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Bobbie Smith is a returned missionary, BYU graduate, and mother of a large family in the northeastern United States with a literal and metaphorical oversized heart. Said heart greatly affects the nature of her religious worship, community service, and housework.
Ten men (if I counted right) attended the General Women’s Session this past weekend and three men spoke. As I watched them take up more than half of our meeting, I thought of how few women are invited to speak in General Conference. I thought of the women denied permission to even attend priesthood session. Yet the men invite themselves not only to attend our women’s session, they also dominate the dais and they dominate the speaking roster. Was it even a women’s meeting, really? It was more of a combined “sister and priesthood meeting” this year, really, when you consider the gender breakdown of talks and the gender count of who was on the stand. These were sobering thoughts.
I crave women’s voices. In my lifetime in the Midwest, we’ve never had a sister church authority visit us, ever. Our only options for help with callings, family life, and personal growth have been “Time Out For Women,” which is expensive and kind of smacks of priestcraft. I’ve never understood why the brethren get flown out on the church’s dime, yet I need to buy tickets to an expensive program if I want to hear guidance from female church leaders. I hoped the Women’s Session would provide a chance for some empathetic instruction, and instead the time was consumed by men.
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The three talks proffered by brethren in our sisters’ meeting all focused on motherhood. These talks included the usual nod to childless sisters via “you are all mothers because you nurture,” consolation. I find this unsatisfactory.
LDS women possess a variety of gifts, other then motherhood, that need to be acknowledged. Many of us are skilled orators, but only male high councilmen are allowed to travel and exercise gifts of oratory. Many of us are gifted, credentialed administrators, but only men are allowed to administrate in the church. Many of us are extremely skilled fundraisers, budgeters, and accountants, but only brethren are allowed to work with the monies of the church. Many of us are paid professional teacher trainers at work, but when we teach at church unskilled, untrained brethren supervise us. Many of us don’t get along with children at all and don’t have a nurturing bone in our bodies and would be better suited for administrative or other practical service opportunities, but instead we keep getting called to child-tending church duties — because the men in charge of callings say God told them that’s where we belong.
Because the brethren placed such repeated emphasis on nurturing, I’d like to take a closer look at what nurturing implies and how the church falls short of capturing nurturing’s full vision. It is because many women are nurturers that we need a greater voice.
Part of the nurturer’s gift includes a strong desire to help the oppressed. Women are the ones who, by a larger margin, stand with God’s LGBTQ children and want to ensure their happiness and well-being. But when we exercise this nurturing gift in behalf of God’s LGBTQ children at full capacity, we are chastised, shunned at church, or even excommunicated. We women feel our nurturing hearts break whenever male-elected apostles of God tear down our beloved LGBTQs before a worldwide audience. We love God’s LGBTQ children and want to see them love and be loved, as they deserve to be. The brethren can’t keep telling us to utilize our gift of nurturing, then ignore us when we find those who are most in need of succor and raise the alarm to advocate for and help them. Elder Oaks’s talk on Saturday caused us to raise the alarm again.
Nurturing women are concerned for abuse victims and our vulnerable young being conditioned to meet behind closed doors with adult men. I was thus troubled by Elder Holland’s talk about a man wrongfully accused of not paying a full tithe during a bishop’s interview. Elder Holland put the impetus not on the leader to apologize, but on the hurt man to let it go—this is a narrative that abuse victims in the church have struggled with forever: abusers not being punished while abuse survivors are told to just forgive. Elder Holland did make a passing reference to abuse/toxic relationships but focused the rest of his talk on forgiving offenses. Sister-nurturers can attest that when somebody has been deeply wounded or abused, the focus needs to be on helping the abused, not on telling them to forgive and absolve the person who harmed them. Telling them to just forgive already can actually do more damage, especially when the person who harmed them holds priesthood keys, powers, and authority. We sister-nurturers know that survivors of this kind of abuse need to hear that their abuser was wrong and amen to the priesthood of those men. They need to hear apologies; they often need restitution. They need validation, love, and nurturing.
We sisters are so nurturing that we care deeply about the poor, so our hearts ache when Elder Bednar promotes self-reliance as he did at this conference. Christ fed the poor and healed the sick without reference to self-reliance. He never asked for anything in return for those loaves and fishes, guys. He never asked his listeners to earn those loaves and fishes first. He saw hunger and he fed people, saw sickness and pain and healed them. When women use their nurturing powers to serve the needy, it pains us to watch leaders make the poor in our wards jump through arbitrary hoops to “earn” church welfare and commodities. We’d rather use our nurturing gifts to minister as the Savior does. When our nurturing requests are overridden, we conclude we need more authority. How are we to serve the world when our nurturing gifts are being ignored?
If sister-nurturers had the influence and authority to exercise our gifts to their fullest extent, our church’s resources would be re-directed to helping/healing abuse survivors instead of protecting their abusers. We would redirect more church resources towards programs and policies that fight racial intolerance than towards fighting marijuana. We would build more houses like Encircle house for LGBTQs and establish policies and programs/procedures that lovingly support and embrace God’s LGBTQ children, rather than paying to rebrand church properties, web sites, and choirs. Our manuals and hymnals would be revised to emphasize worship of our Heavenly Father and following Christ through ministering and loving service, rather than teaching members to adore and obey men the way our current church publications often do.
By emphasizing women’s role as nurturers, the brethren are effectively self-confessing that they are not nurturers. I pray they will realize that, as non-nurturers, there are sensitive topics they are not always equipped to address. I pray the brethren will never again lecture us about motherhood, shame the poor about self-reliance, or criticize our beloved LGBTQs the way they did at General Conference. (I noted that the most Christ-like talk was delivered by a man named Elder Gay. In a church that finds great meaning in names, watching his name flash on the screen moved me deeply!)
We sisters don’t tell the brethren how to exercise their priesthood keys, so I pray that they, the non-nurturers of the church, will in the future assign these topics to those who can offer our worldwide church the requisite nurturing, hope, love, and healing that these delicate topics require. According to the First Presidency, we sisters are divine holders of these requisite nurturing powers. They recognized our leadership with the church’s refugee efforts, and should do so again. Our sister-nurturers deserve a greater voice.