and asked myself what the point of the post is and what it’s saying. But that’s not the blogging I miss.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It’s ten years since I attended my first feminist march* and first feminist conference. Ten years. I suddenly realised this one night a couple of months ago when I came across <a href="pressandpublishing.genderissues?__twitter_impression=true">this piece</a> by Jess McCabe, published in 2007 and looking at the resurgence of feminist activism around that time that included marches being revived and six new feminist publications launching in the space of 18 months. The same year, The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2007/sep/09/women">profiled some of ‘the new feminists’ </a>who were ‘trying to rebrand the f-word’ and feminist writing and journalism was very much on the agenda. It reminded me of my copies of <a href="http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/266">Subtext magazine</a>, still in a cupboard in my bedroom - and how excited I was to find out more about feminist media at FEM 08 in Sheffield, the aforementioned first feminist conference.</p>
<p dir="ltr">FEM 08 was the fourth FEM conference organised by a team including Kat Banyard, which grew from 90 attendees at its first event in 2004 to 500 attendees the year I went. I remember the excitement of being on the train and spotting women I recognised from their newspaper columns, women with banners from organisations I followed online. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune were there that day handing out the surveys that would become the research behind <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Word-New-Feminist-Movement/dp/1848133952"><i>Reclaiming the F Word</i></a>. Three years later I would chat with Kristin over coffee at Watford railway station and discuss the need to bring Christian feminists together, an idea that eventually became the Christian Feminist Network, but in 2008 I don’t think I even really knew any other Christian feminists yet. I was still desperately in search of likeminded churchgoing women who didn’t believe their destiny lay in some heavily gender stereotyped ideal of ‘Biblical womanhood’.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Talks I attended at the conference included 'The Rape Conviction Rate Scandal', 'The Female Face of Poverty' and 'Challenging Destructive Masculinities', although, as my rather breathless Livejournal entry detailing the day explained, the highlight for me was the seminar entitled 'Grassroots Feminist Media' - it was 'so inspiring' to meet the women behind The F Word and Subtext magazine and I was beyond excited about the 'current explosion in feminist media'. Just two years previously I'd been immersed in the world of weekly women's magazines through work, seeing article upon article picking over celebrities' weight, clothes and relationships, 'scary skinny size 0’ celebrities on one page; on the next, shaming other celebrities for having cellulite. The state of my own body image at that time wasn't helped by the media I had consumed and the wounds were raw.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Today's plethora of feminist-flavoured online media outlets and coverage of marches and #MeToo in mainstream magazines means I often forget that the body-shaming, diet-obsessed side of women’s publishing still exists (although some magazines have closed now, as have the 'lad's mags' that were the focus of so much activism back then). Part of that, I guess, is a result of having hung out in the internet feminist bubble for so long. But really, perceptions of feminism in the mid-2000s were very different: we’d all read <i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Chauvinist_Pigs">Female Chauvinist Pigs</a></i> and its critique of ‘raunch culture’ - some of which now seems to recall almost ancient history in popular culture - Playboy merchandise, trucker hats, Paris Hilton, push up bras and thongs.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><u>I</u>n the book, Ariel Levy argues that early noughties ‘raunch culture’ - ‘the emergence of a woman-backed trash culture’ is a ‘rebellion’ against second-wave feminism, the outworking of unresolved conflict between the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, yet also ‘a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women’s movement’. In her conclusion, she wrote that ‘The proposition that having the most simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality constantly reiterated throughout our culture somehow proves that we are sexually liberated and personally empowered has been offered to us, and we have accepted it’. Explicitly feminist media, at the time, seemed like a breath of fresh air and for us as young women reacting against the imposition of ‘raunch culture’, crucially important.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It can certainly be argued now that once feminism began to have its cultural 'moment', at some point over the last few years, the movement started to become commercialised and exploited - for content, for developing celebrities' careers, for making money around International Women's Day. And more coverage and more hype sadly doesn’t mean that we’re any closer to getting rid of misogyny. But feminism wasn’t having that ‘moment’ yet and sitting in a student union building talking about subverting mainstream publishing with a more diverse range of articles and body positive messages seemed like revolution when you were 23 years old in 2008 and probably still does for young women, in other corners of the internet and other feminist get-togethers in 2018.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Some of the debates that would later bubble to the surface of the movement and cause pain, splintering groups and communities and friendships were only just developing among everyone involved. Germaine Greer gave the closing speech that day and received a standing ovation - let’s say no more. I also attended a talk on lapdancing clubs by Object. The following year - or maybe the same year - I'm not too sure - I remember the debates following Reclaim the Night London about the way some women had been chanting and booing outside Spearmint Rhino and how the women who worked there might feel about it. I observed the white, middle class profile of most of the attendees at the conference - people like me, it has to be said - who seemed a world apart from my work colleagues back at home. A re-reading of Female Chauvinist Pigs today throws up a host of assertions that would be seen as problematic now and online feminism itself has changed so much, particularly due to <a href="/_toxic_twitter_wars_is_online_culture_paralyzing_feminism.html">fallout</a> caused by what’s often been referred to as call-out culture, where, as noted in <a href="http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/17/come-one-come-all-bloggers-bear-it-all-out-feminist-and-social-justice-blogging-as-performance-and-bloodshed/">this 2011 piece by Flavia Dzodan</a> that always comes to mind when I think about the most toxic elements of call-out culture and ‘trashing’, ‘we all lose’. </p>
<p dir="ltr">In the years following 2008, discussion via Twitter and personal blogs came to define the feminist journey for so many of us, especially those not fortunate enough to live somewhere with feminist networks or groups or for those who met a lot of feminist friends online. I was continually offering to get involved in a magazine or blog that someone wanted to launch and sometimes writing several blog posts every week. Blogs felt like the resistance, the opposition to traditional, sexist media and much was being made of their democratising effect on whose voices had the potential to be heard (doesn't all this seem a bit quaint now?). Some time ago I really wanted to set up a website where women active in the movement at that time could submit pieces about their memories of what some call the beginnings of the Fourth Wave (and what some believe is still the Third Wave). I never got round to it and I worry about so many memories being lost as blogs disappear and websites close and some people take their activism offline and even ‘hashtag feminism’ has evolved.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Ten years since FEM 08, when I think of all the women I’ve met as a result of feminism and the women just starting out in activism at that time, our lives have moved on in so many ways. We’re mostly in our 30s and busy, busy, busy with work, or children, or work and children. Some have moved overseas. We still do activism and write and work with women’s organisations. We don’t always make it to things that happen in London any more because life gets in the way. We share each others’ projects and work and discuss motherhood as a feminist issue on Facebook and even celebrate each other’s books because things have moved onwards and upwards from those first blog posts and discussions on Twitter about sexism in the tabloids. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Things have also become more complicated. We learned that for all the talk of the internet promoting a more diverse range of voices, privileged voices were always favoured and promoted over more marginalised ones. Pushback against this has been vitally important but hard work; change has been slow; listening and addressing assumptions isn’t always easy. Online, people talk of moving on from being a ‘baby feminist’, learning much as they ‘grow up’. Sometimes we forget that everyone starts somewhere. For us, that somewhere was the mid Noughties, when social media was still a thing for ‘internet people’ - and it was life-changing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">*The very first Million Women Rise march. I didn't know anyone else who was going so I volunteered to be a steward. It rained quite a lot and I was posted at the door of the loos in Trafalgar Square during the rally so missed the speeches but the march itself was like nothing I'd ever experienced before.</p>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-53462952499909701182017-07-19T09:54:00.000+01:002017-07-19T14:37:22.063+01:00On being one of the #hiddenhalf<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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<i>"Some professionals just ask are you coping, are you OK? And think that is all they need to ask but this is a very closed question and too easy for a woman just to say yes when she could be crying out for someone to notice her or help her." </i></div>
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<a href="https://www.nct.org.uk/sites/default/files/related_documents/739-NCT-theHiddenHalf-report-150dpi.pdf" target="_blank">New research from the NCT</a> has found that around half of new mothers' mental health issues don't get picked up by a healthcare professional. Consequently, the organisation has launched a new campaign - <a href="https://campaigns.nct.org.uk/hiddenhalf/support" target="_blank">Hidden Half</a> - to raise awareness and push for better postnatal care that will identify and treat more cases of postnatal depression (PND) and associated conditions. A key focus of the campaign is making sure the existing checkup that takes place six weeks after giving birth looks at the mental health of mothers - something that doesn't always currently happen. </div>
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I want to talk about my own experiences in the wider context of postnatal mental health issues developing later on, after those first few weeks following the birth. I want to do this because I know from personal experience that it's easy to dismiss symptoms when they're not what you think PND looks like, when you're busy and when very few people take the time to ask. I've never written about this in detail before, but having done a lot of processing of my experiences over the past few years having come to the point of understanding much more about how to practice good self-care, I'm hoping it will be useful, in some way, to at least someone.</div>
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Many women surveyed by the NCT said they felt their six-week checkup was rushed, more of a 'box-ticking exercise' than anything else (blood pressure, weight, "Has your bleeding stopped?") and that they didn't feel it was the time to bring up mental health concerns. I remember the appointment, being asked if I'd been 'feeling down' and whether I was coping fine. Of course I was: my physical healing was good, we'd successfully established breastfeeding, I was getting out and about and eating normally and certainly not feeling tearful all the time, or feeling unable to bond with the baby, or anything like that. And besides, don't we always say that, when a complete stranger asks us how we're doing? "Oh yes, fine." "Not too bad."</div>
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It took me until I was at least 30 years old to stop pretending to all but a select few people (even myself, once upon a time; some of my teenage diaries are stubbornly upbeat and optimistic when I remember, actually, how miserable I was at the time) that everything was always fine, not too bad, no, I don't need any help, thanks. I had Sebastian when I was 27, so I hadn't got there yet. I always wonder if it's the sort of thing that comes from having been a 'high achiever' when younger, with a fear of not being able to do things and being seen to be incompetent or a failure. </div>
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So yes, I was exhausted, but then it's totally normal for newborn babies to be up half the night feeding, isn't it? It's also totally normal for them to not want to be put down and only feel they can settle when they're on you. They're newborns. I'd read about the '<a href="https://sarahockwell-smith.com/2012/11/04/the-fourth-trimester-aka-why-your-newborn-baby-is-only-happy-in-your-arms/" target="_blank">fourth trimester'</a>, frustrating as it sometimes was that other people's babies used to have three hour naps in moses baskets while, unless on the move in the pushchair, on a bus or in a car, mine would hold out, wide awake, until 4pm every day ("newborns can only stay awake for up to two hours at a time" said the books and the websites) when I would gingerly move him, on the breastfeeding pillow, across the bed slightly so I could have about 45 minutes to myself before he woke up again.</div>
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That was exactly how I wrote my <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/motherhood-womanhood-whatever.html" target="_blank">very first blog post about being a mother </a>- sat on the other side of the bed as he had his one and only little nap of the day, something he did for a good few weeks before I began instigating naptime in the pushchair or on the bus as we travelled somewhere. If you read that very first blog post about being a mother, it's actually pretty positive. And that was really how those early days were. An exhausting, life-changing learning curve, not without struggles, but not that bad. Because when you've got a newborn and you're adjusting to it all, that's how it is and to expect it to be a walk in the park would be ridiculous.<br />
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<i>"I now always ask “How are you finding being a mum” and am amazed at how that helps them open up."</i></div>
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'Coping' is such a subjective word. When you read lists of symptoms associated with PND they often talk about not sleeping properly; not eating properly; struggling with caring for yourself; struggling with leaving the house or seeing people; having thoughts about harming the baby. I could have looked at a list of such symptoms in those early weeks and told you again and again that no, I was fine, because my life wasn't like that - and that's the truth. The slow creep of postnatal mental health issues came later.</div>
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Sleep was probably at the heart of it - mostly his, but by association, mine. As everyone jokingly says when you have a baby, "Well, they do use sleep deprivation <a href="https://mindfulmiablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/torturing-new-mothers-and-then-wondering-why-they-get-mentally-ill/" target="_blank">as a form of torture</a>". Of course, you get used to it, but then the baby ramps the night wakings up - in our case with every development phase we experienced, with teething, with colds, with the classic sleep regression periods. And the baby doesn't necessarily sleep in the day either. So you find yourself doing what works, which is let him sleep on you after a feed in the morning. Then after lunch, walk and walk until he falls asleep in the pushchair, which can take up to an hour. Then stay out, walking, because you live in a flat with a flight of stairs directly inside the front door and to go home would involve dismantling the pushchair to take it up the stairs so you can't do that because it would wake the baby.</div>
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Eventually, when he was about six months old, I decided enough was enough and attempted putting him down for morning naps in his cot, which resulted in him getting more and more distressed. The health visitor thought that if I went back into the room every minute or so and soothed him, he would get the hang of it and nod off within ten minutes. I reported back that one day, I'd done this for two hours before giving up.</div>
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Finally, at seven months old, we did it: morning naps in the cot. The Holy Grail. A whole hour to get things done (or not). Afternoon naps still took place in the pushchair, because there was no way I was staying cooped up in the house all day. And that was the killer. The routine. Every day more or less the same: wake, feed, breakfast, play, feed, sleep, lunch, play, feed, walk and sleep, dinner, feed, bedtime. The occasional baby group or coffee with friends or trip into town, which were always good, but never quite seemed to break up the relentless repetition of everything else. It was winter and it was miserable. I became obsessed with the clock and its ridiculously slow progression, counting out the day in five minute slots and fifteen minute slots and hours until Luke would get home.</div>
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When I was pregnant, we used to joke about what on earth we'd do if we managed to produce a really extroverted child. Reader, it happened. And when Sebastian was an older baby, he didn't want to play with his toys or sit in his bouncy chair or sit in his cot and chat to himself. He wanted to interact with people. Everything I did that didn't involve him was an ordeal through which he would usually wail (showering, preparing dinner, catching up with social media). As I was to learn, there's evidence to suggest that mothers are wired to have a particular response to crying infants and if I've had one too many coffees I still find myself getting on edge at the noise of a crying baby in a supermarket. It's really not easy having it as an accompaniment to everything you do.</div>
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There was an interesting thread on Mumsnet some time ago, where women shared stories about not really enjoying stay-at-home parenthood. It's such a taboo subject - a lot of people can't comprehend it and a lot more people won't talk about it openly because to do so is so often to be judged. Numerous times, the words 'introvert' and 'perfectionist' popped up on the thread as women sought to describe themselves and explain why those years of having very young children felt so hard. Perhaps that had something to do with it; I could certainly identify.</div>
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I've noticed a tendency for more conservative writing on motherhood to lament the way that increasing gender equality and feminist values being more accepted have supposedly led to girls and women not being truly aware of the value and importance of being a stay at home mother. This has, in the eyes of some, led to women feeling unhappy, anxious and resentful about motherhood because they feel that their worth lies in working, in earning money, in being a 'valuable member of society'. It could be argued that capitalism needs just as much critique here and that society does not value caregiving roles, but I always think about how these conservative writers mustn't know many feminist mums because if they did, they'd realise what a straw (wo)man they've created.</div>
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For me I could never ascribe that unhappiness and anxiety to simply 'not being at work' or 'not seeing motherhood as valuable'. I saw it as incredibly valuable. At a time when I was finding it all particularly hard because I was used to doing so much that I was no longer doing and I just felt lost and alone, <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/baby-brain.html" target="_blank">God actually told me as much</a>. There was never any question of it not being valuable; the mental, emotional and physical exhaustion just got so relentless and made it hard to see a way out. It was also so lonely. I wanted to talk to people without having to make small talk about babies and feel like there was a subtle game of one-upmanship about child development being played. I was so immensely grateful if a friend ever 'checked in' to ask how I was or offered to help out in any way. </div>
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Before I had Sebastian I didn't know anyone who had young children - something that's changed as he's grown older and more friends have become parents. I was so thankful to keep in touch with and see the other women from my NCT classes every week when we were on maternity leave. A very few other friends kept in touch and came to see us, but people are busy and they work. It's not their fault. And I know that if you don't say much about how you're really feeling, people won't assume you need support. We knew a lot of people who were particularly involved in church life - and we no longer were. The loneliness and sadness of a <a href="https://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/searching-for-sunday-motherhood-guilt.html" target="_blank">shifting relationship with church</a> and church community that year have been very hard to deal with and this continues to be the case, highlighting the value of good support networks. Add a faith shift onto a huge life change and identity shift and you've got a whole load of issues.<br />
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<i>"...around 30% of women diagnosed with postnatal depression still have depression beyond the first year after childbirth and a significant proportion of women who experience perinatal depression and/or anxiety will develop recurrent long-term mental health problems."</i></div>
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It happened that I went back to work, relieved and happy, after nine months at home. Things sort of got better. I still wouldn't have identified with having any postnatal mental health issues because I'd still never fitted the descriptions of PND that I read. I probably should have twigged, when I spent countless lunch breaks walking and trying to process it all, over and over, a neverending internal monologue about the relentlessness and the loneliness and the feeling of loss of self. I was very much in the midst of attempting to process my shifting relationship with church and had got to the point where I could barely go any more. The last couple of occasions we attended our former church, I had panic attacks after the service.</div>
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I started to experience a lot of anxiety about spending time on my own with Sebastian - flashbacks to maternity leave. How were we going to fill the time? Would I cope? When he was two I had a panic attack about the Christmas holiday period because I was going to be on my own with him for four days. In the end it turned out to be better than I had expected. We survived. But it took me a very long time to stop watching the clock, trying not to panic too much, when we were alone together. It seeped into every area of my life and not just the time I spent with Sebastian - time off work, holidays, weekends - anxiety about filling up the day and making the time pass more quickly, panic about free time with no plans, or time to myself, when I couldn't actually relax and my thoughts would race, spiraling downwards.</div>
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It's funny, the things you remember about these times in your life. I remember a particular post about motherhood on Facebook. You know, the sort of thing that gets shared thousands of times by all the mums you know because it's so relatable. I think it probably featured a cartoon. It talked about the sleepless nights and the endless repetitive days and wailing babies and feeling rubbish but finished by saying that "and you know you'd do it all again at the drop of a hat". I don't like to use the word 'triggered' lightly, but there was a time where seeing anything like that was deeply upsetting.</div>
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I also remember the day I came across information about anxiety and the penny dropped - seeing as it wasn't something I ever would have considered myself to struggle with, even though it immediately became clear I have actually done so since I was a small child. In the same, eye-opening way, coming across information about <a href="https://themighty.com/2017/05/signs-of-high-functioning-depression-or-dysthymia/" target="_blank">high-functioning depression</a>. The reality is that postnatal mental health issues don't just look like not sleeping or eating properly and failing to bond with your baby. They can look like a lot of other things as well and they can be evident at six weeks postpartum, six months or three years, which is when I would say that things finally started to turn around for me.<br />
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I have a five-year-old now and things are so enormously different. Four was a great age. Five is a brilliant age; it's so much fun. And last year, we made the decision to add to our family, meaning that I'm now expecting another baby later this year. I'm not going to pretend things might not be completely different, but I feel better equipped to deal with it when the time comes. Luke has always been a very involved parent (We shouldn't expect anything else but sadly that's often not the case and I know I'm fortunate) and thanks to the shared parental leave policy that has appeared since Sebastian was born, we hope to share time off together this time around, which should be a huge help.<br />
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<i>"60% of mothers who said there was an emotional problem they didn’t feel able to discuss at the six week check cited feeling embarrassed, ashamed or worried that the health professional would think they were not capable of looking after the baby."</i></div>
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This is key. I've seen it in countless online discussions. Women worried that admitting to struggling will mean social services involvement. I don't think I ever felt this way, but a huge barrier to decent mental health that I've worked hard to overcome over the last couple of years has been <i>the fear of what people will think</i>. I've had aspects of my life as a parent that I've always been fairly unapologetic about - the fact that I was happy and relieved to return to work, for example - but others that have caused a lot of stress, like feeling my parenting is judged by some and linked to the fact I work full-time, feeling that people have negative opinions about only children, feeling that it's impossible to relax because you must constantly be seen to be making yourself busy and productive and useful, or feeling that you'll be judged for being open about some of the struggles you've had with church. </div>
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And another important thing to own has been 'feeling my feelings' - sitting with them without responding in a reactive way or indeed falling into a pit of despair or judging myself for having said feelings. I found the '<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sheffa.ariens.counseling/posts/870635469718458" target="_blank">Sleepy Hedgehog Model</a>' of managing emotions in Emily Nagoski's brilliant book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Come-You-Are-surprising-transform/1925228010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500396676&sr=8-1&keywords=emily+nagoski" target="_blank">Come As You Are</a> </i>amazingly helpful and remind myself of it on a regular basis. When you've spent years beating yourself up about things you feel, seeing yourself as less than and convincing yourself that your feelings are a problem or invalid, that's not easy - but it's so transformative. </div>
