David:     Which would you rather read? An article about the sins of various religious leaders, or an article about religious leaders acting the way they’re supposed to. And which would you most likely find featured on the cover page of a magazine or newspaper? I believe you know the answer.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     Recently, Karen, you read to me a feature article you wrote about various ministers you have known through the years. Has this been picked up by a magazine yet?

Karen:     I haven’t sent it out to a magazine yet.

David:     Oh, my goodness. Okay, you actually haven’t?

Karen:     No, I haven’t.

David:     Okay. Well, I had you take the time to read it to me. I’m very, very moved by it. And I would like for you to have the time just to read the article for our listeners, okay?

Karen:     My title for it is: A Tribute. Fathers, Husbands, Brothers, Sons, Colleagues, Friends. In the light of the extraordinary impact of the contemporary #MeToo movement, powerful men have been called out who use their positions to harass or sexualize their relationships with women. As a woman raised in evangelicalism and working within its parameters, I was not aware of the prevalence of seduction attempts in the corporate culture. It is one of a dozen or so of females who at one time were first women. That’s in quotes. The first to speak on this platform from this pulpit, the first to serve in leadership as an elder in the church, to serve in the board, to become chair of the trustees. I’ve spent some time examining my personal history with the men in my subculture, most of whom were well-known leaders in evangelicalism.

Now the #MeToo movement amazed me with the revelation of the quantity of incidents and with the humiliation of sexual harassment faced by so many women within the male power structure. I had no idea. And in the face of the fury of all that and the loud and needed publicity of it all, I did my own historical counting out as a woman functioning within male leadership that dominated the evangelical structures where I found myself functioning.

This is my reminder to myself that I found myself working with good men attempting to adapt to women’s changing role in the church and religious organizations and in society. And to my amazement, there has not been one cad among them.

As frustrating as some might have been, there were some frustrating ones, I was never propositioned in any way sexually by any of them. So, my personal counting out convinced me that we must work to remember there are really good men, honorable men, some holy and righteous or some just plain ordinary guys who choose to do what’s right to support women, defend women, advance women and delight in their progress.

There are plenty of guys who stand on the sidelines proud as the Dickens, cheering along their daughters and daughters’ friends and their wives and daughters-in-laws and their sisters and nieces and secretaries and work colleagues.

In addition, I write this as a woman who has grown up in the conservative evangelical church culture, have sometimes been nearly frustrated to death by it and suffered from the subtle and not so subtle damaging negative female bias exercised by many of its male leaders.

Along that line, I have also been the subject of an ongoing campaign to shun me and to destroy my good reputation. One that took down my husband’s national daily radio ministry airing in some 500 outlets across the country. And this campaign against me was conducted mainly by ultra-conservative men. Due to this negative focus, our media ministry eventually accumulated a radio television airtime debt of $2,600,000. And looking back, I now realize that I had become the subject of what I will now diagnose as theologized misogyny or woman hatred.

When the news of the death of Dr. John Stott in the fall of 2011 came our way, I suddenly remembered an incident from a forgotten past. And for those not familiar with this man, Stott was named by Time Magazine as the equivalent of an evangelical pope with the disqualifier to the effect of, “if evangelicalism ever had such a thing.”

David and I were on the platform of that meeting where Stott was speaking, and we presented a two-voice scripture reading. Dr. Scott and Charles Colson, the former White House legal counsel under the Nixon administration, who went to jail for six months for obstructing justice during the Watergate debacle. They were scheduled to speak back-to-back at this conference and Chuck, whose intelligence David and I came to highly respect, had experienced a classic evangelical conversion beautifully chronicled in his memoir, Born Again, which had become a runaway bestseller.

In addition, after serving time in prison and after this stunning spiritual turnaround, Colson had founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry dedicated to bringing hope and restoration to prisoners, to their families and to communities impacted by crime and incarceration.

So, in the green room, these are the places where people gather before they walk onto the platform and none of them are green, but they’re called the green room. Dr. Stott, quiet, punctual, and charmingly English, went around greeting everyone kindly and renewed in acquaintance with David and me.

One Sunday morning, he had preached at our church, Circle Church, the plant in the Team street Union Hall, local 709 in Chicago, where during the 70s we had experimented in meaningful forms of worship. Dr. Stott spoke one morning at Circle Church in that worship environment. And I have wonderful memories of Dr. Stott in our home with our four kids, all of us sitting around our $3 Savaged Oak Dining Mood Table for a Sunday after church meal.

So, forward in time, at some point as we were waiting to proceed to the platform of the large California Hotel Convention Hall, Dr. Stott eased quietly beside me. He spoke to both of us, smiled at us, and David was at my side, and then this elder statesman, then some 20 years older than me, slender and elegant in his composure, said, “I have forgotten how beautiful you are.” And as to be expected, my husband agreed with him.

