What the Philadelphia Eleven Mean to Me
How my call was shaped by the 40th Anniversary of the Ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, and what it means now that we're at the 50th Anniversary
Could you use some good news? I could.
Next week, the Episcopal Church celebrates the 50th anniversary of the ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first eleven women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church. While the Church has always had women in leadership — most especially the Early Church, with Deacon Phoebe and Church planter Lydia and of course the Apostle to the Apostles, Mary Magdalene, to name a few — this is a powerful and significant anniversary of recent memory.
This anniversary also has a lot of personal significance to me.
In 2014, newly married and about to start my Divinity School education, my husband Jonathan and I were … spiritually unmoored. A series of events had begun in our lives that we now see were both the folly and sin of people in ecclesial leadership around us, and also, these events were God nudging us out of our denominational home. Naming this as both and has been important for me: terrible harm had been done. And, God was still with us.
I’d been a “dual citizen” all through college, attending and eventually interning with a delightful Episcopal Church (All Saints’ in South Hadley!) but had never formally been Confirmed. Largely, this was because I felt an obligation to be one who “stayed” in a non-affirming denomination to be a part of the Spirit-led change we all knew was coming. I thought my gifts could be used to push and prod and receive and beckon the full dignity of myself my and LGBTQIA+ siblings in my previous denomination. But as a friend recently reminded me: obligation is not a fruit of the Spirit. Joy, however, is.
I am getting ahead of myself.
Jonathan and I were married by 3 clergy friends, one of whom was an Episcopal priest. He had offered counsel that the grass might truly be greener on the Episcopal side of the fence … but he also candidly affirmed our concerns that the denomination was, shall we say, a bit stiff-in-the-upper-lip and a touch (white) elitist. We were wracked with what to do. And then, through the feminist spirituality grapevine (such a thing does exist, and all paths of it at some point converge in Durham, North Carolina) that there was to be a festive Eucharist. A celebration. Of women who had carved a path of their own within the great tread of God making smooth the rough places and lifting up valleys.
This was the 40th Anniversary of the Philadelphia Eleven, hosted by the Episcopal Church of Advocate in Chapel Hill, and helmed by 2 bishops and 2 of the eleven women themselves — The Rev. Allison Cheek, now of blessed memory and glorious resurrection; and The Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward.
My copy of Rev. Dr. Heyward’s book The Redemption of God was — is — bulging with notes, tinged yellow with over a decade of highlighter bleeds. I’d read it in undergrad, the typeface one and the same as her original typewritten manuscript because the textbook was a glorified, bound copy of her dissertation. To know I could meet her? I was beside myself.
We went. Trepidatiously, at the back of the enormous tent pitched in the front lawn of what I now know to be an Episcopal Church Plant (Jesus was showing off) I approached these two women and thanked them. Carter Heyward signed my book.
I’m sure I babbled about what her book meant to me and I’m even more sure I asked a question to show how much I had really, really read it, but what I mostly remember was how fierce and kind she was. And I walked away knowing sisters in the Spirit across all denominations and in and out of all time, could find ways to make holy mischief. The label mattered, but what mattered more was the sisterhood.
I did not see it then, but — to quote Søren Kierkegaard via Rev. Dr. Renita Weems — life is lived moving forward, and understood looking backwards. And looking back? I see the convergence. Of feisty women who were done with the stiff upper lip gatekeeping and ready to follow God’s wild path. Of a church plant being the first place I really felt a “wink” of the future in the Episcopal Church in my home state of North Carolina. Of joy. The effusive, fear-filled and celebrating-anyway joy of being the first. The loneliness that could now be seen. The sacrifice that was now, as it ought to have been, lauded.
These fancy Episcopalians could do Eucharist in a tent? This — this was a church I could boogie with.*
I see now how much the fingerprints of this day are all over who we are at Jubilee, my own sweet and mighty church plant in Texas, bursting with all kinds of color. To look back not only at the turbulent and imperfect fifty years that have transpired between these eleven ordinations in the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia in 1974, but to also behold what the last ten years have had in my own life that thread this moment into the decade tapestry? It takes my breath away.
I am so grateful.
Thank you for reading! If you’re wanting to dive deeper, I am overwhelmed / ecstatic to share I have a whole BOOK coming out in February 2025 called God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us: 40 Devotions to Liberate Your Faith from Fear and Reconnect with Joy. It’s a first-of-its-kind devotional for the disillusioned and deconstructed to help you feel a little less disheartened. You can even pre-order it right now!
*(Please don’t hear me say: we’ve completed the work of unraveling white supremacy in the Episcopal Church. Far from it.)