Women in Ministry: Life Changes by Sue Corley

If someone had told me in my teens or early twenties that I was going to be a Methodist pastor, I would have checked the joint we were probably both smoking. I grew up Catholic: baptized, confirmed, married in the Catholic church. I even went to Catholic high school.  But my parents never really went to church or took us kids. I do remember when I still lived in Bayonne, New Jersey and was probably about seven or eight, my parents sent me with my two older brothers to attend mass. They even gave my oldest brother money for the collection. The corner candy store turned out to be church that day, and the offering was gratefully accepted by the pinball machines.

I am a single woman, divorced after twenty-five years, and the mother of two grown (but not necessarily mature) sons. I am over-fifty, overweight and what is charmingly referred to as a “second career” pastor; which means that I gave up a life and career in the “real world” when I received my call to ministry. On any given day, no one is more surprised than I am that I am a pastor. And I am always amazed at how impossible, draining, and life-giving it is to be a pastor.

As I try to find my authority and assurance in my call, I seem to constantly be pulled back to a reality that is not what I had hoped. As children we thought it would be cool to be invisible. As it turns out, it is not cool at all. When you are all the things I mentioned above, you can be invisible. Even though women clergy are common in the United Methodist Church, I can still feel invisible and unvalued in gatherings. Throw some Baptist preachers into the crowd, the ones who call you “Miss Sue” and not Pastor or Reverend, and I lose my “cherub-like demeanor” (as comedian John Pinette used to say.)

In 2006, as my marriage was ending, I experienced a call to attend seminary at Duke Divinity School. Suddenly I found myself eight hundred miles away from everything and everyone I knew, including my sons. Since I had gone from living at home to married at twenty-one, I had never had my own place until I was forty-nine years old, divorced, and a seminary student. The experience was a mixture of abject terror and giddy excitement. That period was the beginning of a deeper relationship with God that involved some dark nights of the soul. I questioned, cursed, and became defiant. I begged and bargained and rested my head on God’s great shoulder. I felt like Job, and wrote a poem called I’m No Job to prove it:

 

Change of life

I lost my life

But He pulled me from the wreckage like the jaws of Life.

 

I heard a sound I never heard before

It was the moving van door

Slamming shut on my dreams and driving me…

Where?

I didn’t know

But I didn’t want to go.

 

So my hands that were pleading, held high

Were waving good-bye.

But then He spun me around

And now I’m waving “hi”

To something new on the horizon,

If I just squinch my eyes I’m…

Almost able to see it.

 

Don’t tell me God’s not in this

We are in this together

I know it.

I don’t care whether he’s

Silent partner, absentee landlord

I still write him the check

‘Cause I owe it.

 

The planets have actually changed

Pluto’s out of the picture.

How bold we are to rearrange and rename

But He’s still the same

No matter how we stir the mixture.

 

But in the dark, I still make deals with God

And I give him a warning:

“This far only, can I go,

Don’t test me, I’m no Job!

But you know that, ‘cause you formed me.”

 

So does He answer prayer?

I don’t know

But I’m not going anywhere

To whom else would I go?

 

The planets changed again. Pluto has been reinstated and I still make my deals with God. I beg for patience when people ask me if it’s Biblical for a woman to be a pastor. I lay my head on God’s great shoulder when I experience a painful bite from one of my sheep. And I still write the check with my life and service. To whom else would I go?

 

Rev. Sue Corley was born in Bayonne, New Jersey and grew up in South Florida. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Christian Ministry from Palm Beach Atlantic College in 2005. She received her Master of Divinity in 2009 and is a Provisional Elder of the Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church. She has been pastor of three churches since graduating from Duke. She currently serves at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Ocala, Florida.