Now, due to the heightened sexual harassment discussions of these days, I need to explain that this was a gentle compliment given by a dignified and kindly older man to a younger woman. It had nothing to do with any subtext of personal encroachment.

So, waiting in that green room, I casually received this lovely compliment. And being middle aged with major amounts of my time, taking up corralling and hurling four kids, I admit I received it with pleasure and promptly forgot it. Perhaps this was also because this attention from an older man was very much like something my father frequently did when we were in groups together.

My father, Wilfred LaRue Burton, would also ease up to me, place the back of his hand so it hid his mouth and whispered my ear. “Now, sweet, I’ve looked everyone over in the room when you were the prettiest one here.” Talk about confidence building during those awkward stages of blooming adolescence. Dad also took the devil’s advocate role during Sunday dinner table discussions, insisting we learn to think for ourselves, pointing out any tendencies to emotionalize logic and forbidding tears is a means to vent frustration when our thinking was still underdeveloped and half-formed. Both my sister, Valerie and I credit our competence and self-confidence to these weekly tutorials. She is now the CEO Emerita of Awana International, an international kids club ministry that instills a love of scripture into its memory programs. And Awana has a significant outreach overseas.

Furthermore, compliments on how I looked took another turn with my husband. After working hard on a speaking assignment, preparing it, and practicing it, then giving it, I would naturally ask David, a superb communication coach for hundreds of pastors, “How’d I do?” His reply, which used to aggravate me beyond words, “Well, you look so good, it didn’t really matter what you said.”

Feminists can now rise, raise their fists and boo. In time, he learned to take me seriously, give me good evaluations on my work and leave the physical illusions for other moments.

However, as a matter of self-disclosure, I am now 80. I noticed that those looking good comments are much more appreciated now than when I was in my younger years.

Now mentioning Dr. Stott’s credentials is important to the story I’m building regarding my journey as a woman through conservative Christendom. In this at a time when the whole traditional concept of woman’s role was changing not only in the culture, but in the conservative church milieu. Dr. Stott was the man credited with inventing modern evangelicalism, staking out a position between fundamentalism that would be doctrinally conservative but unengaged in culture and liberalism engaged in culture but losing the underpinnings of doctrinal faith as hallmarked in scripture. He pioneered the concept of uniting evangelism and social justice as Christianity’s natural mission. He founded the Langham partnership to train majority world pastors. He’s credited with re-establishing the neighborhood-based city church, not one built from commuters driving in from suburban towns, but one that emphasized serving and reaching those within a geographical parish. Of course, this list could go on and on, including Time Magazine’s analysis that if evangelicalism had a pope, Stott would surely be it.

In 2005, Time did include Stott in its list of 100 most influential people in the world. News of death invites seminal memories to rise that should be more impacting than they are until loss helps us to examine them more closely. Suddenly at the announcement of Stott’s death, I remembered that green room and Dr. Stott and the fact that I was probably one of the few women in the place, certainly the only guest woman to be on the platform. Dr. John Stott, for whom some two dozen memorial services were held on every continent in such places as Addis Ababa, Auckland, Delhi, Hong Kong, Lima, Manila, Singapore, Vancouver and the US, head in the most gentle way imaginable smile and said with his lovely English accent, “I had forgotten how beautiful you are.”

Though I have been publicly pilloried, my husband’s media ministry brought to a halt due to reaction to the publication of one of my books, The Personal Memoir, Lonely No More, and the resultant $2.6 million of debt. It took us 15 years to pay off with the help of David’s father’s inheritance, which was to be our retirement security and of the generous and amazing love of faithful friends. I will loudly and clearly say that there have been many, many more men in the evangelicalism who said to me, “I had forgotten how beautiful you are” than those who excluded me because God made me female. I’ve heard more times than I count. “Wow, you do that really well.” Nor can I total the times men sometimes was surprised in their voices exclaimed, “Just never have seen a woman function in leadership before.”

So, I choose to remember there are thousands of really good men, even in the light of the #MeToo outings or the miserable actuality of rampant child sexual abuse in the Catholic church at the hands of priests. Due to the sincere rantings and ravings of the still misogynistic ultra-conservative spokesperson, both men and women, I would like to do a counting out. I would like to write the negative impact and name a few of the men, many of them holy and upright, who can quietly alongside me and said, “You do that so well.” In other words, another way of saying, “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.”

There are some 17 ordained ministers in the three generations of lineage descending from my paternal great grandfather, Greenberry Burton. This number varies of course, depending on who does the telling. Nevertheless, my father was ordained, the Reverend Wilford Burton. My brother is ordained, the Reverend Craig Burton. My brother-in-law is ordained, the Reverend Steve Bell. And of course, my husband, the Reverend Dr. David Mains.

