By Jessica Griggs for Mennonite Church USA
Lea la versión en inglés aquí. ELKHART, Indiana (Mennonite Church USA) — Mennonite Church USA’s Women in Leadership Steering Committee recently bid farewell to two of the founding members, Linda Gehman Peachey and Erica Littlewolf, after more than a decade of service. The group, which empowers Mennonite women in leadership, especially by centering the voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) women, began meeting 2012, after a 2009 church-wide audit revealed a decline in the number of women providing leadership in Mennonite churches. Gehman Peachey and Littlewolf were among the first women asked to join the committee, and while others came and went, Gehman Peachey and Littlewolf remained consistent members since the beginning.
While on the WiL Steering Committee, Gehman Peachey and Littlewolf participated in a number of committee-wide initiatives, including developing the anti-patriarchy curriculum, Laboring Toward Wholeness, and planning Women Doing Theology conferences in 2014, 2016 and 2018.
“Having served on the WiL project since its inception, Linda and Erica helped shape the mission and direction,” said Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, MC USA’s denominational minster for peace and justice and current WiL staff person. “Their historical knowledge of the work of Women in Leadership has been invaluable to the ongoing work of supporting women in leadership positions and addressing the systemic issues of patriarchy and white supremacy within the church.”
Linda Gehman Peachey
Linda Gehman Peachey is a freelance writer, who previously worked with Mennonite Central Committee, as the director of women’s advocacy and co-director of peace and justice ministries. She lives in Lancaster, where she attends Blossom Hill Mennonite Church.
Gehman Peachey said that she often served as the group historian. Having been one of the first women to join the steering committee, she experienced a lot of the group’s history firsthand, and since she saw WiL as a sort of extension of the work she had done with women’s advocacy at MCC, keeping the history made sense. Gehman Peachey also said that she found the relationships she had built while working with MCC beneficial to the group.
She said her personal vision for WiL grew out of her “lived experience of sexism in the church and feeling excluded, like women were not full members.” Gehman Peachey said she wanted to help “address some of those realities, as well as continue to address the violence and silencing that women experience.” She lamented that “spiritually, the church has not been a nurturing place for women to develop healthy relationships with God, themselves and others.”
“I had the honor of co-facilitating a 10-week online course using the Laboring Toward Wholeness curriculum with Linda Gehman Peachey during the pandemic,” said Sue Park-Hur, MC USA’s director of racial/ethnic engagement and current WiL Steering Committee member. “Linda brought her experience from formerly heading MCC women’s advocacy and continued to expand on helping the church read the Bible from an Anabaptist women’s lens. I’ve always appreciated her brilliant, yet humble, posture when she leads. She will be dearly missed on the steering committee.”
“Being part of the Women in Leadership Steering Committee and working with this group has been one of the most meaningful and enriching experiences for me in the church,” said Gehman Peachey. “It was life-giving and created spaces for us to deal with difficult issues, while also modeling new ways of working together and being together as a mixed group of women of color and white women.”
Erica Littlewolf
Erica Littlewolf is Northern Cheyenne and Suhtai, and she currently resides on the land of the Northern Cheyene tribe of southeastern Montana. In addition to her work with the WiL Steering Committee, she has also worked for MCC Central States, with the Indigenous Visioning Circle. She grew up attending White River Cheyenne Mennonite Church.
Littlewolf said that she believes she was initially asked to join the group to represent both young women — she was in her early 30s when the group was first created — and Indigenous women.
“I, as one person, did feel a responsibility to represent not only my community and my local church, but my tribe, and then, I also felt a duty to represent, as best as I could, Indigenous people in general,” said Littlewolf.
In addition to representing young and Indigenous Mennonite women, Littlewolf said she felt that one of her biggest contributions to the group was representing single, divorced and childless women, as she was often the only person on the committee who fit into those demographics. She said that she sometimes had to draw attention to how she was being left out when the group’s conversation would drift toward talking about their kids, which reminded them that even in a group so focused on diversity, “it’s the human thing to leave people out.”
“Erica has been an important and critical voice in WiL, contributing her perspectives as an Indigenous woman. I’ve always appreciated her emphasis on defining the words we say, so we build a common vocabulary to have the conversations we need to have”, said Park-Hur. “I will miss her wisdom, wit and laughter.”
Each month, the committee participates in a two-hour call, with the first hour being dedicated to catching up and checking in with one another. Littlewolf recounted that, especially during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this time of sharing provided space for the women of the committee to be authentic in their isolation and build deeper relationships.
Once each year, as the budget allows, the steering committee gathers in person, generally with all of the women staying together in an Airbnb and cooking meals collectively. Both women remembered these gatherings fondly. They said that the meet-ups allowed for more connection and bonding than their monthly check-in calls.
“I think this committee was so fun. If undoing patriarchy and undoing sexism work is fun, this was fun,” said Littlewolf. “And it was mainly because of who I got to do the work with. I knew other people were doing their part also, instead of feeling like the only one that did anything and everyone else just saying they got busy. No, this was a really reliable group of people.”
The WiL Steering Committee has always consisted of a combination of five to six women, the majority of whom are BIPOC, in addition to a representative from MC USA staff. The steering committee is currently made up of Shannon Dycus, Katerina Gea, Sue Park-Hur, Bonita Rockingham, Abby Endashaw, Lynette Madrigal and staff person Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz. More information about the work that WiL does and the steering committee members can be found here.
Mennonite Church USA is an Anabaptist Christian denomination, founded in 2002 by the merger of the Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church. Members of this historic peace church seek to follow Jesus by rejecting violence and resisting injustice. MC USA’s Renewed Commitments state the following shared commitments among its diverse body of believers: to follow Jesus, witness to God’s peace and experience the transformation of the Holy Spirit. Mennoniteusa.org
MC USA’s Women in Leadership works to dismantle patriarchal systems in MC USA by empowering women to live out the call of God on their lives, increase their capacities, and contribute their wisdom in congregations, area conferences, agencies and institutions.