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I do wish in some ways that I'd sought professional help at an earlier point but nothing is ever easy. All you hear is talk of waiting lists and cuts and finding it hard to get help unless things are <i>really bad</i>. And getting help privately isn't an option open to many due to its cost. All that felt discouraging and pointless. And so I've had to do a lot of work on my own, with a small amount of professional help, with friends who have been helpful to talk to, with good resources, learning to be kind to myself and to process events in a helpful way and understanding how my mind works. If the Hidden Half campaign helps more women to access help when they're struggling, it will be amazing and so necessary. And if an increased focus on mental health at the six-week checkup starts to make a difference, I hope that more women will find it easier to access help and to know who to talk to if they find mental health issues develop later on.</div>
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There are no prizes for just getting on with it and telling people you're fine. I've finally learned that while I may be tempted to fly under the radar and shut myself off from people when things aren't great, I can reach out to people too. So often, women struggle under the burden of feeling like they must be seen to have it all together, that to admit to anything less will mean being judged and that even to be truly honest with close friends may be taking it too far, opening up too much and becoming that friend who's a needy, irritating burden. We make ourselves smaller and our needs lesser until we become invisible because it's somehow distasteful to have needs and wants and feelings. For the sake of mothers everywhere, this must be resisted. </div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-3188029275355909252017-07-13T21:31:00.000+01:002017-07-13T21:31:32.899+01:00The power of J John's anonymous fellowships<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the summer of 2004, when I was 19 years old, I was just one of a crowd of young people who flocked to St Paul's Cathedral one evening to hear J John preach on the ten commandments. I was attending Soul in the City, a week-long initiative where thousands of young people of my generation descended on London to carry out community projects and evangelise. </div>
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I'm not sure how significant it is that we had a choice, that evening, between going to see J John preach on the ten commandments and going to see Delirious? and that I chose the former, but I expect I was very diligent and wrote a lot of notes. It was a very hot week in August and one of the things I remember the most about that evening was the stickiness of the Tube afterwards. But I also remember feeling as if what I'd heard that evening was important.</div>
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This past weekend J John's been drawing crowds in London again, this time to his JustOne event, held at the Emirates Stadium. An estimated 23,000 people attended, not quite filling the stadium - as was the organisers' goal - but a perfectly respectable total for the UK's first evangelistic stadium event in three decades.</div>
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One particular <a href="https://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2017/June-2017/J.John-Why-I-want-to-fill-the-Emirates-stadium-with-40-000-people-on-July-8" target="_blank">quote from J John</a> is being heavily featured in coverage of JustOne:</div>
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"Mass evangelism reminds the world that the Church is not dead. It’s easy to ignore a few little fellowships hidden away in anonymous buildings in a dozen suburbs. It’s much less easy if there are tens of thousands of people in your city’s main stadium."</div>
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It's a quote that many people are finding rather troubling. I'm not sure if that was his intention, but there it is. Enormous Christian rallies at stadiums featuring 'big name' speakers and high profile worship bands may not be everyone's cup of tea (including mine, these days) but they have a place. They do have an impact on people; they change people's lives. But while promoting the event and in the aftermath as the organisers celebrate its success, it's not exactly necessary to position huge events as a more glamorous, more important counterpart to what happens in churches and communities across the country every single day.</div>
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JustOne has partnered with scores of churches to link up people who responded in some way to the event last weekend. Initial reports suggested that there were 6,000 'responses' - 6,000 'lives changed' which is an interesting assumption to make as early as the point at which these people may have simply filled out some contact information on a postcard. The official number has now been confirmed as 1,743 - and these people will be put in touch with partner churches in London to hopefully continue their journey. </div>
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These partner churches might be little fellowships in anonymous buildings in the suburbs. They might be slightly larger, flashier outfits. But what they'll all have in common is that every day, they'll be striving to make a difference to the lives of their members and those living in their communities. Reporting impressive numbers is nice and looks good in headlines but these numbers aren't much different to what I'd think of, if they related to something I was doing at work, as vanity metrics.</div>
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Without what happens next, these numbers mean very little. For those 1,743 people, what will come to matter just as much as the moment they 'made a decision' at JustOne is what will happen in countless small suburban fellowships and small groups and conversations in the years to come. It's likely that these will make or break their faith</div>
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For some Christian leaders and some churches, the headline statistics and hopes of national media coverage, the 'influence', the presence in major cities, the big name speakers and big events and big numbers seem to matter a great deal. <a href="http://natejlee.com/hillsong-church-do-not-colonize-san-francisco/" target="_blank">The hype and the big pronouncements matter a great deal</a>. It's hard to critique all this without coming across as thought you're mounting a bitter attack on the well-meaning actions of good people, I know, but when all this becomes the focus, we end up with a distorted, consumerist view of success and one that is fundamentally incompatible with the ups and downs of the Christian life. Hype will pass away. Media coverage will pass away. 'Influence' as a goal raises troubling questions.</div>
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One of things I've read recently that's stuck in my mind the most is <a href="https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/7-july/comment/opinion/sean-bean-s-lessons-for-the-c-of-e" target="_blank">this <i>Church Times</i> comment piece</a> on Sean Bean's portrayal of an inner-city priest in <i>Broken</i>. I think it actually made me feel somewhat emotional, probably in part because I'm pregnant and also very much because increasingly, it described what I have needed and benefited from and sometimes found upsettingly lacking in church life in recent years.</div>
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In the piece, Mark Bryant describes being at a clergy gathering and hearing stories of faithful commitment to communities that results in unspectacular tales - helping the homeless, walking alongside parishioners struggling with depression - stories these clergy felt often go unheard at a time when the focus is on church growth.</div>
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At the weekend, mentions of JustOne were entirely absent from my social media feeds. That could be because people I know just weren't really its target audience (although <a href="https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/JustOne-stadium-event-A-view-from-the-stands" target="_blank">one report</a> estimates that 80 per cent of attendees were Christians). What were very much in evidence, however, were descriptions of the small church meetings and regular church events happening all over the country that weekend. </div>
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I'm not gloating. As a new Christian, the first time I attended an event with 10,000 other churchgoers blew my mind and helped open up a whole new understanding of church. But I was brought up attending church weekly in a small congregation in a rural town (so small, we didn't even have a youth group, which explains why my mind was blown when I finally got to hang out with thousands of other Christians my age). And I made a deeper commitment to my faith after attending an Alpha Course attended by about ten people, run by another small rural church. And every time I read a wonderful story <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/church-of-england/the-baptism-that-changed-our-life/10154998170413143/" target="_blank">like that of Leanne and Darren Bell</a> or see the coverage of the way local churches have played a key role in supporting people in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, I think of the anonymous buildings in a dozen suburbs that make these stories possible.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-43778282493568901532016-11-28T21:48:00.000+00:002016-11-29T10:17:07.420+00:00Conversations around investment in women in ministry: do they speak to the UK church?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Martin Saunders </span><a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/what.are.we.training.all.these.female.leaders.for/99990.htm" style="text-align: justify;" target="_blank">wrote for Christian Today recently</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> about the experience of attending a conference of the UK's most influential church leaders and their teams, only to realise that "Ninety per cent of the people in the room were male; if you were to take pastors' wives out of the equation, that number would look even worse." He noted that in the UK at least, 'there's no doubt women are being invested in', citing well-known leadership conferences as examples of this - and who could fail to notice the image used to illustrate the piece - Justin Welby surrounded by female clergy?</span><br />
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It was also interesting to note Ruth Gledhill's <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/is.there.still.room.for.church.growth.in.britain.the.quietly.explosive.phenomenon.of.fresh.expressions/99806.htm" target="_blank">piece published in the same week</a>, that highlighted the visibility of women in Fresh Expressions:</div>
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"...unlike most of the larger, evangelical megachurches where nearly all the leaders are men, dozens of gifted Christian women are emerging as capable leaders of fxC churches.</div>
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Having seen a number of photos of the conference Martin attended shared on Twitter that week, I'd also noticed the dearth of women in attendance. It bothered me, as it normally would, but perhaps more so because the churches represented at the conferences were the sort of churches I attend. Women still don't have it easy in the Church of England, but the established church is often held up as an example when it comes to the inclusion of women leaders, when churches like those I've attended since I was 18 are lagging embarrassingly behind, looking, if you attend their conferences (on which I <a href="http://www.project328.info/" target="_blank">help produce an annual report</a>) and their Sunday services, like so many boys' clubs.</div>
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I've felt compelled to move on from two churches partly because of my concerns about the invisibility of women, in one case because I felt a veneer of egalitarianism was dishonestly applied to a set-up where the opportunity to exercise certain gifts was not open to all who might fit the bill. It is genuinely concerning that hundreds of 'influential' church leaders can gather to plan for the future of 'new churches' in the UK, with so few women involved at a high level. Some new churches may be conservative and therefore opposed to women in senior leadership positions, but many aren't, meaning there is no excuse for this happening.</div>
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At the same time, the US Christian blogosphere (and indeed, the US national media) was reacting to the twin revelations of Jen Hatmaker's <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/31/the-high-cost-of-popular-evangelical-jen-hatmakers-gay-marriage-comments/" target="_blank">support for equal marriage</a> and Glennon Doyle Melton <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.blogger.glennon.doyle.melton.comes.out.as.gay.reveals.shes.dating.soccer.star.abby.wambach/100660.htm" target="_blank">coming out</a>. Anne Helen Petersen had just written a brilliant piece about the '<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/the-new-evangelical-woman-vs-trump?utm_term=.qrB88w4K8#.ouJ99eLy9" target="_blank">new evangelical woman</a>' who loves Pinterest and statement jewellery, drinks wine, goes to a church with a name like 'ONE' or 'Forest Hills' and wouldn't ever vote for Trump - but is still, of course, pretty conservative. "This election has made her feel politically homeless," wrote Petersen.</div>
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The bigger story here for some Christian women was not Hatmaker's opinions or Melton's new relationship. It was the way evangelical women's ministry had been thrown into the spotlight - Buzzfeed reporting from its conferences, national newspapers talking about the women who serve as evangelical 'inspiration' through their books, blogs, speaking tours and podcasts.</div>
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'Pastor, if you had to ask, "Who's Jen Hatmaker?" it's time to be more directly invested in the spiritual nurture of half your church,' <a href="https://twitter.com/jenniferwilkin/status/792060538205315072" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Jen Wilkin as male church leaders dismissively wondered why on earth Hatmaker had become a talking point because they'd never even heard of her before. It was pointed out by many that churches often invest little in women's ministry and that male church leaders are disinclined to read books written by women or listen to teaching by women.</div>
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"If you are an evangelical woman with teaching gifts, there aren't always role models in your local church," <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/november-web-only/bigger-story-behind-jen-hatmaker.html" target="_blank">wrote Kate Shellnutt for Christianity Today</a>.</div>
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The overarching theme here, which subsequently played out in numerous discussions on Twitter and in blog posts, is a reasonably conservative one - the idea that many of the speakers and ministries influencing Christian women are not theologically robust, that problematic teaching abounds and that women would be better served by good quality local church women's ministry, which would therefore empower them to use their leadership and teaching gifts within the church.</div>
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There's been much discussion, as a result, of the way gifted evangelical women have gravitated towards parachurch ministries because they find few opportunities in their own churches. Christianity Today named organisations and events like True Woman, Propel, IF Gathering and Belong as examples of these. In the UK there are probably fewer examples and some of the biggest names in women's conferences come from the stable of influential churches like Hillsong and HTB.</div>
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A <a href="http://christandpopculture.com/persuasion-outsourcing-womens-discipleship-para-church-personalities/" target="_blank">recent discussion</a> between Hannah Anderson and Erin Straza for Christ and Pop Culture's Persuasion Podcast claimed that "the church has outsourced women's discipleship, thereby relinquishing its role in the spiritual formation of half the church."</div>
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"Women with gifting are rising up through the ranks, through blogging, through podcasting, through gaining a following online and launching from there into more visible, national ministries," said Anderson, explaining what she's observed in recent years and written about on numerous occasions, including a <a href="http://christandpopculture.com/persuasion-outsourcing-womens-discipleship-para-church-personalities/" target="_blank">piece in response</a> to the debate surrounding Jen Hatmaker and stating that this has come in response to the fact many churches don't 'have a way to integrate women into mission and leadership'.</div>
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"Women's ministry is much more entrepreneurial than discipleship ministries at large. So what you see is...collecting and advocating and building a following and building this social network," she added, highlighting that this can be both a strength and a weakness of women's ministries.</div>
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One strength of such ministries is the fact that they're more accessible to those whose churches have no women's ministry, or who have too many other commitments to attend weekly get-togethers. But Anderson's concern is that 'relatability' and a focus on 'self' - even though she feels this 'has a place' - sometimes takes precedence over in-depth teaching; 'entertainment' and 'head patting' being prioritised over 'sacrifice for something greater than yourself'.</div>
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Lore Ferguson Wilbert blogged shortly afterwards on the same theme, <a href="http://sayable.net/2016/11/pastors-heres-how-you-open-the-door-to-women/" target="_blank">imploring "Pastors, keep your doors open"</a>, as she wrote:</div>
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"It’s easy for men in particular to believe they have opened the doors to women in their church, particularly in complementarian churches, if they have opened the door to one or two who are particularly gifted once or twice."</div>
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It may be a particular issue in complementarian churches but it's a problem that goes all the way across the spectrum to the functionally egalitarian churches, where one woman preaching on a couple of occasions might be held up as a positive example; where seven in ten main stage speakers at conferences are men.</div>
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"Open your doors to the women longing to serve, pastors, and don’t make them fit into little molds of children’s ministry or administration," concluded Wilbert. "These things are needed, but they are not the whole, or even a fraction, of what women are gifted to do."</div>
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It definitely needs to be noted many of the voices contributing to the discussion on women's ministry are complementarian (albeit '<a href="http://www.sometimesalight.com/1/post/2013/05/leaning-towers-new-complementarians-and-twenty-five-theses.html" target="_blank">new complementarian</a>', as per the blogosphere discussions of three years ago) and from somewhat conservative churches where in-depth study of scripture is prioritised and parachurch ministries open to more 'liberal' influences are more likely to be viewed as cause for concern.<br />
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I've also wondered about the extent to which these concerns about women who have parachurch ministries come from a place of feeling women are fine to lead and exercise influence, but only under the authority of a male senior leader. It could be construed that what we're seeing here is a preference that women still only operate under male authority. Perhaps that's me looking at the issue through my egalitarian lens - I don't believe that women heading up their own organisations, ministries and churches is a problem at all - but we have to wonder whether complementarian views on the issue are influenced by this.<br />
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Despite this, it should also give us pause for thought that it's complementarian women that are telling pastors to open doors to women and advocating for greater resources to be poured into discipling and empowering them because they've noticed that the local church is losing gifted women due to lack of investment.</div>
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I may end up at a different place to these women in my conclusions about women and the church (although I greatly respect and appreciate their recent conversations on this), but as I think about the photos of church events I see - leadership gatherings from churches like mine, their networks and their 'friends' - I feel that more than ever, we could all do with considering how doors are being opened for women - and how so many doors - in the UK, in 2016 - are currently closed. As it is, women are being left absent, unnoticed and under-resourced as the boys' clubs of ministry and church leadership continue on their way, seemingly oblivious. As it is, I want to think about how I - and other women in our church circles - can help effect change.<br />
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<b><u>Further reading</u></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2016/november/what-i-want-pastors-to-know-about-womens-ministry.html" target="_blank">What I Want Pastors to Know About Women's Ministry</a> - Sharon Hodde Miller</div>
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Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-81759864797447526112016-07-27T21:05:00.001+01:002016-07-27T21:14:51.925+01:00For Momentum, as it comes to an end<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>It was recently announced that this year's <a href="http://momentum.org.uk/" target="_blank">Momentum festival</a> would be the last, with Soul Survivor planning a <a href="http://naturallysupernatural.co.uk/" target="_blank">new festival for 2017</a>.</i></div>
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Thanks, Momentum, that the year I came feeling totally lost and confused about what on earth I was supposed to do, as a Christian woman who had no time for all the ultra-conservative stuff about gender and the church that I was reading about, I got to hear Jo Saxton preaching on an egalitarian interpretation of scripture and Elaine Storkey talking about global women's issues and that I realised that yes, things were going to be ok and that there was life and wholeness outside the box marked 'Biblical Womanhood'.</div>
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And thanks for amplifying all those other women's voices too because otherwise, I'd have barely experienced seeing women preach and teach. We really do have that far to go and we need Soul Survivor to keep banging the drum for women.</div>
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While I'm on that subject, thanks for 'coming out' as egalitarian and nailing your colours to the mast about it because you were so moved by the response the night you appealed for young women who had been hurt by the church over gender issues to come forward for ministry. The church needs organisations that are vocally, intentionally inclusive of women and their gifts.</div>
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Thanks, Momentum, that I found something special at Shepton Mallet when I was a thoroughly-messed up young adult with a catalogue of issues, a person who struggled even being on site at first because everyone seemed so happy and I was exactly the opposite and it just felt so bad, so crushing, seeing all those beatific faces when I felt the way I did. And thanks that I also found something special as a newlywed trying to figure all that married life stuff out. And as a justice-seeker trying to figure out what to do with my calling and my job at a time when I also wanted a child. And just a year later, as a new mother with my perma-feeding three-month-old in tow (even when he orchestrated a nappy explosion in the middle of a seminar on sex). That reminds me - thanks for giving Danielle Strickland the main stage slot that year. Her baby was only a month older than mine and seeing her up there preaching every evening knowing she was in the same stage of life as me was exactly what I needed.</div>
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Thanks for bringing together thousands and thousands of people from the supposed 'lost generation' of Christians every year for a decade and yes, for being cool enough to keep them excited about coming but also for welcoming all, not just the sort of young people who dress a certain way and go to a certain sort of church - even those who don't always want to jump around and do the Christian conga during worship in main meetings. Especially those who just like to sit quietly on the floor and keep still and think about stuff. It took me a good few years to understand those people. And then I became one of them.</div>
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Thanks for diversifying your programme as your delegates grew up and as the things we cared about and were interested in evolved, all the while keeping the core elements intact. And thanks for inspiring my generation to live differently and do some great things and get through the less-thrilling bits of life too - not just the highs of festivals and 'mountaintop experiences' - while keeping their faith alive.</div>
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Thanks for being committed to seeing healing happen, particularly emotional healing. I remember one year, a long time ago now, overhearing a young woman say that so many seminars seemed to focus on 'issues'. 'What if you don't <i>have</i> any issues to deal with?' she said to her friend. '<i>Aren't you fortunate?</i>' I thought. You've provided the space for people to work things through and hear more clearly and I know so many people who are thankful for that.</div>
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Thanks for the terrible late-night campsite singalongs and the free hot drinks for people serving on teams and for making me spend loads of money in the bookshop and for the lovely smell of the night air and the peace of the early mornings and the pizzas and every injury I've ever sustained tripping over guy ropes in the dark and the music and for being more chilled than an event full of teenagers and the times I've heard God speak and the times I've seen Him do things and importantly, for your integrity.</div>
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Cheers, Momentum.</div>
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Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-894165802734479002016-06-07T10:34:00.001+01:002016-06-07T12:22:13.096+01:00Navelgazing<div style="text-align: justify;">
I was chatting to <a href="http://tanyamarlow.com/" target="_blank">a friend</a> on Twitter the other day about <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/scripted-vulnerability.html" target="_blank">my post</a> on the script we use when we do vulnerability online and we ended up talking about writing in general. I mentioned that these days, I worry that anything I publish will just be awful navelgazing. I joked then that actually, when I look at my navel it reminds me that there’s a story there. Even gazing at my own navel is a storytelling opportunity. See, I am a storyteller after all.</div>
