Word: laywomen
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...follow him, he doesn't necessarily mean physically. He means leave your dependence on them, make an emotional break with them. For me, that meant I had to be willing to step outside the opinions of my parents when I started Bible Study Fellowship [a Bible school for laywomen in North Carolina...
...contrast with male-oriented Islam, the active membership in the typical black Christian church today is 70% female. But there are few women ministers, and apparently that is the way laywomen want it. "Though congregations are run by women in support roles, those women say they want to see a man as an authority figure," says James Costen, president of Atlanta's Interdenominational Theological Center. The issue may generate more controversy as the clergy shortage grows. For now, ambitious women preachers are joining white denominations or establishing their own independent congregations...
...church is making headway in advocating social justice, but admitted that there is considerable "confusion over moral issues," including the limits of personal dissent and the role of conscience. The most significant passage dealt with the status of women. Malone, declaring that "particular attention must now be given" to laywomen and sisters, asserted, "Their role in the church and society must be clarified, their rights and dignity must be affirmed, and their advancement to positions of leadership and decision making must continue." He said nothing about women as priests, which both the Pope and the U.S. hierarchy oppose...
...unemployment, crowded housing and political turbulence. The church hierarchy is divided over the growing influence on the area's 338 million Catholics of a radical movement, partly influenced by Marxism, that is known as liberation theology. In the U.S., the papacy confronts restiveness and even anger among sisters and laywomen who are unhappy about the church's rigid stands on abortion, birth control and an exclusively male priesthood (see following stories). In Europe as well as in the U.S., the Pope and his aides face challenges from theological scholars whose reinterpretations of traditional dogma verge on what Rome considers heresy...
...study of all U.S. seminaries, and a principal reason for this, says the Vatican source, is to guarantee that these institutions "are not turning out psychiatrists and social workers in collars." For similar reasons Rome, concerned that women's orders could vanish if sisters appear little different from laywomen, is investigating the orders in the U.S. and requiring distinctive garb and community life...