Catherine Turnbull | February 25, 2026 

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”  –Flannery O’Connor

As the vestry member of the month, last weekend I attended each of Grace’s three worship services, where I was tasked with receiving direction from you about what kind of church you want us to be.  One of you came to me and said, “My hope for the church is inclusive language.” 

To help us understand why the language we use to image the Divine is as important to our Christian development as displaying the proper colors in each liturgical season or completing the long overdue installation of an elevator, we might try this exercise:

Imagine you are a 70-year old man, a retired Episcopal priest, seated in our Sanctuary right now.  Many in your family before you were called to the priesthood, but you are the only one who was ordained because it is only in the last 50 years that men have been allowed by the church hierarchy (all female) to have that role.  The Church taught for more than a thousand years that, by nature and by Goddess’s design, a man’s private parts made him violent and stole wisdom from his mind, so men were considered ontologically unfit to lead. Despite progress in the last few decades, this attitude still exists in the pews of every church you have served.

Because the early church was subsumed by the extremely matriarchal culture of a certain European empire, most of the work of men in Christianity’s beginnings has been suppressed or overlooked.  Men were Jesus’ friends, sure, but they could not have been disciples or apostles. The conversation in John 3 between Jesus and Nicodemus about being born again really sealed the deal: the qualities of fathering are weaker than the mightiness of birth, so Goddess as Father never reaches your parishioners’ ears or has a chance to enlarge their faith. 

To add insult to injury, it’s practically farcical how, in the Middle Ages, male Biblical figures were recast as gigolos and weak thinkers who could not understand Jesus’ teachings, much less impart those teachings to their female superiors, whose minds were sharper, whose hearts were stronger, and whose leadership skills were better in every way. Despite all the time that has passed, no worship service in your lifetime has employed a metaphor of the male experience in reference to Goddess or Goddess’s queendom.  It doesn’t help that the language you speak has no neutral third person singular pronoun and uses “she” to mean “everyone,” so that it’s been easy for the church to keep images of men from creeping into prayer. 

From your seat in the Sanctuary, you know this is ungodly. Your own eyes on Scripture, your long study of theology, and your own experiences show you that Goddess has no gender; that all of our images of Her are metaphors—we can point to the Divine but we cannot and should not capture Her in one overused photograph—Nevertheless, saying “God the Father” in church today still borders on the heretical. 

A church steeped in this kind of imbalance will need years of redress in order to heal.  

So, what should you do?  

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I propose we start a conversation.  I would be honored to be the vestry member who hosts it.  Let me know your thoughts—you can find my email address on the church’s website or find me in person after the 10:00 service.  “Let’s have it out!” says the Lord (Isaiah 1:18).

Respectfully and faithfully,

Catherine Turnbull