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When I look at my navel, there’s a funny little line inside it and only I can really tell that it’s a little misshapen compared to how it used to be. It’s the only visible evidence of a laparoscopy I had done at the beginning of 2013; one of the three incisions the doctors made right before they removed one of my ovaries, the associated Fallopian tube and something else - something hidden.</div>
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It’s about 1994 or 1995, I think, one morning at Sunday School and we are talking about ‘gifts’. We are asked to draw something depicting what we are good at. I set to work with my sheet on paper, drawing something or another to show that I am ‘good at writing’. Imagine my horror, when we have to explain to the rest of the group, what we’ve drawn and the girl sitting next to me - my age, the sort of girl who everyone thinks is good and kind and sweet - stands up and presents her piece of paper that explains that she is ‘good at helping’. Why didn’t I think of that? ‘Helping’ is <i>nice</i>. Helping is <i>thoughtful</i>. Maybe my admission that I’m good at writing is big-headed and not particularly holy. And so I feel a little bit envious and also, as if I’ve done something wrong, even though no-one gives me that impression.</div>
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It’s 2011, I’m 20 weeks pregnant and I’m lying down with my midriff exposed watching my baby on a screen across the room; arms, legs, organs, brain all looking healthy. The sonographer moves the probe to the right as he finishes up. He looks more closely. “Do you have endometriosis?” he asks. I don't.“Have you ever noticed a lump in your abdomen?” I haven’t.</div>
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“I can see a mass to the right of your womb,” he says. He leaves the room and comes back with someone else who has another look. It looks like some sort of cyst, they say, but a solid one, a big one. It’s the size of my fist - my actual fist. It might be growing. It might cause problems for the baby in the third trimester. I might have to have an operation to remove it and there’s a chance that this would bring on premature labour.</div>
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Over the course of the next few weeks, it's determined that this uninvited guest is a dermoid cyst, that it isn’t growing, that it’s not malignant and that it’s so snugly tucked away inside me that nothing needs to be done about it until after I’ve given birth. I’m told that its size coupled with the fact it hasn’t grown in the time we’ve known about it means it may well have been camping out on my right ovary since before I was born, carefully hidden yet growing ever more significant.</div>
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It’s 2015 and I’m going to a Christian festival. I’m going with no expectations. I’m over the hype, the anticipation that it’s going to be the week that God does something amazing because we’re all a bit jaded with expecting that much of festivals, relying on the ‘high’ they provide and besides, I’m working there so any sort of experience will be a bonus. On my first afternoon off I head to a seminar and at the end, I stay for the ministry because the seminar is about juggling all life’s demands as a woman and what I really want to know, what I’ve really been praying about, is whether I should give up my responsibilities at church and maybe even step back from church for a while because all it does it make me anxious and cross.</div>
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A woman comes to pray for me and as she finishes, she tells me about a word she has for me. Later that day I excitedly message a friend from church because just a couple of weeks earlier, she’d told me the very same thing that this woman has just said. It’s a picture so specific and detailed that there’s no way anyone can say it’s just a coincidence - but I have no idea what it means. </div>
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Several weeks later I was talking to another friend about a mission trip she was going on. She was talking about what she feels is her calling in life and all of a sudden, the words of two different women, one of whom didn’t even know me, made sense.</div>
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My tale of that day at Sunday School when I didn’t feel I’d said the right thing was something I’d forgotten about for years until fairly recently, when it suddenly came back to me as I was trying to plan a devotional about God-given gifts. It was probably a jolt I needed, because it helped me to start making sense of something I’ve always struggled with - accepting and embracing what I can do rather than feeling shame about the things I’m not so good at.</div>
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As I’ve often shared in the past, much of my time in the church has been characterised by the sneaking suspicion that I don’t really fit in anywhere, with my distinct lack of characteristics I’ve always felt you’re supposed to have as a Christian and particularly a Christian woman. I read <a href="https://www.threadsuk.com/no-i-dont-want-to-write-about-it" target="_blank">this piece</a> the other day and it made me laugh because I recognised myself in it - particularly over the last couple of years, as I’ve struggled more and more with writing for an audience, impostor syndrome a constant presence. </div>
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Yes, I could do writing and speaking and presenting and creativity and ideas, but I didn’t know what all that was for outside of work. It's been like a mantra that I have work skills, not church skills. I’ve also come to realise that even I still have a bit of discomfort with being open about what I’m good at because I’m a woman. So many people unfortunately see women who can talk and women who can write as having an agenda, as pushy, putting themselves out there for the sake of it. </div>
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It’s a problem in society as a whole but never more evident than in the church, where it often feels as if speaking, writing and having opinions must come with a caveat that you <i>don’t hate men of course, obviously, you don’t have an agenda, you’re not one of those angry or controlling women</i>. The temptation is to minimise yourself, to become small enough to fit into the box of others’ expectations. It’s embarrassing admitting that you’ve fallen prey to that, really, but it’s no wonder.</div>
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The words from the two women - my friend and the stranger - both mentioned a gift from God in a box that doesn’t look very exciting or attractive, to the extent that I disregard it and keep on looking for something that I perceive to be ‘better’. All the while, it’s the gift in the less attractive box that’s important - a gift hidden in plain sight, a gift that’s always been there.</div>
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Now here’s where my analogy goes slightly awry, because in 2013, that thing that had been hidden away inside me since goodness knows when (growing teeth, just so you know - because dermoid cysts are a fascinating yet slightly terrifying example of the things our bodies can do) was whipped out and disposed of. I never knew it was there before and I can’t tell that it’s gone now. But this is a story about the significance of things unseen, the importance of the things we don’t notice and pay no attention to even though they’re definitely there and have been for a very long time. It's a story about never listening to the people close to us when they affirm us, mentally stamping every positive statement with 'Not good enough, though' until God probably, finally, gets so sick of it that He gives us a smack round the head.</div>
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I have a voice that I’ve never been entirely comfortable with or accepting of. And I’m still not entirely sure what it means to embrace it and what that means outside of work these days with blogging having changed the way it has and a busy life and having recently started attending a different church where I’m only just starting to consider how I might be involved. But what I do know is that it no longer means silencing myself and dismissing my voice because somewhere, there must be a pretty box filled with the gifts I think I’m supposed to have, rather than the ones I’ve always had.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-17739945255331191782016-06-01T13:59:00.000+01:002016-06-01T18:57:00.329+01:00Scripted vulnerability<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3pXyB9UQReGcCFGEtg1LkNrnekYCAa2220U-w8oLH3ZijdJJ9HRvrmvIlmUL76xh1e0SKIpjfteUWm27gFmvYOkv8GSVECiWeAY0wVJgyzG4ns47u75TmaNNEmzocTx2o_EzeYK98dlEf/s1600/10616941024_0a5beab44d_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3pXyB9UQReGcCFGEtg1LkNrnekYCAa2220U-w8oLH3ZijdJJ9HRvrmvIlmUL76xh1e0SKIpjfteUWm27gFmvYOkv8GSVECiWeAY0wVJgyzG4ns47u75TmaNNEmzocTx2o_EzeYK98dlEf/s400/10616941024_0a5beab44d_z.jpg" width="400"></a></div>
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Everything bad that happens to you doesn’t have to be a teachable moment. </div>
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It’s probably a product of the boom in confessional journalism and its Christian equivalent, the <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/the.christian.storytelling.boom.vulnerability.openness.and.emotional.burnout/65583.htm" target="_blank">storytelling boom</a>. We’re all storytellers now and perhaps we’ve internalised the idea that every significant event in our lives must be presented as a carefully-structured essay, a sermon of sorts, or like so many sermons a list of points that speak of the learning and practical application that have come out of our pain. </div>
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We hold off writing about things, not simply until we’ve got our thoughts on the subject organised, but also until we’ve got a structured message, some clear takeaways for our readers and an opportunity to be inspirational - perhaps with a few key ‘shareables’ highlighted specifically for that purpose. </div>
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This week a friend shared a lengthy update on social media, informing people of the tough year they’ve been having and being thankful that things have turned out ok, even though they still have a lot to work through. As people commented with love and support, expressing admiration for how open and ‘real’ my friend had been, it struck me that much of the post's perceived ‘realness’ lay in the fact it didn’t follow what I’m now recognising as the script we, as Christians, often follow (consciously, unconsciously, who knows?) when reflecting on difficult times. </div>
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We describe the difficulties and pain; we bring the focus back to God; we give thanks and count our blessings; we move into reflecting on any positives that have come out of the situation and our lessons learned. We can hit ‘publish’ safe in the knowledge that we’ve followed the approved framework for dealing with life’s knocks and that people will like it. </div>
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Don’t misunderstand me: this ‘script’ isn’t wrong. It’s helpful sometimes and yes, it can be inspirational. It’s quite natural for many people and in many circumstances - but sometimes it’s hard to get there. Sometimes it feels like we’re never going to get there at all. Our feelings aren’t so neatly organised and I wonder if we’ve perhaps lost something in shying away from sharing the messiness of our thought processes, preferring instead, by the time we’re ready to share on our blogs or on Facebook, to tie it all up neatly into a set of inspirational learning points that make us seem like real writers, or teachers, or ‘thought leaders’. Or at least the right sort of Christian. </div>
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We should be able to write about our struggles - if we want to - without waiting for the perfect time to share, when our attitudes are right and we can say all the ‘right’ things. We should understand that praising people and telling them how inspirational they are when they describe their pain using the ‘right’ narrative isn’t always helpful. We pick up on what we see and keep quiet accordingly when our emotions and thoughts and questions don’t follow the approved script because we worry what people might think. Our thoughts aren’t for everyone to see unless they’re ordered correctly. That's something I've been guilty of in recent times, my head a swirling mess of half written essays not considered well-formed enough to be shared because there's no teachable moment for you, or because things are still difficult, or because I can't look at them objectively and give you some life application fat to chew on.</div>
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Everything bad that happens to you doesn’t have to be a teachable moment. When being ‘real’ becomes scripted, it doesn’t seem so authentic any more. We can share our truths without completing a checklist of themes and words. And the difference will show, as it did for me this week when I read my friend's Facebook post and as it does always when I think about the stories that have stayed with me the most.
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Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-67182928152576141862016-02-24T21:36:00.000+00:002016-02-24T21:36:20.896+00:00Three years of Project 3:28<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This week, the <a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/7c3a0c_9c7c6ce00b4f4fd58bb690df6414b7b5.pdf">Project 3:28 report</a> on the numbers of men and women speaking at Christian conferences and events in 2015 was released - the third annual report produced since a small group of people got together - first in conversations on Twitter, and then over dinner - to talk about the way platforms are dominated by male speakers. All of us were interested in the issue of gender justice in the church; all of us were concerned that Christian organisations were not doing enough to represent a diverse range of speakers, gifting and expertise.</div>
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Three years on, I'm really encouraged by the conversations that <a href="http://www.project328.info/">Project 3:28</a> has started. I'm particularly encouraged by the organisations that have contacted the working group to let us know that they're being proactive about finding more women to speak at their events. It's clear to see that effort is being made, because these are the organisations appearing in the top half of all those ranked. One of our longterm aims for Project 3:28 is to be able to set up a database of women speakers, listing areas of expertise and experience, so we'll no longer hear that <i>'we didn't know any women to ask'</i> or <i>'we couldn't find anyone'</i> - but in the meantime, seeing that certain organisations are committed to a more equal balance of speakers is a really positive step.</div>
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Last year, <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/you-cant-be-what-you-cant-see-or-why.html">I talked about some of the common objections to the project and why we still believe it's a valuable source of information</a>. The fact remains that it is produced by volunteers, in our free time, completely unfunded. So this year I thought I'd talk about some observations I've had about this year's statistics and questions people have asked on social media.</div>
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<b>Yes, the events ranking lowest for gender balance of speakers are the ones that are openly more conservative</b></div>
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It's clear, that despite small increases in the number of women speakers, that they're probably going to continue to rank lowest because of their beliefs about the circumstances in which women are permitted to teach - even as some streams become more proactive about recognising the gifting of women and more open to them preaching and teaching.</div>
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<b>But the events ranking not far above them are officially egalitarian - so what gives?</b></div>
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Some organisations have some catching up to do. This was something that particularly stood out for me when analysing the data from the Hillsong, HTB Leadership and Focus conferences. Having a basis of faith that says women can lead and teach doesn't always translate to women actually doing these things. Sometimes that's down to historical patterns of appointing leadership, how people are noticed and given prominence. Sometimes it's because of old boy's networks that rely heavily on in-crowds of people who socialise together, speak at events together, and are all on the same committees together. Sometimes it's because of events looking for the biggest names on the Christian festival circuit to sell their programme to prospective attendees - names that are more likely to be male, because that's how conference culture works.<b> </b>What's clear is that those organisations whose theology is essentially egalitarian, but are low ranking, could do much better.</div>
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<b>What about other elements of diversity?</b></div>
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Project 3:28 looks at the balance of men and women speakers. Someone asked us this week whether or not we know anyone specifically doing work on racial diversity at these events. We don't - but we think it's a really important thing to think about. We've explained that because of the way we compile the data, it would be more difficult to look at racial diversity because it's much less easy to make a judgement about someone's race from looking at their name on a programme. Just as the majority of conferences are male-dominated, they are also dominated by white speakers - that's clear. They're dominated by middle class speakers and able bodied speakers. So there is much work to be done in achieving diversity that reflects the church as a whole.</div>
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<b>We haven't covered every single event and conference here</b></div>
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That's true. When we looked at the data for 2013, we started with a group of events based on what we could find at the time. We have stuck with this list to enable better comparison year on year. But we know there are numerous events that we have left out. Some people have already made suggestions of others we could look at next year. If you can see any we've obviously missed out, <a href="http://www.project328.info/#!get-in-touch/cbys">let us know</a>!</div>
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<b>What about the balance of men and women on the main stage versus seminars and smaller talks?</b></div>
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We chose not to include this data, again because so far we've stuck with what we can compare year on year. However, my counts differentiated between main stage speakers and other speakers and I can confirm what some people have asked: male speakers dominate 'main stage' sessions at festivals. At many events, women are also more likely to show up as speakers at sessions focused on subjects that have more traditionally been considered a woman's domain - marriage, children's work, family life, mental and emotional wellbeing. It's not problematic in itself to see women speaking about these topics, but just as many women are gifted teachers on other subjects that are more likely to be seen as the preserve of male speakers.</div>
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<b>The knotty problem of wives</b></div>
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Something we have looked at informally, and something people have asked us about, is the number of women present at festivals only as a 'husband and wife act'. This varies quite a bit between the events, but we felt it was difficult to represent these numbers with integrity. Some women have a ministry with their husbands, some independent of their husbands. Some speak in their capacity as a 'leader's wife'. It's difficult to make judgements about the data here without seeming critical about the women involved - and that's not what we would want to do, at all, because we know they are gifted teachers and leaders in their own right. Our general feeling is that many events could be more committed to finding single women speakers, women who lead churches on their own and women whose husbands are not in ministry.</div>
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<b>Things are improving...but there's still some way to go</b></div>
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Women have the knowledge and the gifts. Organisations need to be more intentional about seeking them out and inviting them to speak.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-51941075739740732742016-01-09T23:34:00.000+00:002016-01-10T09:01:36.097+00:00Three conclusions from 2015, a year of shifting faith<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="6" style="background: #FFF; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: -webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width: 99.375%; width: calc(100% - 2px);">
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/_nG0XRMeif/" style="color: black; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Much to think about #outofsortsbook</a></div>
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A photo posted by Hannah Elizabeth Rose Mudge (@boudledidge) on <time datetime="2015-12-22T22:34:49+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Dec 22, 2015 at 2:34pm PST</time></div>
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I'm not particularly proud of quite a few of the blog posts I've written over the years; some of them show me at my absolute worst: enjoying drama, taking mocking things and trying to be clever with it a bit too far, being full-on cynical all day every day. One post I am particularly proud of, however, is <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/searching-for-sunday-motherhood-guilt.html">the one I wrote about my journey with motherhood, faith and church</a> in May last year. It meant a lot to me to finally be able to write about something that had been plaguing me for so long - and as I was to discover, it meant a lot to other people too - people who could identify with what I was saying. People who, in a couple of cases, had never felt about to vocalise what they were feeling before.</div>
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After the post, 2015 continued in much the same way. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jesus-doesnt-tweet/2015/04/30/fb07ef1a-ed01-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html?postshare=6561452285038028&tid=ss_tw">Pieces</a> <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/millenials.dont.believe.in.church.anymore.heres.why.were.wrong/75673.htm">about</a> millennials and the church were <a href="http://time.com/3858933/pew-christianity-millennials/">still</a> <a href="http://thesaltcollective.org/why-the-church-needs-millennials-but-millennials-dont-need-church/">being</a> <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ponderanew/2015/05/13/dear-church-an-open-letter-from-one-of-those-millennials-you-cant-figure-out/">written</a> <a href="https://alexisjudy.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/an-open-letter-to-the-church-from-a-millennial/">on</a> probably a<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theologyintheraw/tag/millennials/"> weekly</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-chiakulas/churches-millennials-if-they-just-did-this_b_8215846.html">basis</a>. The Evangelical Alliance even surveyed UK millennials for a fascinating report, <i><a href="http://eauk.org/church/one-people-commission/building-tomorrow_s-church-today.cfm">Building tomorrow's church today</a></i>, which is great, because we hear an awful lot about Christian and post-Christian millennials in the USA, but there are some enormous differences that mean we can't assume too many similarities.</div>
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After another few months of reading all the open letters, all the hot takes on why people who have issues with church are just consumer Christians and selfish babies, having all the thoughts, being able to reel off all the buzzwords and stock phrases about my generation and church, and developing a bit of an obsession with pieces about Hillsong churches (and how they square with current popular narrative that young people are leaving flashy megachurches and discovering tradition and liturgy), 2015 ended up being all about coming to some realisations and making some decisions.</div>
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<b>1. God is not some disappointed performance manager</b></div>
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I've struggled to work out where it came from, but pretty much ever since I've been a Christian, I've tended to see myself as a bit of a disappointment. I feel as if it's most likely that it started from a place of low self-esteem and perfectionism, and that it was made worse by pressured Christian contexts, anxiety, together with a combination of not having fully taken on board key bits of scripture and, let's be real here, snobbishness about a lot of what I've always seen as saccharine, self-helpy, feelgood rubbish that seems to quite often be delivered as part of cringey women's events that I wouldn't normally touch with a bargepole.</div>
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I'm talking about stuff like God's love, acceptance and grace. And also the fact that actually, I'm not a terrible person because I didn't want to get 'on board' at the vision meeting and my anxiety went off the scale every time there was a call for people to serve on more teams and all I could feel was dread when I got an email about 'events you may be planning in your area'.</div>
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I have this story that I tell for laughs; it's about the time I listened to a sermon about 'giving yourself a spiritual healthcheck' and we were all encouraged to think about being in a car, and whether we would say that God was in the driver's seat or the passenger seat, or sitting in the back (<i>or tied up and stuffed in the boot</i>, I thought, because that's genuinely how I felt about my relationship with God and church at that time, a couple of years ago). And of course behind many of the stories that we tell for laughs, there's a lot of pain. For me, it was a pain that grew until I couldn't cope with the incessant Sunday morning calls-to-action to join up, get better, commit to improving x and y - so I had to tune them out. I had a coping strategy for the anxiety caused by feeling like an awful person at church. It may not have been a very sophisticated coping strategy (effectively, it involved just not listening), but that's what I was doing.</div>
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I was talking to someone about it last autumn and she told me I didn't need to feel guilty. It was hard for her to see how I could beat myself up - a full-time-working, mothering, writing, household-running person. I told her that around the time of the spiritual health check incident, I'd heard a church leader tell people like me - 30-somethings balancing careers and young children - not to get 'complacent' about the Kingdom and about getting involved in church stuff. As an exhausted, recently-returned-to-work, toddler-parenting Christian, I was pretty ready to let him have it over that comment (but I didn't, because I was too cross). However well these comments are meant, they can cause deep hurt. And it still burns, but I know God knows. He sees. And I don't believe He's shaking His head and tutting at what my life looks like now.</div>
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<b>2. He also has a sense of humour </b></div>
