Men can join the ministry, but how can Protestant women give their lives
to serving God? One way is to join a sisterhood. Today, although few
laymen are aware of it, more than 60,000 women, mostly in Europe, have
taken up the religious life within Protestantism, in organizations that
range from convents of veiled nuns to mother houses of deaconesses
devoted to public service. Like Roman Catholic sisters and nuns, Protestant women seeking the
religious life have a wide range of vocations to choose from. There are
cloistered Benedictine convents in the Church of England whose nuns
attend daily Mass and recite the monastic Divine Office in English.
U.S. Methodist deaconesses, on the other hand, take no vows, dress in
the latest fashions , follow no rule, and work at such
chores as teaching Sunday school and visiting the sick. Coming
somewhere in between are the majority of Lutheran and Reformed
deaconesses: most wear some sort of distinctive garb halfway between
that of a nurse and a nun, promise to remain single as long as they are
in the service of the church, and in their life strike a balance
between prayer and service. “A Helper of Many.” Religious life for women has a long tradition in the
Christian church. The Apostle Paul, in a letter to the Christians of
Rome, commended “our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at
Cenchreae . . . for she has been a helper of many and of myself as
well.” Out of that beginning grew orders of deaconesses for service and
of conventual nuns for contemplation. The great Protestant reformers of
the 16th century rejected the ascetic ideal of post-Renaissance
convents; serious thought of establishing some form of Protestant
sisterhood is scarcely 150 years old. Within the Anglican Communion, the Rome-admiring Oxford movement led, in
mid-19th century, to a revival of both monks and nuns. The modern
deaconess movement began with the Rev. Theodor Fliedner ,
pastor of a Lutheran parish in the German town of Kaisers-werth.
Inspired in part by the Roman Catholic order of nursing sisters
established by France's St. Vincent de Paul, Fliedner in 1836 drew up
plans for a Protestant Association of Christian Nursing; by 1849 he had
brought Lutheran deaconesses to France, Britain and the U.S. The 25,000 deaconesses associated with the Kaiserswerth movement still
serve primarily in hospitals, but other Protestant sisters undertake
almost every ministerial duty short of celebrating the communion
service. In Germany, Darmstadt's Ecumenical Sisters of Mary do
missionary work among the poor, perform religious plays for pilgrim
audiences, run a retreat house. Organized in 1946 to serve penance for
Nazi crimes against world Jewry, the sisters eat breakfast standing up
in commemoration of concentration-camp routine, recite special prayers
on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. Another German sisterhood, the
Casteller Ring of Schloss Schwanberg, has an intellectual apostolate:
teachers all, the sisters of this order wear street clothes instead of
habits, but make promises of chastity and recite community prayers in
their own chapel.
