Social Change as Mission and Intersectional Sisterhood as Reflexive Influence: A Twin Story of United Methodist Women

Abstract

Essay Abstract The role of agency, solidarity, and resistance, on the part of United Methodist Women and their predecessor organizations, in effecting social change is one side of the story of women in mission. Equally important is the reflexive impact of engagement in mission on shaping the collective identity of these lay women in mission. This twin story of agency and reflexivity is a multiyear, multilayered, and multistage formation in mission narrative. Methodist women responded to the sacred gospel call as well as the “woman question” by an ongoing process of negotiating their countless individual identities into a collective agency for social responsibility. A key struggle for social change is how lay women organized for mission in the Methodist Church addressed the issue of differences among women, with particularities of race and ethnicity in the U.S. while striving to expand their own collective identity. It is a story of a multipronged strategy of operating from the margins and along with the margins, in order to bring about change in the center.