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The perfectionist in me doesn't like those words like 'consumer Christian' and 'complacent'. So in 2015, having felt I'd retrieved some of the headspace I'd lost in the baby and toddler years, I set about making sure no-one could accuse me of being either, thank you very much. This involved improving my prayer life (and because I like peace and quiet and nobody being up in my space, that means walks on my lunch break), getting back into reading again, and visiting some different churches. Excitingly, I have even managed to listen to a few sermons online (only a few, mind you - there are only 24 hours in a day). Related to this, because it's not easy to claw back time from my day to do it, I also spent a good few days on Twitter, on and off, having a ranty discussion about full time pastors and academics being snobby about people who don't have the time or enegry to constantly read and learn and expand their minds. I attended my first ever New Wine summer event, my first ever Youthwork Summit, and as always the Gathering of Women Leaders. And I've been talking to people at church about what's been going on.</div>
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Most of this has been great, and it's led to some serious moments of realisation that have cleared up stuff I've been agonising over for years. Giftings and callings, for one. I know I've written before about my ever-present anxiety that I have nothing to offer the church. Ask me what I'm good at, as a woman in a seminar at New Wine did, during one of those often-awkward 'discuss with the person next to you' moments, and I've always been able to tell you, but never have I thought these things have anything to do with my place in the church.</div>
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Thanks to two identical words at two different times from two different people, one of whom I had never met before and have never seen since, and several weeks of trying to figure out what on earth they meant, now I know that they do. And when I announced this to my husband, he reminded me that he's only been telling me the same thing for the past few years. 2015 has taught me that I am truly terrible at believing anything anyone says about me unless I've had a personal revelation of it - which brings me on to my decade-long suspicion of saccharine, cringeworthy platitudes aimed at Christian women to make them feel good about themselves.</div>
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I remain a truly humorless feminist killjoy on this point: if you're telling women they're precious princesses to try to combat structural oppression without critiquing patriarchy...just don't. But last year, I read an<a href="http://christthetruth.net/2010/11/11/the-search-for-identity-or-emotional-gold-digging/"> old post</a> that Glen Scrivener shared, and by the end I was basically cheering at my desk. Then I had a conversation with Glen that started with me grumbling about my long-held dislike of 'princess' terminology and ended with him <a href="https://twitter.com/glenscrivener/status/620520768426872832">saying</a> 'The Prince totally loves us. But He doesn't leave us in the chamber. He calls us to the throne.' By this point, I was basically <a href="http://m15m.livejournal.com/2237.html?page=67">channeling a little bit of fandom that really shows my age</a> ( <i>"Damn straight, you tell ’em Albus, testify!", snap snap snap etc.</i>). It's ridiculous how you can be blinkered to something for so long. Especially when God further rubs it in via a prayer-ministry based moment several months later.</div>
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<b>3. The church could take some tips from the charity sector</b></div>
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You're probably really concerned about what I'm going to suggest at this point, given the picture of charities that the media has been working hard to paint in recent months. Over the last three years, my day job, coupled with my status as a millennial who's suspicious of being sold things and marketed to and just wants, like, authenticity, has left me beyond disillusioned with megachurch culture, the marketing and strategising and branding and careful curation of a presence and, as I would refer to them when at work, the donor journeys. I'm talking about the 'journeys' that, in the church, can put members on a sort of treadmill of predictable topics and lead-ups and build-ups to courses and initiatives with the idea that they will take certain steps.</div>
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At this point, feel free to call me hypocritical, because in my working life, this is essentially what I do, day in day out. It's also probably the reason I would quite like a break from it on a Sunday. I'm not alone - in recent months I've <a href="http://bulletin.equinoxpub.com/2016/01/media-ideologies-contested-authenticities-and-socality-barbie/">read</a> <a href="https://branyancomedy.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/your-excellent-worship-isnt/">umpteen</a> <a href="https://realjesusology.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/trajectories-branded-religion-vs-incarnational-diversity/">pieces</a> <a href="http://kathyescobar.com/2015/03/23/church-bingo-before-after-our-faith-unravels/">expressing</a> the same sentiments (they are, after all, a key point in this debate on millennials). Pictured at the top of this post is how Sarah Bessey put it very neatly in the excellent <i>Out of Sorts</i>. <b> </b></div>
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Now, I'm not stupid. I know that a lot of this is key to the running of churches and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Recently it occurred to me, however, that one of the current major concerns fof the third sector needs to be a key consideration for churches too. You can't have the strategy and the marketing and the journeys without focusing just as much on retention, in a way that<b> is </b>authentic and <b>is</b> meaningful and genuinely communicates that you care, that you're appreciative. Openness and honesty are important, because they build trust.</div>
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If you can't give a member of your church a straight answer on what the church believes about a particular issue when the member can see from your practice that it's obvious you have a definite opinion, that's not honesty. If being part of the body of Christ is very much about community, what happens when people feel like little more than another resource to be exploited? If you talk the talk on diversity but who gets to 'play' on a Sunday shows you don't walk the walk, how are those whose faces (or bodies) don't fit going to feel?</div>
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When care, community, openness, trust, and the idea that members can play a meaningful part in something important are deprioritised, there will be a problem with retention. Call me a lazy consumer if you like but my work and my eperience tells me it can't all go one way for too long without people becoming disillusioned. And this isn't confined to certain types of churches or denominations (although I do believe size is a major factor). It shouldn't be ignored. I know that churches do think about turnover, but despite sometimes being tackled with the best intentions, it's sometimes misguided.</div>
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<i>The end of 2015 saw us make some exciting decisions, and the first months of 2016 will see us exploring our options as a result. Things haven't been easy, but change is coming.</i></div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-34669027893048082002015-07-09T21:36:00.000+01:002015-07-09T21:36:02.935+01:00Theological conferences and inclusivity: a conversation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Earlier this week I received a comment on a post written four years ago - part of a conversation that sparked a huge debate and, I believe, was a catalyst for a strengthening of women's voices in the Christian blogosphere. At the time I wrote </span><i style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/female-christian-bloggers-rare-breed.html">Female Christian bloggers: a rare breed?</a> </i><span style="text-align: justify;">it was frequently assumed that any Christian blogger worth reading was a man. Men wrote about serious and meaty topics; women's blogs didn't really count as Christian blogs when the rankings of 'top bloggers' got published because they tended to write more about daily life and stay away from heated theological debates.</span><br />
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In 2011 I argued that the voices of Christian women were not absent online, but marginalised. Regarded as less serious than their male counterparts, often lacking in confidence about their knowledge and gifts, and - thanks to online abuse towards women and the unpleasant atmosphere below the line - less willing to engage in debate, Christian women were certainly writing, but were overlooked.</div>
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Looking back, I'm proud that the conversations sparked by my post and by Lesley's contributed to many more women beginning to make their voices heard and particularly to speak out against misogyny in the church. Just this week I saw Rachel Held Evans referred to as the 'leader' of progressive Christians online. While I don't really know what I think of that statement, it's evident that four years on from my observation that just 19 out of 122 blogs on a particular Christian blog aggregator were written by women, things have changed - and that's a good thing.</div>
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Make no mistake, however - the digital world may be somewhat more inclusive than in 2011, but the church has a long way to go. This week, Christian leaders and teachers have gathered in Bedford for the <a href="http://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/think_conference_2015_wrestling_with_1_corinthians">THINK conference</a>, an opportunity to work through 1 Corinthians in depth in the company of like-minded individuals. I'd seen the conference advertised earlier in the year and while it looked interesting, I had assumed that as someone not in formal church leadership, it was not 'for me'. It was a shame, I thought, because there are so very few conferences that do that sort of work.</div>
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On seeing a picture of the first day of the conference posted on Twitter, and what appeared to be a room full of white male delegates, I <a href="https://twitter.com/boudledidge/status/618468854554042368">asked</a> whether anyone I knew was attending, and if so, were any women present? Over the last two years I've <a href="http://www.project328.info/">been involved in an initiative</a> raising awareness of the way Christian conferences exclude women both as speakers and as delegates. Project 3:28 has led to some helpful and productive conversations with event organisers who are open to understanding how conferences exclude women and who want to set a positive example. I did not believe that the THINK conference would explicitly be off limits to women, but as a conference out of the NewFrontiers stable, I was interested to see if women were involved.</div>
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Another friend of mine <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcurrey/status/618492300872839168">confirmed</a> that she had attended THINK in 2014 and that she was the only woman there.</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/mattcurrey">@mattcurrey</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/boudledidge">@boudledidge</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/simplepastor">@simplepastor</a> I'd been nervous of going b/c I thought I wld prob be a minority and wasn't sure how I'd be received</div>
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— Hannah Swithinbank (@hannahswiv) <a href="https://twitter.com/hannahswiv/status/618508425966788608">July 7, 2015</a></div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/mattcurrey">@mattcurrey</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/boudledidge">@boudledidge</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/simplepastor">@simplepastor</a> And it felt like no one there could quite understand why a woman might not choose to go to that space</div>
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— Hannah Swithinbank (@hannahswiv) <a href="https://twitter.com/hannahswiv/status/618508590266085377">July 7, 2015</a></div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/mattcurrey">@mattcurrey</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/boudledidge">@boudledidge</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/simplepastor">@simplepastor</a> ... Though everyone individually was very welcoming and nice to me.</div>
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— Hannah Swithinbank (@hannahswiv) <a href="https://twitter.com/hannahswiv/status/618509014083706880">July 7, 2015</a></div>
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To many, this could seem strange. If a person is treated in a kind and friendly way when attending an event even as an outsider, what's the problem? The problem is the insecurity that comes with being a woman in an all-male space, coupled with (generally) differing ways of engagement, which is often down to socialisation. Women tend to learn from a young age that they're expected to be quiet and take a back seat while men dominate in group settings. It's the reason why women only space is so valuable, and it's one of the key things men can work on in terms of being more inclusive.</div>
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We've had a number of years now to observe, in the digital realm, the combative way that men often engage with theology and their opinions about the church. In an atmosphere that is frequently not a safe space for women thanks to theological and/or cultural beliefs that mark us out as somehow inferior, and considering the struggles with impostor syndrome and lack of confidence that women often face, it's no wonder that somewhere like the THINK conference could make a woman feel uncomfortable. Particularly - as Hannah pointed out - when the conference is hosted by a group of churches known for making complementarianism a distinctive.</div>
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The challenge for the organisers of events such as THINK is to make them inclusive. I was intrigued to learn that as a small group leader, as someone who works for a Christian organisation, the conference would not have been off limits to me. Hannah and I agreed that it would be encouraging to go to such an event knowing that other women would be there - knowing, as a result, that the organisers saw it as more than a boys' get-together, a meeting of an inner circle. As part of Project 3:28 I have discussed the practical ways organisers can make conferences accessible to women - inviting women who they feel would benefit from an event, being understanding about childcare arrangements and facilities, and making clear that when 'leaders' are mentioned that this means women too.</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/Davidcapener">David Capener</a>, who has only recently become an acquaintance of mine on Twitter, was quite right to point out that the photo we'd seen of the event gave the impression <a href="https://twitter.com/Davidcapener/status/618687038510997505">everyone in attendance was white</a>. It's all too easy for church leadership to remain homogeneous as people of influence - unintentionally or otherwise - seek out and raise up others who are just like them. Together with <a href="https://twitter.com/simplepastor">Phil Whittall</a> we agreed that diversity must be aimed for, but David suggested that he believed things are unlikely to change within the next decade.</div>
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David, Phil and I have agreed to continue a blog conversation about this, and I'm excited and thankful that they've been open to engagement on how conferences like THINK can be more accessible and open to those who may genuinely benefit, even though they don't fit the 'mold' of a traditional elder.</div>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-36479433880403343772015-05-12T21:36:00.000+01:002015-05-12T21:36:54.035+01:00Searching for Sunday: motherhood, guilt and disillusionment<div dir="ltr">
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I spent my teenage years dedicated to the music department at my Fenland comprehensive school. Choir, orchestra, string quartet, vocal ensemble, recorder group. Local music festivals, county-wide choir days, youth orchestra every Saturday and umpteen church f<span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">ê</span>tes. We were a partner school of Cambridge University, and so it happened that every December, we'd pile into a minibus and he'd drive us to Cambridge, the Head of Music leading a gaggle of girls over the Backs and to King's College chapel, where we'd sit, awestruck, alongside fellow music geeks of Cambridgeshire, and listen to a special performance of <i>Carols from King's</i>; without the TV cameras, without the crowds of people queuing from breakfast time to try to get a seat. Just 20 or so teenage girls high on sugar from vending machine sweets, on the lookout for nice male undergraduates in the choir, with a slightly harassed middle-aged man known as 'Mr C'.</div>
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I'd sit and listen to those performances absolutely rapt. The hush, the stillness and sense of anticipation in the chapel always contrasting with the grey murkiness of the December day as we stepped back outside shrieking once more and looking about, furtively, for attractive men (think of my choir, circa 1999, a bit like Alan Warner's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sopranos-Alan-Warner/dp/0099268744">Sopranos</a></i> - minus the nuns and delinquency, instead intensely bothered about their GCSE results). Something <i>got to me</i> every time and it's something that's always happened with old churches and chapels, something I ceased to think about very much as I moved into adulthood, attending church in a school hall, a football stadium, a tent, a conference centre and finding that God could show up in any of them, as well as in seminars on Celtic mysticism, in halls of residence at one in the morning, in fields at dusk and on a mountain in a hailstorm.<br />
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I recently finished reading <i><a href="http://rachelheldevans.com/searching-for-sunday/">Searching for Sunday</a></i>, Rachel Held Evans' new book about 'loving, leaving and finding the church'. As I read the final chapters, highlighting paragraphs and having laughed, cried and nodded along with Evans' experiences as a member of a most difficult generation, - a generation that's the subject of <a href="https://www.barna.org/barna-update/millennials">research</a> and anguish and <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/topics/m/millennials/">umpteen thinkpieces</a> - I felt as if I'd reached a turning point and was ready to do something I haven't been able to do for three years. I say I haven't been able to do it - I've alluded to it and vaguely explored it - but have intentionally refrained from writing because the reality has been something I've been wrestling with, and all along I've felt as if this isn't something I could write about in the midst of so much turmoil.</center>
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And so instead, I've emailed people. I've engaged in lengthy Twitter conversations and poured my heart out to friends. I've been angry and I've felt full of shame and I've felt relief and happiness when people have said 'Me too'. Because for three years I've been searching for Sunday, and I've come to the conclusion that right now it's probably not what I should be doing, nor is it what's most helpful.</center>
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In 2012 I became a mother. It hardly seems possible that Sebastian is three this week, a hilarious, much-loved little ball of energy. Motherhood <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/baby-brain.html">hit me like it hits most other women</a>; I mulled over the shift in my identity incessantly, felt incredibly lonely, struggled with anxiety and felt as if I'd left my brain somewhere else for months on end as I cared for a child that Did Not Sleep. Unsurprisingly, I totally disengaged from church. With one eye on the baby and my weary mind struggling to cope with the noise and the crowds and the intrusion, I zoned out. When I wasn't zoned out, all I could feel was guilt.</center>
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The modern church can be incredibly effective at making you feel guilty because you're insufficiently <i>involved</i>, insufficiently <i>on board</i>, insufficiently motivated to <i>do more, give more, be more</i>. There are always more programmes, more opportunities to serve, another reminder to get better at quiet time or outreach or prayer. When you have a baby your priorities change. This doesn't mean that you have no desire to give more, to learn more; in my case, motherhood coincided with the beginning of a deep desire to know more about theology, to delve deeply into scripture, and a growing sense of revelation in the everyday, in conversations with friends and rigorous self-analysis. But what it does mean is that you almost certainly have no time to actually do it. </center>
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In 2012 I became a mother. My mental health has had its ups and downs. I returned to work full time when my son was nine months old and I love my job. I've had a thirst for deep friendships, but my introvert's brain doesn't do well with small talk and crowds and distractions. I've longed for peace and quiet and a sense of the sacred and to simply be left alone. And for a good few years, I've been sold the idea that showing up on a Sunday, getting enthusiastic about joining in and getting something out of it is paramount. But by and large I've felt nothing, learnt nothing, wished for more free time and more focus, wished I'd stayed at home or gone for a walk or read a book instead.</center>
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Deep down I know that looking to find everything in 90 minutes on a Sunday isn't the right thing to do. But I've still expected something - and when I've failed to gain anything from those 90 minutes on a Sunday, I've felt disillusioned and angry. Excluded because I'm not 'on board' and don't even want to be, apprehensive because I've been desperate to talk to someone about it but worried that doing so would make me a troublemaker, get me labelled as bitter, problematic, a contentious woman. The fear of raising issues with church is real. The fear of raising issues with church as a woman takes things up a level because you know that somewhere, someone will listen to you pour your heart out and then put you in a box marked 'women's issues', 'over-emotional', 'Jezebel spirit'.</center>
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On Christmas Eve last year the three of us went to the afternoon service of lessons and carols at the cathedral. Arriving with half an hour to spare, the building was already packed and we ended up sitting off to one side, behind a pillar. A hush fell over the congregation as the lone voice began to sing, the long wait of Advent reaching its end. After the first carol, the choir sang <i>This Is The Truth Sent From Above</i>, something I hadn't heard for years. For a moment I remembered a bleak day and King's College Chapel, and as I sat and watched I felt, for the first time in a long time, what it is like to worship. At the close of the service, as we sang <i>Hark the Herald Angels Sing</i>, I wanted to raise my hands rather than sit down and sigh, disengaged again.</center>
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Traditional forms of church aren't new to me; I grew up in the Church of England. Rachel Held Evans and others have written of a 'trend' that's being observed, of millennials rejecting new churches and falling in love with liturgy. Some people are regarding this with a bit of cynicism: is it truly a trend, or the confirmation bias of a few bloggers with book deals in their sights? Maybe, and yet when Evans writes "All I wanted from church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to <i>be,</i>" I get it. Last summer, I felt as if I was about to become a '<a href="http://www.churchleaders.com/outreach-missions/outreach-missions-articles/177144-thom-schultz-rise-of-the-done-with-church-population.html">done</a>', but I wasn't sure. My faith hasn't gone anywhere, and deep down, I knew that become a 'done' wasn't the answer.</center>
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A couple of weeks ago when I was discussing all this with friends on Twitter, I said I was finally ready to write about it - this internal battle that's hindered my writing about faith for at least two years now. I wanted to write about it because I know that at the start of all this, I felt so alone. I felt as if I knew what would happen if I ever broached the subject. In early 2014 I <a href="http://ontoberlin.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/put-away-shopping-cart-and-pick-up.html">wrote an impassioned response</a> to a pastor who had blogged about what he thought were 'five really bad reasons to leave a church'. "Put away the shopping cart and pick up a shovel," he admonished Christians, accusing those who have struggles with the church of being lazy consumerists. That post came out of my fear of raising those same issues and getting those same, dismissive answers - or as Rachel Held Evans described in <i>Searching for Sunday</i>, a desire to find a quick fix and restore everything to the joyful, smiling norm:</center>
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<i>"...what they find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try to fix it, to try and make it go away. Bible verses are quoted. Assurances are given. Plans with ten steps and measurable results are made. With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure.</i></center>
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<i>But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another's pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome."</i></center>
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And so, over the past couple of years, I've been thankful for those who have come not with an answer but who have said "I know" or "My wife felt exactly the same" or "Me too" and made me realise I wasn't alone. I don't think we talk about it enough; we keep quiet because it rocks the boat and upsets people and makes us seem selfish and complaining.</center>
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What do I think churches can do? You can support mothers of young children but not just mothers of young children, really - the disillusioned and the anxious and the people who have big plans that don't fit with your vision. Look out for the people who are just standing there on a Sunday, zoned out, looking uncomfortable, not looking joyful like I know you want them to. You can remember that we don't have the time and the headspace to give you more and more and buy into your latest strategy, but also that we still exist and that we want opportunities and role models - and that we are still striving to grow in our faith. You can provide pastoral support that makes people feel they can be open, not apprehensive about speaking up. You can refrain from publishing blog posts that call people who have issues with the church selfish consumer Christians.</center>
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And what if you're reading this and thinking "This is me"? Bring it all back to God and your place in the Kingdom and where you're at, right now. Not what you feel you should be involved in and saying yes to and not how you think you should be continually striving to do better and give more of yourself. Invest time in your family and your friends. Listen to God when you feel prompted to explore ways of worship or study or churches you might feel at home in. Remember the fact that Christianity doesn't mean being assimilated and being just like everyone else at church, or all your Christian friends on Facebook, or having to like everything you hear on a Sunday. When that headspace starts to come back, use it wisely. And know that you are not alone.</center>
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<a href="https://storify.com/boudledidge/searching-for-sunday-the-church-and-my-journey">Click here for my Storify of a conversation on Twitter mentioned in this post</a></center>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-90306641993674628952015-01-24T13:17:00.000+00:002015-01-24T13:17:29.748+00:00The nagging wife: symptom or cause?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify;">
