"God opened a door for me," Liz Lopez Spence says. As pastor of the second-largest United Methodist church in Minnesota, Spence is one of the small percentage of women in the United States who have reached the top ranks in the ministry. In doing this, she's proved that the so-called "stained-glass ceiling"—the invisible barrier that has kept women from serving their churches in positions of authority—is breakable. Lori Sharn, "Clergy still tough career for women, " USA TODAY, July 9, 1997, p. 1A. Over the last decade, women have moved into the ministry in unprecedented numbers. Roughly one third of all seminary students in the United States and Canada are women. That's up from 10% in 1972. In San Francisco, female students actually outnumber their male counterparts in six of the eleven seminaries in the area. Add to that the fact that the overwhelming majority of churchgoers worldwide are women, and you have a key shift—one often called the "feminization" of religion.
Some people worry, however, about the advancing presence of women in religion. They're afraid worshiping God might get labeled as a strictly "woman thing." They even suggest this might be why some men go to all-male religious rallies in sports stadiums rather than to local churches.
But maybe there's something bigger—much bigger—going on in religion. Maybe we're really talking about an evolving public concept of God. A concept that moves beyond the traditional picture of God as a manlike father figure. An expanding concept that transcends material limits of all sorts, including gender.
