leaders Elizabeth Fedde, Emma Francis, Anna Kugler, Elizabeth Platz, Ruth Youngdahl Nelson and April Ulring Larson. Lutheran women continued to lead, even when those


in power said no. Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work,


and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), defi nes leadership as “making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” By that defi nition, Lutheran women have long been


leaders in the U.S., tackling such social justice issues as poverty, hunger, domestic violence, human traffi cking, rape culture and land mines. Women learned about the issues, shared their knowledge and developed solutions. T ey were active in the movements that resulted in women’s ordination. T ey raised money for education and advocacy, medicine and training. To ensure that church ministries would be funded,


they established endowments, some of which go back to the earliest part of the 20th century, that Women of the ELCA continues to administer today. Slowly but surely women have been recognized


within the church for what they have been all along: leaders. Over time, they became Sunday school teachers,


musicians and council members. T ey sat on synod committees, served on synod councils and became paid staff . T ey taught in our colleges and universities and stud- ied in our semi- naries. With leadership traits they’d honed within women’s


organizations, they took on


elected leader- ship roles in the wider church. With each gen- eration’s accom-


plishments, those who followed


gained new opportunities as leaders. Today women are leaders in every aspect of church


life. Some lead from the kitchen, some from the pulpit. Some women lead in the classroom, some on the council. Some lead social ministry organizations while others lead in schools and camps. With the election of Elizabeth A. Eaton as ELCA presiding bishop last August, the last stained-glass barrier was broken. Yet, gender justice still hasn’t been achieved. While


it’s possible for a woman to hold any offi ce in the ELCA and while women lead in countless areas of our faith life, many in our church (and in our society) experience sexism. We know, too, that women and girls around the globe struggle every day with forced marriages, rape as a weapon of war, poor sanitation, lack of education and other atrocities that as North American women we can barely imagine. Women must continue to lead so we all—men and


women—can live together as God’s people. Drawing upon the giſt s of healing, leadership and


inclusion, women live and thrive in community. “T ere is in women’s friendships a diff erent quality of pres- ence,” wrote Joan Chittister in T e Friendship of Women: A Spiritual Tradition (Sheed & Ward, 2001). While men tend to have “side-by-side” friendships,


carried out in “shared activities, in project development, in group play, in situations that bring no basic threat to power and demand no emotional vulnerability,” Chit- tister says women “shape their relationships ‘face-to- face,’ in mutual dependence, in honest conversation, in exposures of personal weaknesses.” Chittister tells us that women’s friendships can bring


“new hope for the human race, if we can only recognize them, if we can only bring them to life—respected, revered and invested with honor—in the world around us.”


Humanity can transform public institutions, she


writes, if the best of what it means for women to be in community can be shared with the whole world. For our church to be transformed and more fully live into the commonwealth promised by God, we need the giſt s of both men and women. All must welcome and honor women’s leadership styles, accepting women for the leaders they have been all along. 


Author bio: Linda Post Bushkofsky has participated in Women of the ELCA since its inception and has served as its executive director since August 2002.


February 2014 21


MICHAEL D. WATSON


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