The 'nagging wife' is a centuries-old stereotype that refuses to die. She's the subject of eye-rolling banter between men, the warning from the pulpit and the marriage guidance book, the defence of countless <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-435685/Mentally-ill-husband-stabbed-nagging-wife-76-times.html">men</a> who have <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137955/Italian-pensioner-strangled-82-year-old-wife-death-constant-nagging.html">committed</a> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/491083.stm">murder</a>. In recent weeks, she has resurfaced as a truly 21st century reminder to women that there's something else they're probably not doing well enough at - in the form of a piece entitled '<a href="http://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/610/I-Wasn-t-Treating-My-Husband-Fairly-And-It-Wasn-t-Fair">I wasn't treating my husband fairly, and it wasn't fair</a>'.</div>
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The post, which appears to have gone viral in the grand tradition of 'pseudo-meaningful revelations about my relationship that easily translate into clickbait' (247,000 shares on Facebook), details a wife's realisation that her controlling and obsessive attitude to household matters was belittling her husband and buying into another hard-to-stamp-out stereotype - that of the 'useless' husband who can't be trusted to do a thing around the house.</div>
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Thousands upon thousands of women have apparently recognised themselves in this tale and I don't think she's entirely wrong. I've heard her tale in conversations in the office or on nights out with friends. 'Wife always knows best' - 'happy wife, happy life' - I've heard people say it and I've most definitely seen them post it on Facebook (there is a theme here. Facebook has a lot to answer for). And I don't buy into it because, really, what does it say when the only words that come out of your mouth regarding your partner, your husband, the father of your children - are about how 'useless' he is and how you won't 'let' him do things?</div>
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This works both ways. It's clear that men and women are called to respect and honour each other and sickly relationship-themed clickbait is, for all its faults, reasonably good at pointing this out. However what's often noticeable is the way this point is made differently, depending on whether the post in question is primarily about, or written by, a man or a woman. A key theme in relationship-focused clickbait from men (particularly of the loosely Christian variety): 'You'll be bawling your eyes out when you read about the amazing thing this guy did for his wife'. Conversely, a key theme in relationship-focused clickbait from women: 'The one thing I realised I needed to do more of/less of as a wife and mother'. As ever, identifying our inadequacies and how we must 'do better' defines us as women.</div>
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In writing about her tendency to take control and insist that things are done 'her way' - the purchasing of meat, the sorting of laundry - one woman has identified a key way that power struggles between couples often play out. She mentions that she doesn't believe men act in the same way towards women, referencing the fact her husband is 'just not as concerned with some of the minutiae as I am'. But what she doesn't identify is what is so often the reason for this, and the reason for the way women frequently feel compelled to assert power.</div>
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I don't know many women who are comfortable with simply doing nothing. Relaxing, chilling out, whatever you prefer to call it. I'm one of them. I've had countless conversations with friends where we've discussed our discomfort with sitting still. There are, quite simply, always things that must be done, whether that means housework or running errands or getting through our 'to read' list or writing another blog post. Not for nothing do we talk about the '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Shift">second shift</a>' or the '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_burden">double burden</a>' - the fact that women's increased entry into the workplace has not resulted, in the majority of cases, in an egalitarian set-up when it comes to housework, childcare, and the general organisation of family life. </div>
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Even women who do enjoy a more equal partnership struggle to allow themselves downtime, knowing at the same time that their partners have no such qualms about relaxing - and for many it's learned from childhood in the way they've seen the household roles their parents have played.</div>
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The curse of modern womanhood, as we all know too well, is that whatever you do and however you do it, feelings of guilt and inadequacy will snap at your heels like an angry terrier. The majority of society, from politicians to journalists, to people on parenting forums and your own relatives have a wealth of opinions on what constitutes acceptable womanhood and unfortunately, most of us socialised to care a whole lot about what others think about us and out lifestyle choices.</div>
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This, of course, happens in different ways. I enjoy a pretty egalitarian marriage and couldn't care less if I haven't dusted my mantelpieces in living memory, but I've certainly considered myself a bit of a let-down for sitting on the sofa watching television when emails have languished in my inbox and projects haven't moved forward as quickly as I would have liked (and those are personal emails and personal projects, not even work-related ones).</div>
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Even today, especially today, the running of the home and of family life inevitably falls on the shoulders of women. Even if it doesn't, in theory - for those in equal partnerships for example - we still consider it our responsibility, berating ourselves internally when they let something slip. The minutiae of daily life all too easily becomes a source of anxiety - I know I've had to remind myself that I am, in fact, allowed to relax and that this is not the same thing as laziness. And for many women, the efficiency and performance of the minutiae of daily life is one of the few areas in which they can exert power and control.</div>
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Guarding against a hunger for power and control is something all humans must do. A toxic force within relationships and families, it often manifests in differing ways because of the ways men and women are brought up to behave and to gain power, and the ways society considers it acceptable for them to do so. Discouraged from speaking our minds and pursuing confrontation or appearing to 'dominate' a relationship, women are encouraged instead to resort to manipulation and only ever to demonstrate indirectly that they might 'know best', or indeed have feelings about anything at all. It's even a tactic that's encouraged by numerous Christian books on marriage: upholding traditional gender roles means subtly manipulating and influencing your husband rather than asking him or telling him. That would, of course, be 'nagging', or assuming a dominant role.</div>
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'Nagging', and the range of emotions and issues it encompasses - the wrong meat purchased, the blue sock accidentally included in the white wash, the fact that somehow, people do things differently to you and that's just not right - must therefore be looked at as part of the wider picture of how women are permitted to exercise control over their own lives and the lives of others. </div>
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The key sphere in which women are permitted by society to exercise authority is the home. In a world of judgement, anxiety and the feeling that whatever you do will somehow be not good enough and that there are countless factors in your life that you can't control, household tasks are one of things that you can. Whereas men are allowed to assert authority in the public sphere and as the 'head of the household', women remain largely responsible for all that lies beneath, and even today, they know that their worth as women is often judged by it.</div>
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Men have - usually - not been brought up to notice the minutiae of the home and family life. They haven't had to, because, historically, it's always been women's work. It's something that's been done for them and they've often never really had to think about it - yet many (not all) expect it to somehow get done anyway. Even in relationships where both partners truly don't care about crumbs on the floor and the correct brand of mayonnaise being purchased, women feel compelled to set standards lest they be judged by society, their friends, their mother-in-law - and found wanting in a way that men never will. </div>
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In a world where this burden still inevitably falls to women, in a world where humans want control and power, the woman whose anxiety and anger over things not being done 'her way' can be seen as a symptom, not just a cause, of gender relations that need restoration. Perhaps a more balanced and egalitarian approach to home life - where tasks and responsibilities are not gendered - might alleviate the need to control and 'take charge' over simple household tasks.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-35649840247329475832015-01-12T22:17:00.000+00:002015-01-12T22:17:09.325+00:00'You can't be what you can't see' - or why gender parity at conferences matters<div style="text-align: justify;">
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In 2011, Jennifer Siebel Newsom's documentary <i><a href="http://therepresentationproject.org/films/miss-representation/">Miss Representation</a> </i>captured the imagination of those who are passionate about seeing girls and women reach their full potential. Despite the advances made in recent decades, women are still subject to messages from society that tell them their worth lies in how they look, assigning them a narrow set of priorities and limiting their horizons. That year, the motto "You can't be what you can't see" was everywhere. As I wrote at the time:<br />
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<i>"Even if you haven't watched the trailer yet, with its footage of bikini-clad women in music videos interspersed with derogatory newspaper headlines about women politicians, you can probably reel off a list of the ways the media and popular culture makes it abundantly clear what us women are good for. We're the eye candy, the gender whose worth is bound up in how sexy we are. We're the bitches and the backstabbers and the lovers of catfights. The yummy mummies and the slummy mummies. The bosses from hell and the boardroom ballbusters. When we go into politics, the newspapers run stories on our dress sense and cleavage rather than our achievements. Men turn up at our public appearances holding banners saying 'Iron my shirt'. </i><br />
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<i>"How is this making the women of the future feel and what's it doing to their ambitions Miss Representation reveals all. It reveals how such toxic imagery is making girls and women feel devalued and ignored - as one teenager says, it's as if no-one cares about their brains, only their looks. It reveals how girls' dreams and ambitions change over time, as they find themselves trapped in stereotypes of what a woman should be and treated accordingly by boys, trapped by the perception that 'feminine' or 'like a girl' means 'inferior'." </i><br />
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In recent months I've had cause to look back at my diaries from years gone by, and what has struck me more than anything else is the sense of alienation that I felt from the church as a young woman who didn't feel like she conformed to the popular stereotype of 'Biblical womanhood'. When I finally found women 'like me', particularly women who I could see doing the things that I felt I was gifted to do, I knew that they were my people. They were mentors and cheerleaders and role models for women like me, and they gave me hope that contrary to the impression I'd been given, there was a place for me in the church.<br />
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At the end of 2013, I was involved in the initial conversations that grew into what is now known as <a href="http://www.project328.info/">Project 3:28</a>. These conversations were inspired by the discussions about that year's <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2013/november/nines-explains-women-speakers-rachel-held-evans-rhoades.html?paging=off">The Nines conference</a>, which began with a tweet from Rachel Held Evans: "More than 100 speakers and four of them are women. This is not what the church looks like." We wanted to take a look at the UK Christian conference scene and see if we'd fared any better than The Nines. In our first year of analysing conference line-ups, we found that although it's claimed 66% of churchgoers in the UK are women, they make up just 34% of speakers at conferences.<br />
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Last week, we released the statistics from 2014's conferences, and it was encouraging to note that several organisations had been encouraged to think about gender parity in their line-ups that year. The report, once again, prompted plenty of conversations. There has been news coverage, and there have been blog posts. Some people think that the report is a terrible waste of money (hint: it didn't really cost anything at all), and others have argued that it's obvious that women are underrepresented - why should we need a report to tell us that?
I would argue that a report was needed because it has spurred people into action. It has recognised the efforts of organisations trying to be inclusive, and in giving people the figures, it underlines the extent of the issue. The vaguely negative accusations levelled at those of us involved in the project have been interesting and frustrating, not least because they're no different from the stock responses that those passionate about gender and the church have to deal with every time they stick their heads over the parapet.<br />
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<b>Nobody's saying that we should prioritise a 50:50 ratio of speakers over gifting, knowledge, and experience. </b><br />
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What we're simply saying is that the gifting, knowledge and experience of the body of Christ is often not reflected in who gets to speak, who gets to lead, and who gets to be considered an authority.<br />
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<b>Yes, women sometimes have different styles of leadership to men. And they often make different life choices due to lack of confidence. </b><br />
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But as <i>Miss Representation</i> told us, you can't be what you can't see. I speak from personal experience when I say that many of us who are underrepresented in leadership benefit from having people like us to model it for us before we can believe it's something we can do, something that would be possible. That doesn't just go for women and the church - we're talking about all minorities here, in all areas of life. If women aren't stepping up to speak at conferences right now, that's not to say things can't change if they start to see a better way modelled.<br />
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<b>Women are mothers. And?</b><br />
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Some of the women who have been the greatest influence on me in recent years are mothers. And they're doing what they're doing despite being mothers. It's my firm belief that mothers who are called to lead can do so with the right support, whether that's more equally shared parenting or conferences and organisations being considerate of their needs and helping out with childcare, or enabling them to bring along another adult to watch the children while the preach happens. It is simply not true that the secular feminist movement, the Christian feminist and egalitarian movements and conferences with a commitment to gender parity have little interest in promoting a more equal approach to parenting. It's one of the keys to women realising their full potential, And we must continue to advocate for it.<br />
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If women feel that their children take priority over ministry and career, so be it. That's their prerogative. But it's not the whole story. To say this is the case for the majority of women is incorrect - and it casts a disapproving eye on women who feel otherwise: women like me, and so many other women I know, who don't feel that a few hours of evening preparation and a day spent at an event means our children are worth less than profile and accolades.<br />
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<b>Lack of gender equality isn't the problem. Conferences and high profile speakers are the problem, apparently. </b><br />
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All that scoffing at Christian events and 'well known speakers' and snide little 'ughs' at the very idea of desiring to hold a leadership position or stand on a platform or teach people looks a little bit suspect when it's coming from people who are the leaders and the speakers and the high profile names, by which I mean white men - sorry, but that's exactly who I mean. It's all right for you, isn't it? You can scoff, and talk about how Christian culture needs to change, but come conference season everyone on the line-ups will look a bit like you, sound a bit like you - and they'll probably include some of your friends as well.<br />
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Project 3:28 didn't spring up when a bunch of people in thrall to the idea of helping women to become 'big names' and 'Christian celebrities' decided to try to make it happen. We'd all agree that a culture of Christian celebrity and waiting for conference season for a yearly spiritual high at the expense of the local church, of building relationships and grassroots organisation is inadvisable and can be toxic. But at the same time, we know that events and conferences are important to many. People go to them in order to be fed, to be inspired, and to grow in their relationship with God. We all need a balance - and while we know that Christian culture can be problematic, there's no reason we should seek to model gender justice in this very visible sphere.<br />
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<b>How is making women more like men the answer to inequality?</b><br />
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Let's get one thing straight: appealing to the 'why should we squeeze women into a male mould?' school of thought doesn't wash. If you think the 'masculine flavour' of church leadership and speaking is a problem, why seek to uphold the status quo and fob us off by pretending we're better off out of it? Let's challenge inequality together, not by keeping men and women in separate spheres. Change the 'flavour'. if women lead and speak in different ways, let them do it.<br />
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<b>What about [insert issue here]? Isn't that far more important? </b><br />
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Maybe it is. But gender justice is my thing and I'm going to stick to it, for all the women who have ever felt they can't be the person they want to be because they can't see anyone like them paving the way.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-72936835027115773002015-01-06T12:43:00.001+00:002015-01-06T12:43:30.875+00:002014: A recap on those resolutions<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Happy New Year! At the beginning of 2014 I overhauled the look and feel of this blog, and resolved to be a bit 'better' at posting. Last year, I managed a whole 12 posts. I didn't write about nearly as many of the things I would have loved to write about, and I felt as if I missed the boat on many other things due to just having too much on. But I was proud of what I did manage to produce. However, I'd made some other resolutions for 2014 as well, and I wanted to chronicle how I got on with them.<br />
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<b>Be hospitable (and a good friend)</b></div>
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If you're a Christian you get to hear a lot about being hospitable. Christians just love people who are good at hospitality. They are everyone's favourite. They are the people at church that everyone <i>just adores</i>. We're told that it's a special gift that some people have, but we're also told how hospitality has been a key aspect of the church since ancient times. So, you know, we've got to do it. When you're an introverted couple with a non-sleeping baby and living in a flat it's not all that easy. Plus I was convinced I hadn't been at the front of the queue when the gift of hospitality was bestowed on God's people.<br />
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Everyone knows a woman (or women - and it is always women), who's a pro at sorting out a buffet or doing the refreshments for everyone. She's good at bustling round a kitchen. And when there's some sort of party, several of these women will just get everything done. They just get on in there and bustle. Now there's a very important conversation to be had here about gender and why, exactly, it's women who are the ones that do this, but my point here is that I never got this gene. When everyone with ovaries starts doing that bustling around thing and being hospitality pros, I ask if there's anything I can do. And invariably, there isn't much I can do. So I get a drink, and feel slightly guilty.</div>
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In 2014, a few things changed. We became an introverted couple, with a toddler who finally slept at night, living in a decent-sized house. Having been really rubbish at socialising for well over a year, and having moved to the periphery of church (more on this later), I really wanted to get better at hospitality. And you know what? It's still hard, but it's been working. We like cooking, and people appreciate that. We're really trying to open up our home a bit more - subject to everyone else's busy lives as well as our own, so it doesn't happen all the time, but I hope we can build on this in 2015.</div>
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<b>Sort out The Church Thing</b></div>
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On 2 January 2014 I gave myself a bit of a talking-to and decided I was going to attempt to move forward on my long-running struggle with church. The year, in this respect, was full of ups and downs. I read things like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Churchless-Faith-Journeys-beyond-Churches/dp/0281054657">A Churchless Faith</a> and read a lot of blog posts by post-evangelicals and disaffected people and people seeking <i>authenticity</i>. In the process I think I learnt a lot about myself. When we say we're seeking authenticity, are we merely seeking <i>more people like us</i>? And what happens when you're reminded that creating communities of <i>people like us</i> is, really, pretty exclusionary? If <i>those who ask questions</i> are currently the people of the moment, surely, at some point, some <i>answers</i> would be helpful? Or at least, some ways to move forward. And if we have issues that we need to discuss, it's always <i>better to discuss them</i> rather than simmer over them and expect people to understand why we're upset, when we haven't actually told them in the first place (what do you mean, people aren't mind-readers?).<br />
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Through the spring and summer, following the (extremely disheartening) disbanding of the midweek group we were attending, I was dipping in and out of visiting a couple of other churches. But when I thought about it, I just didn't feel led to make the move anywhere else. I was feeling as if I was going to become a '<a href="http://www.churchleaders.com/outreach-missions/outreach-missions-articles/177144-thom-schultz-rise-of-the-done-with-church-population.html">done</a>'. What ended up happening was that we discussed it and decided we needed a fresh challenge that would help us get more involved and enable us to build community again. This challenge came to us in the form of an opportunity to become the new leaders of a midweek group, and at the moment it's going really well. I still have a long way to go when it comes to Sundays, but at least one thing has changed and one thing has made a difference.<br />
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<b>A new resolution for Twitter</b><br />
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I got really disillusioned with Twitter and internet activism in 2013 - more specifically, the way that a community I had once loved seemed to become primarily about performative 'call-outs' as activism, the monstering of women trying to make a difference because they haven't yet managed to focus on or solved all the world's problems, and the readiness of people to brand others as 'vile' and 'disgusting' over things that may not have happened and may never have been said. In 2014 I pledged to do what I could to support people, signal-boost good things and be encouraging instead. I didn't entirely do away with having a bit of a rant on occasion, however (one friend I met for the first time in 2014 mentioned my 'controlled rants'!). This also meant getting rid of a lot of negative and unhelpful voices from my timeline - and in return a lot of people did away with me, often for something as simple as being seen talking to particular people or sharing their writing, which pretty much proves my point about the way things have gone.<br />
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I'll be carrying my 2014 Twitter resolution over into 2015 and keeping up with some of the wonderful people I've been talking to and getting to know over the past year. In 2014 I had the opportunity to meet some longtime Twitter friends for the first time (quite a few of these at Greenbelt).<br />
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<b>Get fit again</b><br />
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I used to run half marathons, remember? The guilt of my paid-for and unused gym membership motivated me to get back to working out last year. For a time. It was all going so well - and then a particularly busy period at work happened, and my lunchtime trips to the sports centre tailed off (although I've continued to do plenty of walking). Like nearly everyone else this month, however, I'm hoping to get back into exercise for the new year.<br />
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<b>Be kind</b><br />
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I didn't always manage it, particularly in the first few months of the year, but in 2014 I've been working on being a lot kinder to myself. This has involved a few different things:<br />
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- Identifying some avoidable causes of feeling anxious and/or miserable, and trying to avoid thought patterns that exacerbate these. This has had mixed success but is really getting better<br />
- Trying to ignore impostor syndrome whenever it rears its ugly head<br />
- Acknowledging that I do need - and deserve - downtime - and not beating myself up for failing to <i>achieve</i> things 24/7<br />
- Do the little things: use the nice skincare every day rather than sporadically!<br />
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I've also been working on extending the kindness through reaching out to support friends and family. 2014 was a tough year for my extended family as both my maternal grandparents passed away (in September 2013 and January 2014), so we've been particularly trying to spend quality time with my mum.<br />
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<b>Say yes</b><br />
