Faith & Insight: Celebrate women of faith who went before

In the Nevada Art Museum, looking at the quilts and prints made of quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala., immersed me in "woman culture".

These quilts were made by women whose foremothers were slaves, yet many of the quilts reminded me of quilts made by my white foremothers in Missouri, Kentucky or Virginia as they made their way west from 1720.

They also reminded me of an exhibit I saw at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. That exhibit included embroidery and china painting and needlework - handiwork that women had produced over time. It was the kind of work my own mother had done but which I had not fully appreciated until that moment.

I encountered this exhibit after exiting an art installation by Judy Chicago, a contemporary artist who stresses the importance of modern women remembering powerful and influential women throughout history.

Appreciating those historical women allowed me to appreciate the more familiar gifts of my mother and grandmothers, my actual tradition.

Often I think we in the church fail to encourage contemporary women to recognize they can find a place in the tradition of a faith community.

We gloss over the exclusion of women from leadership in the church after the fourth century until more recent times (although in current Biblical scholarship we find that the early church included women in leadership). Sometimes we fail to highlight God's generous Holy Spirit working through women as well as men in our current faith communities.

I am so grateful to be part of the heritage of the United Methodist Church as I celebrate 33 years of ordination this year.

In 1977, there were 25 women who had already gone before me in our California-Nevada area standing on the shoulders of women whose call to preach was acknowledged by John Wesley in the 1700s, although full ordination and rights of membership as clergy would not come until 1956.

I celebrate and welcome in the church both women who have kept traditional roles and women who have been considered "uppity." As I think about it, those quilts on the walls made by ordinary women in a subsistence community in Gee's Bend, with traditional patterns and form, look like they came from "uppity" women, women full of hope and vision, community and freedom.

I want to welcome many diverse people to participate in this season of new hope and new possibilities on this journey of being the church. As the old black spiritual says we are "walkin' the freedom way", walking the Jesus Way with the message of love for our hurting world.

• Rev. Dixie Jennings-Teats is co-pastor of First United Methodist Church, Carson City.