Growing the Movement

WOC members tried other forms of activism as well. By 1980, they were sponsoring “Skills in Feminist Perspectives” workshops and scheduling retreats nationwide. The WOC office moved to Greenwich Village for a while, then returned to Washington, D.C., then moved to northern Virginia. With the office staff and the second CORE Commission steering the organization, WOC sponsored the 1984 "Ordination Reconsidered" conference in St. Louis attended by 200 women called to ordination.

Over the years, specialized sub-groups formed to pursue particular agendas within the larger mission. One such group, RAPPORT, a covenanted community of women seeking Roman Catholic ordination as soon as possible, took on the task of resuming direct dialogue with sympathetic bishops. This group was formed at the 1984 conference in St. Louis and it began its work in 1986 in response to the pulling back from women’s ordination by another group of WOC women, Women-Church, founded in 1983.

In the years of 1983-1992, the newly organized movement known as Women-Church explored the larger question of women’s religious empowerment in a series of conferences. This was also a period of great richness in the field of feminist theology and Scripture scholarship. Many women were attending seminary programs with the expectation on their part that the reasonable conclusions drawn by the scholars would result in a change of policy by the institution. Other women, particularly those doing the research and writing, were much more skeptical. Their analysis of the nature of the problem was that no reasonable argument would move the entrenched institution. Women-Church, a movement calling for women to create their own communities of worship and spirituality, was born in 1983.

During the mid-eighties, many WOC women put their energies into organizing Women-Church and into lobbying for inclusive language in liturgy and scripture. Others left in frustration to be ordained in other denominations.

Also at this time, the bishops began to write a pastoral letter on women. WOC testified in hearings held by the bishop's writing committee, advising against the pastoral, calling it basically flawed. It made women rather than sexism in the church the problem.

In an effort to influence the process of the pastoral, women were encouraged to "Take a Bishop to Breakfast," to participate in Holy Thursday foot-washing and prayer vigils outside churches, and to write letters to bishops as well as to newspapers. Some women met directly with bishops on a regular basis. This pastoral failed to get enough votes for passage in 1992 after several rewrites and nearly ten years of effort on the part of some working for it and others, including WOC, working against it.