don't miss this!

Now that there's a new beautiful website for the Women in Ministry Network, if you're one of those readers who tried to click on the gadget in my sidebar to join the yahoo group and found that that didn't work (it doesn't, and I never managed to figure out how to fix it)--no worries, because you can go here and get yourself connected.

Also on that same page is a contact if you have any publications or sermon texts you would like to submit to the site. And I'd like to encourage everyone who has anything like that to do so. If you feel odd about it--as if it were some kind of weird self-promotion--think of it as both a historical archive (because what you have done and said is important!) and a public encouragement for other women to lift up their God-given voices as well. This is why I started my little sermon blog--not that I really thought a sermon blog would get any readership (it doesn't) but because I wanted a public record of these events. They are small and unimportant in themselves (except to me personally, for whom they were momentous) but taken together with all the other small, quiet actions of women in our churches, they help paint a picture of the real situation in our churches regarding gender and vocation and ministry. And by that I mean, the real situation is that women are raising their voices...the "status quo" is not complete silence (and as some have pointed out in discussion recently here, perhaps it never was to begin with). That should be recognized far more than it currently is, and we can all take the simple measure of making the public record complete on this point.

(I'm loving and overusing the parenthetical comment today for some reason...hmph...)