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At the beginning of 2014 I started to become involved in more talks and get-togethers about the gender imbalance of speaker line-ups at Christian conferences, following <a href="http://god-loves-women.m.webs.com/site/mobile?dm_path=%2Fapps%2Fblog%2Fshow%2F35601231-are-uk-christian-conferences-sexist-&fw_sig_permissions=none&fw_sig_site=82811861&fw_sig=ce7310311cb75874816b53829ca41da9&fw_sig_partner=webs&fw_sig_tier=0&fw_sig_access_token=975d4d84b42bd5b7fe2ff631b9e29ef97d2c4104&fw_sig_permission_level=0&fw_sig_time=1418676558301&fw_sig_social=1&fw_sig_url=http%3A%2F%2Fgod-loves-women.webs.com%2F&fw_sig_locale=en-US&fw_sig_premium=0&fw_sig_is_admin=0&fw_sig_api_key=522b0eedffc137c934fc7268582d53a1&fw_sig_session_key=7926e662f19254955914837bfc4625199fc2b39934ae54d2d39dfe4e9f4c0e0b-82811861&fb_sig_network=fw#3121">this bit of research by my good friend and partner in crime Natalie</a>, and the many discussions it prompted. One of the main barriers to women being more visible as speakers, as 'experts', is that we're much more likely than men to say 'no' to opportunities put our way. Sometimes that's down to a lack of confidence or impostor syndrome; sometimes it's due to responsibilities like caring for children. I was so encouraged that some organisations were really willing to talk about all this and discuss how they could make changes, and I'm really excited that out of all these discussions, <a href="http://www.project328.info/">Project 3:28 - a new initiative for 2015 - was born</a>.<br />
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I knew that in 2014 I had to get better at saying 'yes' to opportunities too. And so I did some exciting things:<br />
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- I did another talk at Greenbelt (and helped organise a Christian Feminist Network worship session; and exhibited for my day job there too)<br />
- I wrote <a href="http://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2014/November-2014/Are-boobs-news">a feature on Christianity and feminist activism</a> for <i>Christianity</i> magazine<br />
- I wrote for the New Statesman's series on second wave feminism, <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2014/05/hannah-mudge-susan-brownmiller-backlash-against-second-wave">discussing Susan Brownmiller's <i>In Our Time</i> and the lessons the movement today can learn from it</a> (particularly pertinent to my 'new resolution for Twitter above). The series generated a lot of controversy, but was also well-received by a lot of people<br />
- I presented on 'Hashtag activism' at the Christian New Media Conference<br />
- And I also got approached about writing a book. This was incredibly exciting, and I did a lot of thinking, praying and planning as a result. Over the summer, however, I had to concede that while writing a book would be amazing, it's not something I can commit to right now - my life is really busy already and I just don't have the spare time needed<br />
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However, the past year has really underlined for me the importance of keeping the right perspective as I 'say yes' to things, not becoming too invested in profile and self-promotion at the expense of authenticity and relationships. Unfortunately I've seen this happen to people, and I know how much hurt and disillusionment it can cause.<br />
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For 2015, I've decided to carry over all of these resolutions and build on last year's efforts, with one new addition: <b>read more</b>. I have a stack of new books following Christmas, and lots of things I want to learn about too.<br />
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Before I go, some mentions for the blogs I kept on reading in 2014 despite a distinct lack of free time: <a href="http://glosswatch.com/">Glosswatch</a>; <a href="http://aroomofourown.org/">A Room of Our Own</a>; <a href="http://sarahditum.com/">Sarah Ditum</a>; <a href="http://www.cjanekendrick.com/">C. Jane Kendrick</a>; <a href="http://diannaeanderson.net/blog/">Dianna E. Anderson</a>; <a href="http://www.messynessychic.com/">Messy Nessy Chic</a>; <a href="http://littleeandbean.com/">Littlee and Bean</a>; <a href="http://lulastic.co.uk/">Lulastic and the Hippyshake</a>; <a href="http://www.sianandcrookedrib.blogspot.co.uk/">Sian and Crooked Rib</a>; <a href="http://www.mummysays.net/">Mummy Says...</a></div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-58060581074800319942014-11-14T22:28:00.000+00:002014-11-14T22:43:47.703+00:00The basic bitch: a lifelong struggle with relating to Generic Womanhood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In 1999, I smugly recorded in my diary that on non-uniform day at school, I'd been one of only two girls in my form not to wear head to toe sports brands. Aged 14, my favourite outfit consisted of cord flares (Gap; too big as I'd misread the label and looked at the US sizing), a bottle green velvet jacket (Camden Market) and cherry red Dr Marten boots (£30 in the sale. £30). The girls who tended to wear head to toe sports brands and mock my cord flares, were 'trendies': the basics of the late 90s. In 1999, trendies wore Kickers or Fila sweatshirts with bootcut jeans and listened to boy bands and UK garage. I inked Kula Shaker lyrics onto my homework diary in metallic gel pen; they did the same with the lyrics to <i>Sweet Like Chocolate. </i></div>
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In 2004, I was a student. The trendy, transported into the campus environment, had evolved, and my best friend and I, angsty and awkward, were by now referring to them as 'generics'. Generics wore Miss Sixty jeans and sometimes their boyfriend's sports stash. They had super-straight hair and made a lot of noise in the dining hall. They were your rag reps and your Christmas ball committee and they sniggered behind their hands whenever the Christian Union rep made an announcement about something. They didn't write angry letters to the student magazine when the Union bar ran a Playboy-themed night. They chatted loudly in the corridor about how they were definitely cutting back on carbs. <i>I only had two small potatoes with dinner this evening. Do you think that's ok?</i></div>
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It's 2014 and the trendy who became the generic has now evolved into the 'basic', or the '<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/04/basic-bitch-who-is-she.html">basic bitch</a>'. Despite the <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/basic-bitch">origins of the term</a>, it's come to to define a particular sort of young white woman. The basic likes Uggs and seasonal beverages and posting dubiously-attributed Marilyn Monroe quotes on Facebook, while watching <i>Sex and the City </i>and scrolling through her 'wedding inspiration' board on Pinterest. Should you wish to find out, Buzzfeed et al can give you examples of <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/laraparker/things-all-basic-white-girls-do-during-the-fall#25n7xgq">what a basic posts on Instagram</a>, the sort of texts she sends, <a href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2014/03/you-should-date-a-girl-whos-a-basic-bitch/">how she treats her boyfriend</a> and what she gets up to on a girls' night out.</div>
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The US-centric stereotype doesn't always translate, but the idea of the basic is universal. And as Noreen Malone wrote in <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/what-do-you-really-mean-by-basic-bitch.html">this piece</a> for <i>The Cut</i> last month, it's taken off because it 'feels restrained, somehow'.</div>
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<i>'You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.'</i></div>
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Malone sums it up perfectly when she describes the basic as 'the woman who fails to surprise us'. She buys into what society and capitalism tells us it means to be a woman today. She's unoriginal, and she doesn't care. What's noticeable about the current usage of 'basic' is that it doesn't simply describe unoriginal patterns of consumption; it also describes patterns of thought and modes of expression. Feminists can be 'basic'. Mothers can be 'basic' (witness the rivalry between Mumsnet and Netmums and the stereotypes the former has of the latter). Fashion and lifestyle bloggers who don't necessarily buy in to generic consumerism but actually see themselves as pretty 'alternative' can also be 'basic'.<br />
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As if you couldn't have guessed it, from my tales of 1999 and 2004, I have to confess to a lifelong struggle with all that is basic. At the age of 14, major aspects of my personality and behaviour were little more than a construction to throw other girls off the scent and give them something to talk about. <i>If they're mocking my clothes and my taste in music, at least they're not mocking the way I look or the fact I don't have a boyfriend. </i>It was only in recent years that it became clear to me exactly what I'd been up to, diverting their mockery at the same time as inwardly marking myself out as <i>better than them</i>. If you grew up being given funny looks by all your popular, incredibly generic peers, if you ever felt like a tortured soul or called yourself 'indie' or wrote in your journal that you were pretty misunderstood, really, you've probably had a lifelong struggle with relating to all that is basic. Sooner than you know it you're 30 years old, and you're still avoiding basics and rolling your eyes when they pop up in your Facebook feed.</div>
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Those of us who can't deal with 'basicity' have a tendency to (inwardly) mark ourselves out as 'not like Those Women'; those generic ones over there. In a hangover from our school years, we categorise and separate out. We're more unique, more interesting, more special. Today the tables have turned, and the basic is no longer queen. She may subscribe to all that is on-trend and acceptable for women, but she's no longer cool. What I believe is an uncomfortable truth for many of us as feminists, however, is that decrying basic culture is kind of problematic. We know it, and we do it anyway. Noreen Malone started to explore this and hit the nail on the head when she concluded her piece saying:</div>
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<i>'And so the woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture, and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.'</i></div>
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When you're calling another woman basic, you probably haven't got to know her very well. And it's fairly reliant on your perception of what society sees as 'things for women' as inferior. Ouch. I'm not going to pretend I'm the first person to feel conflicted about the popularity of the word. In fact, the thinkpieces about it have been numerous. Anne Helen Petersen, for Buzzfeed, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/basic-class-anxiety">described</a> women being dismissive of all things basic as little more than class anxiety, citing the term's origins as having class connotations and explaining its current usage in the same way:</div>
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<i>'Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.'</i></div>
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Petersen ends her piece by telling us that mockery of the basic woman is 'troubling' and 'regressive':</div>
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<i>'To call someone “basic” is to look into the abyss of continually flattening capitalist dystopia and, instead of articulating and interrogating the fear, transform it into casual misogyny.'</i></div>
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Responding on Thought Catalog, <a href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/anna-dorn/2014/10/buzzfeed-writer-pretends-basic-is-about-class-is-basic-af-while-doing-so/">Anna Dorn vehemently disagrees</a>. Calling out basicity, as she sees it, is 'rooted in female empowerment'. She gets the argument that deriding other women as 'basic' for choices they have made in the vacuum of patriarchal society is misogyny, but she doesn't ascribe to it.</div>
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<i>'...basic-bashing is not about punishment. It’s about women rising up. It’s about women saying – We can be real people with real thoughts and opinions. We can wear our natural hair. We can be loud and curse and be offensive. We can say fuck heels because they hurt. Basicity is about giving power to the fringes, because basics – the walking embodiment of male subordination – ultimately have all the power.'</i></div>
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She concludes that <i>'...basic-bashers can’t be misogynistic because we don’t stand to benefit from patriarchy.'</i><br />
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Both Petersen and Dorn are partially correct. As women, defining ourselves as superior to basics is somewhat rooted in anxieties surrounding consumption and class - even when we write off feminists as 'basic' because their commitment to the cause goes about as far as reading Lena Dunham's autobiography and thinking that a women's magazine running a feature on feminism 'is everything'. But it's not the full story. It's about buying in to expectations that we'll always define ourselves in opposition to some other group of women. <i>Not like those women, thinking this, supporting that and wearing those clothes. </i>Writing off women as friends and sisters because our opinions are superior or because they haven't reached a certain level of consciousness yet, sealing ourselves off and sneering at the Other. Radfems vs libfems vs funfems vs whitefems.</div>
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When we differentiate ourselves from all that is basic, we're representing all that is real and diverse and exciting about being a woman on the fringe when it is, indeed, what is generic and safe that has the power. Every woman who's ever felt free to be the person she really is knows that. Generic and safe is the ideal, and when you don't fit the mold you're often made to feel bad about it. Being able to say 'That's not me and I don't care' is liberating. But defining 'basic-bashing' as feminist praxis? 21st century empowerment as declaring that we're not like other girls and effectively writing off those generic specimens of womanhood as people who matter? It's indisputably problematic.<br />
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It's here that disagreements over the nature of sisterhood are bound to come in. Feminism doesn't mean liking all other women, or even being able to relate to them, but sneering at other women and calling it empowered shouldn't even come into it. Call it what it is: an extension of the way women have always been socialised to relate to other women, judging them and eyeing them up as competition and fuelling our anxieties about being interesting and clever and real.<br />
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Having always written off that which we now call basic, I've felt challenged in recent weeks not to buy into that any longer. Don't like particular women for particular reasons? Fine. Name them. But basic-bashing isn't about women rising up. It's upholding the status quo and shutting women out of potential opportunities to learn, grow, and identify with one another,</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-5028019515428302014-11-02T23:04:00.002+00:002014-11-02T23:04:37.297+00:00Feminist t-shirts, call-outs and commodification<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At the beginning of the year I made a resolution of sorts, to distance myself from the sort of feminism that only actually mentions a feminist campaign or organisation when it's tearing it down. There's nothing wrong with critique and highlighting issues within reason, but by the end of last year I'd become thoroughly bored with performative call-outs as a primary form of engagement. This has had its plus points: for one thing I haven't had to spend most of my precious little free time telling everyone how I'm not here for <i>this </i>sort of feminism and not here for <i>her</i> brand of feminism, thanks very much. And one debate I haven't had to wade into recently has been the one surrounding <i>ELLE</i>'s next step on its mission to bring a reinvigorated feminism to the readers of glossy magazines. </div>
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It is <a href="http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2011/05/media_coverage_of_feminism">definitely a good few years</a> since I first wrote about my discomfort with the commodified 'trendy feminism' campaigns that women's magazines have run, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment, in the last five years or so. Here's one disclaimer: I do appreciate <i>ELLE</i>'s commitment to focusing on women's issues in recent years; they've managed to do it better than other women's magazines (putting aside <a href="http://www.feministtimes.com/debranding-feminism/">that whole thing with the 'rebrand' of feminism</a>. But I get it. I know they can't exactly take a crap on consumerism; I'm just not going to say I'm comfortable with it). But I haven't been able to force myself to care all that much about the magazine's new partnership with Whistles and the Fawcett Society and, it seems, various attractive famous men (another disclaimer: I own an original Fawcett Society 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirt, as I've supported its work for the last eight years). </div>
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It's nothing we haven't been through before. Feminist merchandise at £45 a time (£85 if you want a sweatshirt), unavailable any bigger than a size 16. The publicity opportunities for politicians and celebrities and the 'outrage' that David Cameron wouldn't wear one. We know that there are some redeeming factors - well-known public figures at least <i>claiming</i> to support gender equality; exposure to people who might not otherwise think very much about feminism or think it's something they can be a part of. If it changes anyone's life and makes them a feminist or somewhere, somehow, improves a woman's life, then, I will concede, fair enough. In the spirit of the times, online news outlets have shown us image galleries of people wearing these t-shirts and proclaimed that Benedict Cumberbatch being our ally '<i>is everything</i>'. So far, so predictable.</div>
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Things took an interesting turn on Saturday night, when Twitter got wind of the <i>Mail on Sunday</i>'s front-page exposé of exploitative conditions in the factory where the t-shirts have been made. One worker is quoted as saying: ‘How can this T-shirt be a symbol of feminism? These politicians say that they support equality for all, but we are not equal.’ The Fawcett Society was absolutely on the ball with crisis management and quick to issue a <a href="http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/2014/11/feminist-looks-like-t-shirt-fawcett-society-response/">statement</a> saying it had been assured by Whistles that the factory producing the t-shirts complied with the highest ethical, sustainable and environmental standards possible. I don't doubt that this was a key consideration for Fawcett, and as we've seen, <a href="https://twitter.com/thisiswhistles/status/528834940071608320">Whistles</a> and <a href="http://www.elleuk.com/statement-elle-feminist-shirts"><i>ELLE</i></a> have subsequently issued statements to the same effect. Ensuring standards are met isn't always easy and the garment industry is a minefield in this respect.</div>
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Much has been said about the credentials of all involved in the campaign and in the <i>Mail on Sunday</i>'s exposé. Politicians taking part in publicity stunts - how much do they know about how their clothes are made? The investigative journalism tearing down a very public feminist campaign, published by a newspaper with absolutely no previous form for supporting gender equality or migrant workers. What I haven't been able to get behind, though, is the smug trashing of Fawcett, <i>ELLE</i>, and anyone who's supported their campaign and bought a t-shirt. It's a sad state of affairs when the first sign of interest in either ethical working conditions or marginalised women from the <i>Mail</i> comes at the expense of feminism, and the glee with which the whole thing has been reported needs nothing but contempt. What it doesn't need is to be held up, alongside the screengrabbed tweets of Fawcett supporters and well-known names, as 'everything that is wrong with feminism', a stick to beat the same old women about the same old things in the same tedious fashion. Nobody wins.</div>
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<i>ELLE</i> and Whistles have received a trashing, despite their best intentions. The Fawcett Society has, as far as I've seen, gained some support for its professional handling of the situation - yet has clearly still received a trashing. The <i>Mail on Sunday</i> has jumped at the opportunity to take part in the same tedious progressive/left/feminism-bashing they've been doing for years. And I'm betting it won't devote much time to covering exploitation of women and migrant workers overseas in the future, because clickbait misogyny and xenophobia will always be much higher on its agenda. Women working in factories in Mauritius are still working in the same conditions. The garment industry won't get an overhaul any time soon - and certainly not thanks to the sort of people on Twitter who, as ever, will keep on posting screenshots of Things Well-Known Feminist Campaigners Have Said and devoting hours at a time to sneering at them. Politicians will continue to display a dubious grasp of what 'improving women's lives' means. No-one will ever mistake David Cameron for a feminist.</div>
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So: no victories. Feminism got commodified, celebrities got column inches, activists got called out, and the majority of women in the UK remained completely untouched by whatever it was trying to achieve. Good job, everyone. I'm continuing to support the Fawcett Society because I believe it is a real force for good. I genuinely hope that this whole situation is resolved for the best and that all involved are able to make it clear that they did their utmost to ensure ethical production. But if awareness-raising initiatives can't make a break with consumerism and celebrity PR opportunities, then I can't help thinking that we'll see something similar happen again. The co-option of feminist activism into profits for t-shirt manufacturers has been much discussed in the wake of #YesAllWomen and more recently, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/23/the-many-many-problems-with-fckh8s-potty-mouthed-princess-video/">FCKH8's 'Potty-mouthed princesses' video</a>. Women in the movement can't prevent this sort of thing from happening, but campaigners can be smarter about how they hope to engage women with feminism.</div>
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Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-4727972974338104702014-08-28T21:18:00.000+01:002014-08-28T21:18:22.208+01:00On equality and power: a post about a post<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="text-align: justify;">This is a post about a post. It is unfortunate; as combative blogging is somewhat looked down upon by much of the Christian blogosphere these days. But if this post makes people disappointed, or saddened, so be it, because there are things that need to be said.</span><br />
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Alastair Roberts has been <a href="http://www.threadsuk.com/conservative-or-sexist/">writing a lot about gender, power and equality</a> recently. I respect Alastair and what he brings to the table, even though I don't agree with many of his conclusions on these particular subjects. He's absolutely right to point out that a narrow definition of feminism based on a shallow sort of 'equality' that favours the privileged - 'equality', for example, that cares a great deal about getting more women in boardrooms but little for women on the breadline. But in saying that "there is an implicit class opposition within equality feminism that is seldom adequately addressed", he is wrong. While it may be seldom addressed by the mainstream media, the examination of liberal feminism and what it offers (or doesn't offer) to the majority of women is a key topic of discussion within the movement and has been for years.</div>
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Movement women are very aware of the fact that the idea of "equality" has not so much advanced the lives of all women so much as the lives of a privileged few. At Greenbelt festival last weekend I spoke on feminist activism and made a point of talking about this very problem, highlighting it not as a reason for feminists to be discouraged and dismiss the idea that the movement could have something to offer all women, but as a reason to work for greater inclusion, giving space to the voices of the marginalised.</div>
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Yesterday, some of Alastair's comments on equality and power were <a href="http://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/feminism_and_equality">reposted by Andrew Wilson at the Think Theology blog</a>. The debate that ensued encouraged me to write this, because of how incredibly disappointing I found it that Alastair's words were posted with very little context in what looks very much like complementarian point-scoring to me. What can be taken from the post is a description of the feminist movement as focused on equality of outcome above all with value on the most the privileged, when society could do with more focus on, as described:</div>
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<i>"...robust and accessible universal healthcare, better maternity leave and more provision and flexibility for part time workers, equitable wages, secure jobs for their husbands and partners, a strengthening of marriage culture, the deepening and enriching of local community life and its groups and institutions, a society that is more mother and child friendly, action and stigma against domestic abuse and such things as street harassment..."</i></div>
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I don't think that anyone could argue that society could benefit from increased focus on achieving these goals, which is <i>why feminists have been working towards them for <b>decades</b></i>. And if these things could be more successfully achieved without the banner of feminism to hold them back, I'd be interested to know where the pushback, where the actual work on these issues is coming from outside the movement at present? Is the example being set by the complementarian gatekeepers? Walk the walk on gender issues if you believe it's important; without succumbing to benevolent sexism; without denying women the place to speak from their own experience.</div>
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I realise that might be difficult, if you're generally in agreement with statements such as:</div>
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<i>"In Scripture, this priestly role is often associated not merely with men, but with ‘alpha’ men. The Church is strengthened as a body when it is led by persons with steel backbones, principles, and nerves, persons that can withstand others in more confrontational situations." </i></div>
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It helps no-one when men's reactions to the absolutely justified pushback against such statements is described as "emotive", "all the shouting", and "brouhaha". Egalitarian and feminist women and their allies as pawns while the gatekeepers believe they're above such displays of emotion and subjectivity. As I mentioned to someone on Twitter earlier today, I do not wish for the experiences of individuals to be paramount at all times and at all costs, but yesterday's post was a prime example of when the <a href="http://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/feminism_and_equality#comment-1562212716">experiences and intepretations of individual women are important</a> - women for whom this is not theoretical; women for whom this is their life, their calling, their gifting. While complementarian gatekeepers discuss their theories about what we're good for and what we're <i>allowed to do</i> in closed circles and echo chambers, women are representing more than half of the church, leading, pioneering, keeping on keeping on. And they're doing it regardless of whether these gatekeepers believe a church with women in leadership is an "increasingly impotent institution".</div>
