Finding Circles of Trust
(copyright April 20, 2008, Dee Ann Miller, www.takecourage.org)

For the first forty years of my life, I believed that I had the advantage of a gigantic circle of trust. Parker Palmer, author of The Hidden Wholeness, wasn’t available to me back then. If he had been, I might have recognized my perception to be a delusion.

Today, thanks to a host of new friends I’ve found, mostly through networking in the arenas of mental health, social activism, and the survivor movement, I have a much larger circle of trust than ever before. They are more willing and able to hear, more open to the truth about many things, than any group I ever encountered previously, either within the ranks of the Southern Baptist Convention or otherwise. I believe because these groups of people know what real brokenness is about. They inform me as much through their stories, many that take them on excursion into education that does not earn formal degrees.

It is brokenness, which often feels like a “fall from grace” when either the family or the faith community betrays it’s members, has a way of opening the heart in time. Though often there is a period of great constriction of the heart before it can be opened. Generally, the heart goes through many spasms as it attempts to come to a resting place where it can beat in rhythm to the soul.

Locally, I have a small circle of trust that I’ve found in a local church that takes me in, with much acceptance. This very day they encouraged me from the pulpit and had congregational prayer for the retreat I'm leading in two weeks. It’s a circle full of people who seem to know that they are broken. They find unique ways to do ministry in the community, boldly and courageously, especially for the tiny congregation that comes together, mostly just on Sunday morning because they don’t have time for typical church programs.

This morning, among the newcomers, I found Janet. Before she knew much about me at all, she let me know that her journey had begun with Southern Baptists. In her youth, her father, who was a deacon in the SBC, did an about-face as the denomination turned more and more fundamentalist. I laughed at the synergy as the puzzlement that registered on her face. Puzzlement that lifted into a smile when I told her that we had something, rather unusual in this congregation, very much in common between the two of us.

Janet represents many of the women who has strong roots in the SBC, but is no longer a part of the group. According to Susan Shaw, most women with SBC roots have found it very difficult if not impossible to leave. Susan, herself a Southern Baptist Seminary (Louisville) graduate who has felt the oppression of women in a very personal way, is now Director of Women’s Studies at Oregon State University. She is also the author of book just released this month, entitled God Speaks to Us, Too. (see review) The book has drawn on her interviews with over 150 women with SBC roots, and I just happen to be one of them.

Throughout the book, Shaw continues to show how much the Woman’s Missionary Union, through it’s organizations for various age groups and it’s strong emphasis on missions, especially to oppressed people throughout the world, has played a part in shaping all of our lives. Being a missionary, according to several of the women who “testify” to this fact, has historically been considered the highest calling that a woman could have in the Convention. Certainly the WMU has shaped my life immensely, giving me a world view, as I told leaders of this organization when I approached them six months ago, asking what they might be able to do to reach out to the oppressed women in their midst who had been abused by clergymen.

During a lengthy phone call, I was not surprised to hear the explanation for their reluctance to seek monetary assistance for retreats. “We have to walk a fine line here,” were the exact words courageously spoken with clarity. I understood fully--the women are walking a fine line, just as Shaw describes in God Speaks to Us, Too. Not just because the men keep them in check, but there are plenty of women who join the men in supporting patriarchal beliefs, some of which are clearly reflected in interviews that Shaw did with women who remind me very much of the slave women who learned to play the games of “satisfaction” with a “we’re living with God’s plan as slaves.” In other words, the organization is infiltrated with female colluders who are unable to see how much their belief system has blinded them to the oppression under which they are not fully aware because they are too close to the oppressors.

One question, during the phone conference, left me slightly puzzled. They knew that I was a former SBC foreign missionary who had lost my career because I refused to be silent in the case of a sexual predator, missionary colleague. Yet one asked: “What made you decide to come to us to ask for help?”

Of course, the choice was one that I’d been long in making. Yet this group was the first one that came to mind when I first began writing in 1993. For this organization was like a collective mother to me. It was only natural that the organization that had nurtured me should be the one to whom I decided to turn when I felt the rare need for monetary support in order to expand a ministry that I knew full well was already going to develop, though slowly, despite them. There was no reason that could logically be give to deny my request except “we have to walk a fine line here.” Those words made perfect sense, even if they came from a group who seemed to not fully understand why they were the natural ones to whom I should be turning because of what they have stood for in my life and claim to continue to stand for.

The commitment that I understood they were making is one that I’m still waiting to see fulfilled. It’s a commitment that, while they will not be able to provide any other support, a request would be made to their editors to produce an article that would give testimony of one lady, still active in SBC circles, who attended last years retreat and wanted them to know how important it had been in her life.

Six months after the conference call, I have received no confirmation that editors have been contacted. Nor any answers to my e-mails inquiring about this matter.

I continue to wait and to work on projects to which my heart leads me as the WMU continues to struggle with how to walk the fine line. Such is the nature of collusion.

This article, like all at www.takecourage.org is copyrighted by the author. Other writers, by copyright law, may use up to 300 words in other published works without asking permission, provided the author is given full credit. This also applies to the acronym "DIM Thinking," a term coined by Miller. You may download and/or distribute copies of any of these articles, for educational purposes, PROVIDED the pages are distributed without alteration, including this copyright statement.

www.takecourage.org by Dee Ann Miller, author of How Little We Knew: Collusion and Confusion with Sexual Misconduct and The Truth about Malarkey.