Oral History Project
Candler School of Theology
Sample Life Stories
NAN SELF—Retired Pastor and Former Secretariat of the Commission on the Status and Role of Women, UMC
Presentation on 11 April 2000, Candler School of Theology, Women in Theology and Ministry Spring Dinner [Narrative is lightly edited for a written manuscript.]
"My faith journey began in Ohio University at the Wesley Foundation where I experienced unconditional love for the first time in my life. I came out of a very dysfunctional family. The campus minister and his wife were my role models, and my call to ministry was to be like them, and specifically to be a campus minister.
"My undergraduate major was home economics, child development, and family life. When I wrote a required senior paper on "My Philosophy of Homemaking," shortly after the call had become clear to me to ministry, I wrote that I wanted to be a minister's wife, and thus fulfill my calling to ministry (like Louise Cooley had been at Ohio). However, there wasn't a candidate in sight! It took me nearly a decade to realize that God wasn't making a second hand call. There were, and still are, you will be aware, women who married their vocation as a way of getting into ministry.
"Before enrolling in seminary, I served for two years as a US-2, a short-term missionary program of the United Methodist Church. Now don't laugh! I was assigned to Hollywood, California. I'd never been west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, so going to California was like going to a foreign country, not India but foreign to me. For an additional year, after those first two years, I traveled to 136 local campuses recruiting short-termers. I got a real view of what campus ministry and its diversity were like.
"My first two years in seminary were at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, where I interned in campus ministry with another husband-wife team, Joe Brown and Ruth Winfield Love. Never underestimate the power of your role modeling. You are, whether you seek to be or not, a role model and people are watching. There I met and married a man, who incidentally was also called to campus ministry. (God doth provide—in God's own time). We were already engaged when the 1956 General Conference of the Methodist Church—meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota—voted to give full clergy rights to women. I didn't even know women couldn't be ordained. It didn't matter to me; I just wanted to be in ministry.
"In 1952—a bit of history—the petition for women's clergy rights had been debated and defeated at the San Francisco General Conference. I was there when a discounting and dismissive comment was made from the floor, from one of the delegates (guess what gender). This sent the conference and all the delegates into gales of laughter. The women were in the galleries, all laywomen of course, and they were incensed. They were outraged. They said, "They'll never laugh again!" So, for the next four years, they educated the men; they networked amongst themselves; and they bent history.”