Russell thinks Women of Faith award outrage ‘unfair’
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman Online, May 28, 1999
Letty Russell thinks the uproar over giving the Women of Faith award to Jane Spahr is unfair, since she, too, is a lesbian.
Russell, Spahr and Jane Dempsey Douglass have been selected to receive this year’s Women of Faith awards.
In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Russell said she found it ironic and unfair that all the ire was vented at Spahr when Russell also is a lesbian. To question the award is to question the integrity of the church’s women’s organizations, said Russell, a theologian at Yale Divinity School.
“Regardless of what people’s opinions are about [Spahr’s] ministry, she has worked tirelessly for the church and clearly cares deeply about the church,” Russell was quoted as saying.
Spahr is employed by Downtown Presbyterian Church in Rochester, N.Y., as a “lesbian evangelist” for That All May Freely Serve, an organization devoted to the ordination of gay and lesbian Presbyterians as church officers.
Russell, a professor at Yale Divinity School, was the keynote speaker at the fourth (1996) ReImagining conference, where she was quoted as saying, “In my local presbytery last year, I went to the ministerial relations committee and told them … I was retiring from the presbytery because of the church’s position on the ordination of homosexuals. … As a lesbian, I had decided to use my energy on subversion and not on church committees.”
“I’ve decided … to be in, but not of, the church,” Russell said.
Douglass, a retired professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, was a keynote speaker at the Covenant Network’s organizational meeting in 1996. She told her audience that ordaining persons who engage in homosexual behavior is consistent with the Reformed tradition, even though she admitted the Reformers universally condemned such behavior.
Conservative woman rejected
The May 23 Post Gazette article, “Award to lesbian minister outrages church,” concerned the Beaver-Butler Presbytery declaring its outrage over the “Women of Faith” award being given to a lesbian minister who crusades for gay ordination.
The article quoted Vice Moderator James Mead who said Moderator Douglas Oldenburg tried in vain to engineer a compromise.
“The Rev. Douglas Oldenburg urged those with influence over the awards to also honor some conservative women ‘as a way of being conciliatory to the whole church,’ but that idea was rejected, Mead said.”
See also Layman Online commentary “Why Jane?” posted April 22