For most of my career, I have wittingly or unwittingly been recruited as a poster child for issues the church has trouble confronting. 

In 2003, I began one of several pastorates as the first female church leader. In my little moderate Baptist world, I was one of just a few women leading churches. We stuck out like sore thumbs. 

That eventually led to 2014, when I became the first woman to serve as senior minister at The Riverside Church in the City of New York. That great honor led many to think the question of whether women could be pastors was settled once and for all. 

It was not. 

In 2009, my marriage of almost 20 years unexpectedly ended in divorce. At the time, I didn’t know any pastors who had been divorced. As I lived through that pain, many people called to ask how to navigate such a turn of events, especially as a woman in the pulpit.

In 2016, I published an article about abortion in USA Today. This rushed many angry people to their keyboards to carefully explain what right I had or didn’t have to make decisions about my own body. (To be fair, many grateful people reached out, too.)  

No one, it seemed, had ever heard of a woman pastor talking about reproductive choice and her own experience. But every woman who has occupied a pulpit has had her journey around issues of childbearing or not because we are human beings, too.

And in 2019, when my five-year employment contract at The Riverside Church expired, I was summarily ushered out the door. As I exited, New York Post “reporters” were screaming in the church narthex about vibrators. I write about that experience in my book