As I matured and had written some 20 books and was heard nationally, one of the first women’s voices in religious media on my husband’s daily syndicated radio broadcast and left home every other weekend to speak in churches and conferences and retreat centers, I realized due to all this heavyweight ministerial association that I had really never had a pastor of my own, at least the way other people have pastors. Mine were all uncles or great uncles, brothers, brothers-in-laws, or my husband.

Also, I heard repeatedly, “You’re the first woman to speak on this platform,” or on this diocese or behind this pulpit, or to serve on this board, or to be chair of this board.

About this time, David and I also realized when he was director of the Chapel of the Air broadcast, that as many as 25% of our listeners were from liturgical churches and we knew nothing about liturgy. And at that time, friends invited us to be part of a couple’s small group. One of the participants of that couple’s group along with his wife, Donna, was the director of a nearby Episcopal Church, Reverend Dr. G. Richard Lobs. Credentials do help in this written conversation because they represent something more than just the opinion of a single individual.

In time, I became involved in the vestry of this church. My domain of service was spiritual life and worship. And having come from churches in my past where no woman served on the boards, this was an amazing journey for me. I remember the morning when an ordained woman priest provided supply in the pulpit and also acted as the celebrant for the Eucharist. Huge, knotted things in my soul began to relax and untie. Something deep and knurled and twisted within me was soothed and began to heal. Rick Lobs carefully tutored me in things Episcopalian: The Book of Common Prayer, sacramental theology, liturgical worship, recognizing a hunger in my soul that had not been filled up to that time. And as most of us in the public arena soon learn, fame in any form is fraught with temptations. It can overshadow one’s true self.

In short, although I didn’t know it at this time, this Episcopalian priest was a spiritual director for me. His wife was also a good friend. So, once I was invited to speak at Deanery Day, this also had to be explained to me, a Deanery is the geographical organization of local Anglican churches. Donna and Rick had recommended me as a speaker for the gathering of various women from local churches within the district. Lo and behold, as I looked out in the audience, I saw that my rector had slipped into the crowd to hear me speak. I was surprised. Most of the places I spoke were with wo gatherings. A local pastor might give a greeting, be introduced to me, but none of them ever stayed to listen, not even lurking around in the back to check out my orthodoxy.

In addition, many of the women now invited to speak more and more from the pulpits and conservative ranks, experienced what can only be called the rudeness of men who turned their backs on them while they were speaking, or made a point to collude and mount a protest by getting up and marching out when a woman invited to speak stood to do so.

Now, my way of getting around this was to make sure that if I was invited to speak to a mixed gender group, I was sure the leaders, mostly male, a pastor, a church elder, were approving of the invitation. Then before the crowd I would announce in our family, my husband, David Mains, is the theologian. We’ve decided that one theologian per family is enough. I am the storyteller.

Somehow this explanation alleviated the caution that conservative men might feel that certain scriptures lifted out of their cultural context, citing prohibitions about women teaching men were being violated. So, that evening after Deanery Day, Rick bolden to tell me what a good job Donna and he thought I had done and all I could do was respond by crying. I was so emotionally distraught, we had to discontinue the call. And while I’m packing this incident with my husband, I was still weepy. Perhaps I need to say here that there is no one who has been a bigger booster than David Mains for me and countless of other women venturing into the dubious shoals of public leadership.

In addition, my longest-time booster, my dad, had recently died with a debilitating encounter with encephalitis, which scrambled his intelligence and muddled his personality. Also, it is one thing to have a couples group member who you spend time with twice a month compliment your professional efforts. It is quite another thing when the Reverend Doctor, your parish priest, a spiritual tutor, and confessor takes the time to not only compliment you on the phone, but to make the effort to come sit in the pews beneath the pulpit and listen intently to what you have to say. And frankly, I still feel overwhelmed even as I write this.

A couple hours later, Rick phoned back. “You know, sometimes when we get emotional,” he said, “we just can’t say the things we want to say and the way we want to say them, I want to make sure you have a chance to do that.” Okay, that man scored 100 points in all categories across the board and due to my own emotional disequilibrium at that moment, I became acutely aware that the systemic misogyny inherent in my conservative system of evangelicalism had deeply wounded me. This misogyny had indeed become prejudicially theologized, i.e. women were not just as worthy, as gifted, as capable as men were for leadership function.

So, I had much work to do in the days ahead. The conservative church culture of which I was a part had damaged me more than I knew, hence tears due to the honest compliment of one of its leaders, the Reverend Doctor.

David:     I’m going to stop you there, Karen, because I want you to have opportunity to give this article all the exposure it needs. So, we will pick it up again next time and just thank you, thank you for sharing. And I know that you haven’t submitted this article to any peer article, but just listening to you, I say, “Yes, you need to send this off. And the magazines that are in my mind don’t pick it up, that’s their problem, okay?

Outgo:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2022 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.