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They're also well aware that the majority of Christian women don't aspire to be bishops. When I helped found the Christian Feminist Network, we agreed that one of our aims would be to take the conversation on Christianity and feminism beyond women in church leadership and women bishops, not because we believe it's not important but because we believe Christian feminism is for the mothers, the grandmothers, the CEOs and the entrepreneurs, the women on the breadline and the women who have been abused and the women who don't want to lead from the front but support from alongside. If people like Andrew Wilson were more willing to dialogue with us then they'd know that. But I'm not sure that the activities of grassroots women's groups figure much inside the echo chamber.</div>
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Yesterday's post, with its out-of-context remarks on caring more about the marginalised, "alpha male" leadership and the reasons why women are supposedly unsuited for certain roles was published at an inappropriate time, with the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/28/rotherham-abuse-scandal-south-yorkshire-police-tough-questions">scandal of child abuse in Rotherham</a> making headlines. The scandal of child abuse - an appalling misuse of power carried out on vulnerable young people and ignored by powerful men. An inappropriate time, too, as the <a href="http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/28/mars-hill-pastors-letter-mark-driscoll-step-down-ministry-leadership/">saga of noted alpha male Mark Driscoll continues</a> and the sagas of abuse of power by patriarchal church leaders - Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, pastors involved with Sovereign Grace Ministries - continue to make headlines in the USA. Those who want to uphold the dignity and equality of women without the banner of feminism would do well to walk the walk regarding these incidents. And yet, so often, what we see instead are calls for "grace", or indeed, complete silence, as the echo chamber of privileged and powerful men with little personal interest in those they so enjoy theorising about - remains immutable.</div>
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Talk to us. Listen to us. It's a year now since I made the decision to stop justifying myself to anyone in the name of egalitarianism and feminism, so if that's what you want, look elsewhere. But don't attempt to portray a political movement as irredeemably blinkered to suit your own ends, then act surprised when people aren't happy.</div>
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<a href="http://jennybaker.org.uk/2014/08/27/not-about-numbers/">Equality is not always about numbers</a> - Jenny Baker</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-38563309369667794992014-07-24T23:18:00.001+01:002014-07-24T23:18:23.205+01:00#FaithFeminisms - Where we've come from vs where we must go<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Reading so many stories of women coming to find their feminism alongside, or as part of, their faith this week made me realise the details of how it happened for me had become slightly hazy. I've told people the tale so often now: I went to university as a lifelong Anglican who'd never been taught a single thing about gender and religion, but also as one who had also started identifying as evangelical. In the following years, I slowly began to learn that some people didn't believe women could be church leaders, and that they also believed in rigid gender roles. I struggled to feel as if I fit in at church, feeling as if people wanted to cram my personality into a box marked 'Biblical femininity' and do away with all the bits that made me who I was. I'd started to pick up the messages from leafing through books and from coming across blogs aimed at Christian women. Even though I'd grown up far removed from the US evangelical culture of the time, it was starting to affect my life. When I got engaged, more than one person told my husband-to-be that they didn't think I was right for him and advised him to reconsider. I was the young woman who was Too Much, with the wrong sort of upbringing and the wrong sort of ambitions.</span>
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What I'd forgotten over the years is how much this hurt. These days I tend to consider myself quite privileged to have come to faith and grown up outside the sort of Christian culture that has caused so much pain to so many. Looking back at my Livejournal (yes, my Livejournal) from the time it's filled with accounts of news stories I found that worried me intensely: The Silver Ring Thing trying to raise its profile in the UK; people I knew starting to talk approvingly about Mark Driscoll; conservative blogs on 'Biblical womanhood' that named as 'selfish', among other things, working outside the home, eating disorders, and 'giving in to PMT'. I worried about what would be expected of me as a married woman, and I didn't know what to do. I knew something wasn't right, but I worried that the problem was me. In 2007 I was writing about asking God to show me where the problem lay. Was I displeasing Him? Was I, as ever, Not Good Enough?</div>
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Enter my discovery of egalitarianism, and I know many of you know where that led me. Reading back into my story today has reminded me not to forget the place I came from. Yesterday, I told someone how strongly I feel that as a community of women, as Christians and feminists we must tell our stories, but also move past the incessant going over of those 'moment of realisation' posts, the posts about how yes, indeed, faith and feminism are compatible. They give us warm fuzzy feelings but do they move us forwards? I remember today the women who will be reading through the #FaithFeminisms posts this week with a growing sense of excitement and a sense of sisterhood, the feeling that they're not alone and the problem isn't theirs to 'get over'. I was there once, and then everything changed.</div>
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For the rest of us though, when we've been here a while we can be tempted to get tired of it all. At a time when discussions about the feminist movement often seem to be centred on its 'toxic nature', an incessant cycle of call-outs, fall-outs, and the drawing of lines in the sand, it's easy to hold up our hands and step back. Are these our people after all? Aren't they, well, a bit angry? But if we disengage and seek solace in the safety of our own privileges, of evangelical subculture and its respectability, I don't believe we'll be the women we're called to be. It's easy to take the 'I'm all right' route, stay content in our progressive crowd and forget about all those for whom things are very much <i>not all right</i>. Even as more progressive voices make themselves heard, there's still an emphasis on watching our tone, being careful not to be 'divisive' and being careful not to upset conservatives or men. Often, it seems as if the message is: <i>you'll never win them over unless you play it safe and play nice and make sure that men get to take centre stage too. </i></div>
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I believe what we're called to do instead is bring the very best aspects of our faith to the feminist table. Foster understanding, demonstrate love, and stand against injustice. Demonstrate true sisterhood. Don't be tempted by performative social justice activism that prioritises call-outs, ideological purity, and ejecting people from the fold over recognising people's humanity and discussing problematic behaviour in a productive way. We feel saddened by the performative gatekeeping of Christianity, with its 'farewells' and smackdowns. Let our feminism not fall prey to the same problems. This week I've seen people better known by the mainstream movement and from outside the movement altogether exclaim how open and welcoming they've found #FaithFeminisms. I've always found this to be the case and I hope they're values we hold on to.</div>
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I've met some of the very best people I know thanks to being a young woman with an internet connection and a lot of thoughts and feelings about faith and feminism. At the beginning, it seemed that patriarchal Christianity had the monopoly on the popular books and the websites I was seeing and the messages I was getting. Today, women I am proud to call my friends have published books on egalitarianism and feminism. I've been involved in networks of women working together and supporting each other as we navigate what it means to practice faith and feminism. I'm a founder member of one of them. I'm involved in a group that's trying to get another one off the ground. Once we felt silenced, now there is a definite voice that has the power to speak to the church and to the secular feminist movement. And we can build on this by coming alongside each other and doing what, as Christians, we're supposed to work at doing best: creating real and productive community - those that support, those that organise, those that lead - no longer voices in the wilderness but a movement for change.</div>
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This post is part of <a href="http://www.faithfeminisms.com/">#FaithFeminisms</a> week. Do read the amazing posts that have been written by other women.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-38932580621668240052014-06-03T22:21:00.000+01:002014-06-04T14:43:37.423+01:00Kirstie Allsopp, classism, and a distinct lack of choice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was obvious what was going to happen yesterday when the media started putting its own spin on Kirstie Allsopp's comments made in <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/10868367/Kirstie-Allsopp-I-dont-want-the-next-generation-of-women-to-suffer-the-same-heartache.html">an interview</a> with Bryony Gordon for the <i>Telegraph</i>, coming up with headlines such as "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/02/kirstie-allsop-young-women-ditch-university-baby-by-27">K</a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/02/kirstie-allsop-young-women-ditch-university-baby-by-27">irstie Allsopp tells young women: ditch university and have a baby at 27</a>". As everyone who bothered to read the original article knows, that's not the extent of what she said - but why let that get in the way of calling her stupid, accusing her of wanting to take women back to the 1950s, and telling her where to stick her overprivileged expectations about home ownership and marriage?</div>
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According to the law of how women talk about lifestyle choices and how it's played out in the media, Allsopp has, of course, been positioned as some sort of spokesperson for womankind, judging everyone who doesn't want to live their life the way she thinks they should. And in their reactions to her comments, many of those who don't agree with her have fallen into the trap that's so obviously laid for us all, every single time some vaguely high-profile woman has something to say about women's lives. Yesterday's 'debate' became a defence of education and careers (and why not? No-one's going to deny that they're important things to defend), against the spectre of smug, twee, wealthy motherhood and financial dependency on men.</div>
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No-one likes to feel patronised, especially by someone they perceive to be out of touch with what most women think and want. I don't think it's correct to say that women are unaware of fertility issues, or that they are never talked about. There's enough discussion of it about for us to know roughly at what point conceiving a child does begin to become much more of a struggle - if, indeed, we were all that fertile to begin with. But the fact is, even as most women know what they'd do about becoming a mother, in an ideal world, and even as they laugh at scaremongering headlines about 'career women leaving it too late', the years pass by quickly - years of trying to find a suitable partner, trying to save money, trying to get a job, or a better job, or a job you actually like.</div>
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What Allsopp did touch on - which I believe is important here - is the pressure on <i>middle-class women</i> to have the various aspects of their lives sorted out and adhering to an ideal before children get factored in. The degree, the wedding, the 'life experiences', the career, the foot on the property ladder. It was noticeable yesterday just how many people I witnessed saying "But NO-ONE can afford to buy a house/have a baby in their 20s!" And it's certainly true that for many people, saving up for a house deposit is a terrifying thought. Wondering how to pay the bills while on maternity leave or afford to pay childcare is a terrifying thought. But it's also true that many, many people become parents in their 20s (and earlier). Many, many people who aren't privileged and whose parents haven't bought them a flat somehow manage to become parents and just get on with it. Yesterday's 'debate' had a particularly narrowly-focused and classist side to it - one that needs to look beyond non-debates over the 'right time' to have children or go to university or get married and question instead the way UK society places expectation on women about the 'right' way to live their lives in a country that makes it so difficult for them to do so, sneering at both those who choose not to go along with it and those who are happy about having achieved it.</div>
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Let's leave aside, for a moment, the fact that becoming a mother at a young age so often gets you labelled as a 'scrounger', a 'waste of potential', or a statistic for the right to sneer at, and the fact that being a relatively young middle-class stay at home mother gets you labelled as 'smug' and 'irritating', and being a childfree woman in your 30s gets you labelled as 'sad' or 'selfish' - because these things are important, but they're not the most difficult things.</div>
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Not when a particular 'route' of university followed by the career ladder followed by 'settling down' when you're financially secure and have 'really lived your life' is the 'desired' one. Not when the cost of attending university has skyrocketed and the housing market in London and the south-east is ridiculous and there's so much competition for jobs that people despair of ever getting the job they want or feeling financially secure at all. Not when maternity discrimination is rife, maternity leave difficult to imagine for those in difficult financial circumstances, and childcare here is the second most expensive in Europe. Not when the burden of care and everything child-related is still seen as a woman's domain. Not when the voices of women who have had children at a young age, and working class women who have never had the luxury of expecting to get all their ducks in a row before making big decisions about their lives go unheard, as feminists who are quick to sneer at the idea of having children in their 20s without thinking how that looks to their sisters who already have children and are doing just fine. For all the cries of "Shut up Kirstie, can't you see it's all about choice?!" it's evident that most of the time, it's really, emphatically, <i>not</i>.</div>
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Yesterday wasn't the first time in the last couple of years that I've been reminded of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/03/iceland-best-country-women-feminist?CMP=twt_gu">this piece on women in Iceland</a> that appeared in the <i>Guardian</i> in 2011. I remember being struck at the time by the idea that being a young mum at university could be seen as totally normal, rather than a 'challenge' or something worthy of a newspaper feature as it might be in the UK. Writes Kira Cochrane:</div>
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"Parents here talk strongly of community support, of collective care for children, and there is no sense that motherhood precludes work or study, which effectively changes the whole structure of women's lives."</div>
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One woman, who we're told had her first child at the age of 19, is quoted saying: "You are not forced to organise your life in the 'college-work-maybe children later' way". Another woman explains how couples in Iceland don't tend to think of parenthood in 'How many children can we afford?' terms. And with full-time childcare, at the time of publication, costing single mothers £70 and couples £118 a month (as opposed to an average cost of more than £700 a month for full-time working couples in the UK - much higher in London), you can see why. Feminists do enough shouting about the perceived egalitarian joys of Scandinavia and I'm aware that no country is perfect. The fact remains that women in the UK find themselves supposedly liberated yet also restricted by what we've constructed as the 'right' way to do things, the 'right' way to live the capitalist dream and the 'right' way to experience life. For many, it's a bind and an enormous source of anxiety. For many more, it's unattainable and unrealistic, and by doing things their way they end up being derided and devalued by Kirstie Allsopp's cheerleaders and detractors alike.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-65330128636936157072014-05-22T14:21:00.002+01:002014-05-22T14:21:57.044+01:00Rereading the second wave - Susan Brownmiller<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>“I can attest that in New York City during the late sixties and early
seventies, nothing was more exciting, or more intellectually
stimulating, than to sit in a room with a bunch of women who were
working to uncover their collective truths.”</i></div>
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My contribution to the <i>New Statesman</i>'s series on rereading second wave feminism in the light of the so-called 'fourth wave' was published last week. It's now a couple of months since I read Susan Brownmiller's <i>In Our Time </i>- her memoir of the women's liberation movement, spanning the late 1960s to the middle of the 1980s - and felt that it has much to offer today's activists on the subject of conflict and infighting - particularly those who have, in the last couple of years, felt alienated from the movement and 'put off' by the very fact that feminists don't seem to agree on a lot of things and spend a fair amount of time getting angry about it. </div>
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The number of pieces written and time spent talking about 'call-out culture', 'toxic feminism', or whatever we're currently calling 'feminists publicly disagreeing about stuff' means that it can become the sole focus for many people. It's sometimes cited as the main problem with today's feminist movement, a 21st century phenomenon. But while the internet has added a new dimension to activist infighting, <i>In Our Time</i> reminds us that the struggles - who has power, who should speak for the movement, what it means when women achieve a public profile and platform, and which issues should be our main focus - have existed for decades, and that our aim should be to work through them rather than letting them define us, becoming the obstacle that cannot be overcome and the sticking point that stops women participating. <i>In Our Time</i> is a fantastic memoir of the achievements of the second wave of feminism and the way its activists brought issues into the public consciousness for the very first time. Times may have changed, but there is much to inspire us and much we can learn from.</div>
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<i>"Brownmiller came to see these disagreements and denouncements as par for
the course in the women’s movement. “You have to believe that the Sturm
und Drang are worth it,” she writes - and it seems she did, very much
so, until the last gasps of the second wave in the 1980s. Weakened by
the ‘pornography wars’, the decade’s family values-obsessed mentality
and economic necessity of getting a job and ‘settling down’, with the
women’s bookshops, the feminist press and utopian dreams in decline, the
movement’s militancy petered out. In Our Time’s challenge for
feminists today is to encourage us to keep the balance – effecting
change despite robust disagreement. The aim of feminism should not be
the creation of a synthetic sisterhood focused on little more than
affirmation and making women feel good about every choice they make.
Neither should it be the constant assumption of bad faith on the part of
women who are still learning, doing the best they can, and sometimes
getting it wrong – the idea that trashing other women is progress."</i></div>
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<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2014/05/hannah-mudge-susan-brownmiller-backlash-against-second-wave">Read the full essay</a></div>
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<i>Image: John Olson, from <a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/f6b21ef5a2dee34c.html">here</a></i></div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-87844133730222080252014-03-13T22:41:00.000+00:002014-03-13T22:42:47.984+00:00Book review - Women in Waiting: prejudice at the heart of the church<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Those of you following the progress of legislation concerning women bishops will know that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26131444">these are exciting times</a>. After a disappointing vote in 2012, many are feeling more optimistic about the situation - and there have been many opportunities to speak about hopes for the future this week as the church has celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first women priests being ordained.</div>
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Having finished Julia Ogilvy's <i>Women in Waiting: Prejudice at the heart of the church</i> last week, I'd set this evening aside to write my review. After reading the Tuesday's coverage of the 20th anniversary of women's ordination, and even having a bit of a moist-eyed moment at my desk after seeing <a href="https://twitter.com/revkatebottley/status/443698185052360704">Kate Bottley's tweet</a> marking the day, I was made aware, over breakfast today, of <a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2006/10/Women-Pastors-Not-The-Path-To-Blessing.aspx?p=1">an old interview with Wayne Grudem</a> that people were once again talking about.</div>
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I'd never read the full interview before, although I've seen some of its content reproduced to illustrate Grudem's position on women teaching and writing books that interpret scripture (a man doing so is 'teaching with authority', a woman doing the same is 'giving her viewpoint'). What I hadn't previously been aware of was his intriguing explanation of the problems that arise in churches and denominations where women are ordained:</div>
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<i>"... anyone who lives in a pattern of constant disobedience to the word of God--if a woman does this, she is opening herself up to the danger of the withdrawal of God’s hand of protection and blessing on her life."</i></div>
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He continues:</div>
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<i>"Judy Brown is one example that I mention. [She] contributed a chapter to [the book] Discovering Biblical Equality. She was an Assemblies of God pastor or maybe Foursquare, I’m not sure. And she actually, sadly, is in prison in Virginia for attempted murder. It’s tragic."</i></div>
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The problem with Judy Brown, claims Grudem, was her commitment to promoting women's ordination. As a result of her departure from faithfulness to God, she's now in prison. I've never been keen on giving airtime to Grudem on gender, but on reading the interview with him I was struck by the contrast to the stories of the twelve women contained within <i>Women in Waiting</i>. Twelve women, all of them in favour of women's ordination, many of them ordained themselves and holding positions of varying seniority in the church. Theologians, writers, and advocates for women. Twelve women who felt called to vocations where they knew they would face opposition, who have seen enormous changes in attitudes since they started their careers and who know there is still much to be done.</div>
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This is not a challenging book; if you're looking for a hashing-out of the arguments for and against women in church leadership, you'll need to look elsewhere - but this is no bad thing. The book's purpose is to tell the stories of just some of the women who have helped pave the way for a greater acceptance of women in ministry and a greater awareness of the damage done by patriarchy. Almost all of them spoke to the author about hostile attitudes from colleagues, but <i>Women in Waiting</i> is by no means a book full of stories about feeling hard done by and miserable. It's actually an inspiring reminder - full of wisdom - of what God can do through those who are willing to serve Him. The women interviewed have worked incredibly hard, knowing that they are fulfilling their calling, and were full of positivity about their achievements and the church, despite some of the painful, lonely and frustrating situations they had been through. It was also encouraging to read, in the case of those who are married, how supportive and affirming their husbands have been.</div>
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I wasn't familiar with all of the women profiled in the book and so it was wonderful to learn more about them. I was particularly moved by the interview with Lucy Winkett because it left me with such a strong sense of her wisdom and love for the church and its people. I was reminded, as I read Elaine Storkey's chapter, why I was so inspired by her the first time I saw her speak and why she continues to be ones of my heroes. I was very interested to read the differing perspectives of Katharine Jefferts Schori and Chilton Knudsen from the USA, and found myself nodding my head righteously as I read Helena Kennedy on the cases of abused women that she's been involved in.</div>
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Ever since I started attending events where the place of women in the church has been discussed, I've been struck by overheard snatches of conversation, but the confessions of young women getting up in front of a group and saying:</div>
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'I feel called but I need to know that it's what God wants for me as a woman. Am I allowed? Is it what scripture says?'</div>
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<i>Women in Waiting</i> would be an ideal read for any women mulling over this question, not because it will provide all the answers, but because I think it clearly shows that being a pioneer in the church is what God wants for many women, and that they've been gifted accordingly.</div>
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Further reading:</div>
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<a href="http://www.feministtimes.com/20-years-women-priests-no-women-bishops/">20 years of women priests, but still no women bishops</a> - Feminist Times</div>
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<a href="http://womenandthechurch.org/news/celebrating-20-years-of-womens-ordination/">Celebrating 20 years of women's ordination</a> - Women and the Church</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-67097202932710576282014-02-20T08:59:00.001+00:002014-02-20T09:26:47.596+00:00The problem with ideological purity<div style="text-align: justify;">
If you've ever been part of one of those conversations where someone's having a bit of a moan about their church, you know you can always count on someone to chime in saying "There's no such thing as the perfect church!". Clichéd as that phrase has become, it's true, and it's a constant reminder that when we go looking for perfection in this life, we're not going to find it. There's no such thing as the perfect church, the perfect marriage, the perfect job. And there's certainly no such thing as the perfect person. Most people know this, and recently it's become a bit of a "thing" to be open about all our flaws, admitting to our brokenness and just how "messed up" we are as a way of showing vulnerability and assuring others that no-one ever has it all figured out (so much so, in fact, that it's already been identified as a <i>problematic Christian trend</i> by people with too much time on their hands).</div>
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You know how it goes. "Hi, I'm Hannah, a sinner like everyone else. I'm a champion procrastinator. I struggle with depression. When I'm tired I crave junk food. My relationship with church is none too good at the moment. I didn't start blogging to glorify God; I did it because I knew it could help get me a more interesting job. Sometimes when my toddler is being a pain in the backside I get angry with him. My 'lightbulb moment', when I realised I was a feminist (aged 19), didn't involve any intersectional analysis. None at all! But every day I'm learning; as time goes by I'm evolving as a person. SEE - I'M JUST LIKE YOU."</div>
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It seems, however, that it's pretty hard to be vulnerable and admit mistakes when it comes to activism. It's another progressive cliché, the idea that you 'just need to be constantly learning and growing and ready to admit you messed up', an idea that's become more about performance of learning and a pretence of listening when it often seems like not very much of either ever really happens. You can be vulnerable and imperfect - as long as you stress just how much it's shown you the error of your ways. For many in the social justice world, what's prized more than anything is ideological purity - described by some as '<a href="http://mattbruenig.com/2012/05/10/purity-leftism/">purity leftism</a>'. A so-called commitment to 'learning and growing' that actually struggles to deal with differences of opinion from within the same activist sphere, that struggles to support any cause or campaign because it will never be perfect and supported only by those who display completely "correct" ways of thinking and being. It's 'me, me, me' activism.</div>
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This obsession with ideological purity leads to two things. Firstly, there's silencing - a fear of being denounced, leading to people shutting up, stepping back, and quietly going about their business so as not to be noticed or accused of wrongdoing when they're just trying to muddle along and make a difference in the world. Secondly, it stops activism from involving any action whatsoever. Why run or join a campaign when people who don't see eye to eye with you on everything might get involved? Why go to an event if one of the speakers once tweeted something you didn't like? Why express support for someone who's going through a bad time when 20 years ago, they wrote something that you don't agree with (learning and growing, apparently, is only for the chosen few)? Why do anything except sneer at those in public office and mainstream media and positions of authority who are to all intents and purposes <i>on your side</i> because they're all 'part of the system'? Principles about things become more important than actually doing them.</div>
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When I think about the feminist and egalitarian women that I admire the most, some of whom I'm friends with, some of whom I've never met and probably never will, they have one thing in common. They know that attempting total ideological purity is ridiculous, and that waiting around for perfect situations is pointless. They know that what works is women living as best they can in this world, being the change they want to see and getting their hands dirty in the process, messing up and having to apologise, having uncomfortable realisations and having to love all and serve all as they do so. </div>
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They're in the media and in politics and the church, working tirelessly to mentor younger women and get more women a space on the platform and a seat at the table, even when the table isn't perfect, because they believe in effecting change from within. They're from different backgrounds with varying amounts of privilege. They're helping survivors, fighting injustice, writing, calling meetings and putting their heads above parapets, all the time using words of encouragement and building up and celebrating success - and doing what they have to do to provide for themselves and their families. They'll offer critique when it's constructive and point out the problematic when they've got a solution. And they know that vulnerability, honesty, and love will always achieve more than attempting ideological purity at the expense of anything resembling real change.</div>
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If we want to 'be' any sort of change, we need to be willing to get stuck in - whatever that means for us personally. Creating change is hard, and I'm thankful for everyone who gives so much of themselves to make it happen. We need to be willing to do more than criticise and snipe from on high, congratulating ourselves for not doing anything because that would mean compromising impossibly high standards and associating with people who don't share all of our opinions. If we don't, we risk becoming like religious fundamentalists - concerned only with our self-righteousness and superiority compared to others who are part of the very same belief system, our brothers and sisters.</div>
<br />Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-74104551928041966912014-02-05T13:19:00.002+00:002014-02-05T13:19:37.323+00:00What you should have read recently<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/ann-lovett-silence-that-will-never-be-broken-257153.html#.Uuuyb3gYgt4.twitter">Ann Lovett: Silence that will never be broken</a> - <span class="name">Caroline O’Doherty </span></div>
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<span class="name">"Everyone wanted to know how a girl from a family of nine siblings in a
town of barely a 1,000 people could have carried a baby to term without
anyone finding out, if indeed her pregnancy was the secret the
community claimed it to be. <br />
<br />
Questions were asked about what kind of society made a bright girl feel
unable to ask for help or undeserving of support at what must have been
the most frightening time of her life."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="name"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="name"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="name"><br /><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2014/01/politics-black-hair">The politics of black hair</a> - Emma Dabiri </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="name"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"It can feel pretty frustrating that white supremacy
has bequeathed a legacy in which, for many black women, simply wearing
our hair in its own natural state can become a complex and politicised
act. At the same time - despite the connection between said supremacy
and the relationship that many black women have to our hair - most white
people demonstrate absolutely no idea about the everyday maintenance of
Afro hair, let alone its politics."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://feministcurrent.com/8540/woman-hating-by-any-other-name/">Woman-hating by any other name</a> - Meghan Murphy</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"There’s an air of superiority from those who busily seek to ruin and silence other feminists: “We’re doing it right; <em>she’s</em>
doing it wrong.” By pointing our fingers elsewhere we keep ourselves
safe from attack. It seems pretty clear, though, which white feminists
are using valuable ideas like intersectionality to advance their own
careers and gain popularity, without an ounce of interest in movements
towards ending oppression and with little understanding of structural
inequality."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://juniaproject.com/5-black-women-every-egalitarian-know/">5 black women in history every egalitarian should know </a>- Gail Wallace</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"In a recent study of Black women’s leadership Ngunjiri, Gramby-Sobukwe,
and Williams-Gegner note that “early preaching Black women were radical
in their commitment to consistent egalitarianism and social justice
within the Black church and community as well as society at large” and refer to them as “tempered radicals”... "</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://juliaserano.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/what-is-subversivism.html">What is subversivism? </a>- Julia Serano </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Subversivism is the
practice of extolling certain gender and sexual expressions and identities
simply because they are unconventional or nonconforming. In the parlance of
subversivism, these atypical genders and sexualities are “good” because they
“transgress” or “subvert” oppressive binary gender norms. The justification for
the practice of subversivism has evolved out of a particular reading (although
some would call it a misreading) of the work of various influential queer
theorists over the last decade and a half."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://inamirrordimly.com/2014/02/03/no-one-leaves-or-stays-in-church-for-the-perfect-reasons/">No-one leaves or stays in church for the perfect reasons </a>- Ed Cyzewski </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"I also needed to read <em>Introverts in the Church</em> and <em>Quiet </em>as
a way of explaining my discomfort in church. So much of my church
experience had been shaped by the expectations and standards set by
extroverts. We were always doing more stuff, meeting more people,
attending more events, speaking in front of more people. The introvert
in me just couldn’t keep up. Church felt like hard work, sucking the
life out of me rather than renewing, strengthening, and, the favorite
word of extrovert church leaders, “equipping” me."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://beyoungandshutup.com/2014/01/16/are-you-being-too-sex-positive/">Are you being TOO sex-positive?</a> - Be Young & Shut Up</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Sex positivity is well-meaning, and a lot of its practices have helped
to make people more comfortable with their sexuality. But its execution
is flawed. Many are excluded or harmed by the community’s practices of
the philosophy, and even the pure philosophy itself. Its monolithic
identity means that if you take issue with sex positivity, you’re the
stuffy patriarch enemy. The problems are such that <a href="http://friendlyangryfeminist.tumblr.com/tagged/sex-negative">sex-<em>negative</em> feminism</a>
has become a legitimate movement that, while it has its own serious
problems, is just about as respectful of people’s sexual choices as sex
positivity is."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://littleeandbean.com/family/the-incoherent-ramblings-of-a-guilty-mum/">The (possibly incoherent) ramblings of a guilty mum</a> - Littlee & Bean</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Since going back to work I’ve learnt that sometimes I have to let go.
I’ve learnt that sometimes it’s enough just to do my best. I’ve learnt
that tending to <em>my</em> happiness and sanity is important. And I’ve
learnt that immersing myself in the world that exists beyond the
periphery of my motherhood experience, is key to my family’s happiness.
I’m grateful that most of the time work keeps me sane."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://forbookssake.net/2014/01/29/quick-dirty-intro-black-british-feminism/">A quick and dirty intro to black British feminism</a> - <span class="authorname">Vimbai Dzimwasha</span>
</div>
<div class="topauthorpic">
<br /></div>
<div class="topauthorpic">
"However, after watching that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OmgqXao1ng" target="_blank" title="bell hooks and Melissa Harris Perry">amazing conversation</a> between <a href="http://forbookssake.net/2012/09/25/bookish-birthday-bell-hooks/" target="_blank" title="Bookish Birthday: bell hooks">bell hooks</a> and Melissa Harris Perry,
I realised I desperately needed to find a feminism that reflected my
specific experiences of being a black woman in Britain and navigating
through issues of ‘black identity’, ‘black womanhood’, dual cultural
identity among other issues. Black British Feminism."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-24712805660635897932014-01-24T13:59:00.000+00:002014-01-24T13:59:01.564+00:00What you should have read this week<div style="text-align: justify;">
I'm reviving my weekly-ish round-up of things worth reading!</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.gradientlair.com/post/74243812084/black-women-pro-choice-roe-v-wade">Black Women and The 41st Anniversary of Roe v. Wade: Thoughts About Reproductive Justice</a> - Gradient Lair</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"While some women are fighting not to conceive children—which
matters—others are fighting to able to, to not be sterilized, to not be
shamed and abused during pregnancy, to not live in poverty with that
child and to not worry about State interference and oppression no matter
what the choice may be. Whether Black women need abortion or need
support for entering motherhood, both choices are valid and both need
deliverance from the impact of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy
on Black womanhood and Black motherhood."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/01/i-didnt-fully-understand-what-it-means-be-pro-choice-until-i-decided-not-have-abor">I didn't fully understand what it means to be pro-choice ... until I decided not to have an abortion</a> - Sarah Ditum</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"I thought about the decision that was mine to make. And surprisingly,
solidly, I realised what I would do: I would have this baby. At the
time, I didn't know that there is a critical difference between
unplanned and unwanted. At the time, I would barely have described
myself as “wanting” children. I had never felt that cooing hunger which
teenage girls called "broodiness", the longing to put their arms around a
baby – even when small, I preferred reading to playing with dolls. And I
will never feel the ravenous grief that older women call broodiness,
either, the anguish of love with no object. But I did want a child, and
specifically I wanted a child with the man I was with. It was ten years
premature, but this was that child."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://glosswatch.com/2014/01/21/not-caring-isnt-caring-more-lord-rennard-michael-white-and-feminist-priorities/">Not caring isn’t caring more: Lord Rennard, Michael White and feminist priorities</a> - Glosswatch</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"In the meantime, though, we feminists are stuck with this endless list
of reminders from those far cleverer than us. Just in case you’ve
forgotten, you shouldn’t worry about banknotes because you should be
worrying about Page Three. You shouldn’t worry about Page Three because
you should be worrying about every other page of the Sun. You shouldn’t
be worrying about the Sun because you should be worrying about the
representation of women across the whole of the media. You shouldn’t be
worrying about women in the media because you should be worrying about
violence against women. You shouldn’t be worrying about violence against
women because you should be worrying about FGM."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://nishweiseth.com/blog/2014/1/the-glitter-gloss-of-the-faith-of-my-youth">The glitter and gloss of the faith of my youth</a> - Nish Weiseth<i> </i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i>
"After I got married
and we left Boulder, a deep-seeded cynicism set in, and every little
thing about that former church were all things I despised about
Christianity. I mean, really, WHO NEEDS A FOG MACHINE AND LASER LIGHTS?
But now, working through that cynicism and suspicion, I've come to have a
tender place for churches like that. The glossy evangelical megachurch
is a part of my story, just as much as the more gritty, hipster, urban
church we're in now.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But, more than missing the worship service
and the big-church feel, I miss having an answer for everything and
having a checklist to live by. I miss the Christianity of my younger
years. I miss that chapter of my story, and in some ways, I truly long
for it. Being naive was so much easier."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.yorubagirldancing.com/2014/01/20/shes-all-that-15-years-and-5000-words/">She's All That : 15 years and 5,000 words</a> - Bim Adewunmi <i></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"I first watched <em>She’s All That</em> back in 1999, at the Stratford
Picturehouse some weekend after school. I remember loving it, because it
hit all the spots it was supposed to: boy and girl got to have each
other at the end, and bad guy kind of got his comeuppance, which is as
it should be in real life. The 90s – especially in the mid-to-late
period – was a significant time for teen movies. It was a golden period,
during which the industry enjoyed a purple patch starting around 1995
with <em>Clueless</em>, continuing into 1996 with <em>The Craft</em>, and exploding in a high point of acne, prom and hormone-fug in 1999, which saw the release of <em>10 Things I Hate About You</em>, <em>Cruel Intentions</em>, <em>Never Been Kissed</em>, <em>Election</em>, <em>American Pie</em> and of course, <em>She’s All That</em>."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://premiumtimesng.com/app/humantrafficking/">Inside Nigeria's ruthless human trafficking mafia</a> - Tobore Ovuorie<i> </i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"It is on the windy Sunday evening of October 6 that I make my
first contact with the outer ring of this mafia. A big party with VIPs
is on the cards; the kind of party an ordinary girl, or rather
‘product’, as we are called by traffickers, is not usually invited to.
But I am currently on a fortune ride: Oghogho’s favourite. Additionally,
I have been classified as ‘Special Forces’, or ‘Forza Speciale’ as my
new contacts say, borrowing the Italian term. It’s a rule
of thumb, I understand, that a syndicate subjects girls to
classification through a check on their nude bodies and I, too – in the
company of some male and female judges, headed by a trafficker called
Auntie Precious – had been checked. I had received the highest
classification. “This means that you don’t have to walk the streets. You
can be an escort for important clients,” Auntie Precious had told me in
a soft, congratulatory tone. The ones of ‘lesser’ classification were
referred to as Forza Strada, the Road Force."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And finally...</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- This week I finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's <a href="http://chimamanda.com/books/americanah/">Americanah</a>. Get on it, if you haven't already.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- C. Jane Kendrick is <a href="http://www.cjanekendrick.com/">back on the blogging wagon</a>. Hurrah!</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- Sunday 26 January is World Leprosy Day (work-related plug alert). If you don't know much about leprosy now's your chance to find out how it's very much a 21st century disease. <a href="http://www.leprosymission.org.uk/join-with-us/world-leprosy-day-2014/every-two-minutes.aspx">Watch the video</a>!</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- At the Christian Feminist Network we're organising a day conference that's being held on Saturday 1 March in Manchester. The conference will include presentations, workshops and discussion as well as the chance to network with other Christian feminists. <a href="http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reclaiming-the-f-word-tickets-9876254142">Find out more and sign up</a>.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-327544553976967122.post-82871385729524959522014-01-17T16:29:00.003+00:002014-01-17T18:02:07.212+00:00"Put away the shopping cart and pick up a shovel" - who takes responsibility for our issues with church?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7NKXssgxuKCOAIMU-zlRoEbsJU57Ag9olevpE-1pXonJLKsfJbm9ZcTRyHQaiPaqqmo4GHOcpOplWU0Re8VdGKLjAIxr_hP0NlWHXrCVg5lhlBOYZbfgbc2-AwjzCgdufMej7oZR9AAhR/s1600/1280px-SSF_BART_hanging_exit_sign.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7NKXssgxuKCOAIMU-zlRoEbsJU57Ag9olevpE-1pXonJLKsfJbm9ZcTRyHQaiPaqqmo4GHOcpOplWU0Re8VdGKLjAIxr_hP0NlWHXrCVg5lhlBOYZbfgbc2-AwjzCgdufMej7oZR9AAhR/s1600/1280px-SSF_BART_hanging_exit_sign.JPG" height="380" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
What would you say would be a really good reason for leaving a church? Pastor and blogger Aaron Loy* has <a href="http://aarongloy.com/2014/01/16/5-really-bad-reasons-for-leaving-your-church/">five reasons he thinks are <b>really bad</b></a>, but I don't think I agree with him.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
No doubt, as a pastor and church planter Aaron Loy has heard the concerns and complaints of many members of his congregation. And this post must have been borne out of a certain amount of frustration at concerns and complaints that he can't fully address or resolve, because some of that responsibility lies with someone else, even the complainant themselves. But my own concern is that just as we can be pretty one-sided in the way we look at issues in our church life, his response to this was just as one-sided and actually comes across as dismissive and patronising, hurtful to those dealing with the issues he lists, and even going as far as to remove responsibility and accountability from leaders.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Discussing the post on Twitter, someone I know commented that it read "too much like cajoling someone to stay in an abusive relationship". </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As I read through Loy's five "really bad reasons", my first reaction was to become steadily more irritated. <b>Not</b> because I think we need to move churches at the slightest hint of conflict or dissatisfaction, but because of how I'd feel if I received these answers in response to raising a concern. Under "I'm not being fed", he writes:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i>
<i>"Do pastors have a responsibility to steward the scriptures and care for their church spiritually? You bet they do."</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This, however, doesn't stop him believing that the access to "substance" we have through books and the internet makes it a "cop-out" to expect to get what we want or feel we need, teaching-wise, on a Sunday morning. I'd say it's just as much of a cop-out to respond to people concerned about the quality or depth of teaching by telling them to go and get it elsewhere when they might not have the first clue where to start. I believe that a church with the resources to do so has a responsibility to serve its congregation, teaching-wise, at different stages of their faith life. Not by offering these opportunities only to those who are being mentored and trained on some sort of leadership track, but with teaching days, evenings, weekends, papers. There is a difference between spoon-feeding the selfish and ignoring valid concerns about teaching.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Many people spend many years of their lives serving the church and "contributing" to their community, but I also believe there are times when this is not possible, and a bit of consumption of something, anything, is exactly what's needed. That could be down to illness, work pressures, or parenting pressures. From personal experience, I know that when you're going through a stage like that and feel that "contributing" is a struggle, and people to give you the impression that you must give more, do more, expend more of yourself, it can make you feel resentful and cynical.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Not everyone feels comfortable in the same sort of church set-up, and it's here that I worry about Loy's response to his second point - "It's getting too big". </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>"If you have a problem with big churches, you really wouldn’t have liked the first church and you definitely won’t like heaven. To
be frank, if you have a problem with the inevitable growth that happens
when lives are changed by the gospel, you have some serious repenting
to do</i>."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Feeling comfortable in a smaller group of people, in a quieter and more intimate church service or community has got nothing to do with having a problem with people's lives being changed by the gospel, and I think that's actually quite a nasty way of framing it. On one hand I can see his point about people being dissatisfied when 'things aren't how they used to be' because they are resistant to any sort of change. But small churches and the people who prefer to worship in them, are not 'wrong'. This point also seemed to highlight the oft-discussed divide between extroverted and introverted churchgoers, and the way that extrovert characteristics are often prized by Christian culture. For some people, large groups, noise and crowds are emotionally draining and a huge source of anxiety. Do they need to be ordered to 'repent' as well?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I'm not going to argue with Loy's point on "I don't agree with everything that's being preached"; that's fair enough. But his fourth "really bad reason", "My needs aren't being met", needs some looking at. Again it's important to note there are two sides to every story. No-one can totally have their needs met by a church. But when someone speaks to a church leader about a concern they have, it should not be dismissed as a question of needing to "put away the shopping cart and pick up a shovel". What is the need and why isn't it being met? Can the church help? Is it a petty request or gripe, or an issue where someone needs pastoral support? Is it an issue that has been raised numerous times by numerous different people? If so, it might be time to consider change.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I know that the issues Loy has identified must be a source of frustration for countless church leaders who are working hard and doing their best and trying to accommodate people, but it goes both ways. After reading his post, I felt his overriding message was "Don't try to implicate the church, its leaders, or the way it has dealt with issues - the problem is YOU. If you were less selfish, less needy, and more willing to suck it up and give more rather than expect something in return, you wouldn;'t be in this mess." </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We all have issues with the church. Sometimes these issues can and should be addressed. Sometimes, we need to talk them through and understand that we have to take some responsibility for solving these issues (sometimes we truly are the victims of something terrible, other times, we're not and need to keep things in perspective), or that we need to look at them from a different angle and see the nuance.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Aaron Loy's "really bad reasons" might not be the greatest of reasons for leaving a church. But his responses to them are exactly the reasons I have often been fearful of raising church-related issues with people: that in doing so, I would be dismissed and given the impression that the problem lies only with me and my selfishness. People I know have experienced it too, in conversations with church leaders and even in response to blog posts. It is perhaps one of the most common sights below the line in some corners of the Christian blogosphere - someone writes about a negative experience with church; someone else rushes to tell them that they're actually the one at fault. When we address the issues that arise on our journeys of faith, the reaction of the church should not be to absolve itself of any responsibility, but to see both sides of the story and think about what could be done to help.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
*who I had never come across before today - which leads me to say that I don't regularly read his blog or know about anything else he has written on this subject. I felt the post discussed here was problematic and hurtful, and felt moved to explain why.</div>
Hannah Mudgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06367085612049349757noreply@blogger.com2