If the Door Doesn’t Swing Wide, It Will Slam Shut

and hit you in the ass

August 7, 2025

I’m a final-year seminary student preparing for ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). That means I’ve written scores of essays—ad nauseam—about the kind of faith leader I hope to be. And I’ve read just as many from my peers.

One theme appears again and again in these reflections: inclusion.

“I want to be part of a church that affirms women in leadership.”
“I long for a ministry setting where I can bring my full self to the pulpit.”
“My call is to help the church truly welcome people like me.”

These are beautiful and important visions. But too often, they stop at the threshold of one’s own identity. We continue to be—shockingly (or not)—self-obsessed.

Inclusion must mean more than include me. It must mean include all. Otherwise, it’s not inclusion—it’s assimilation. It’s self-preservation dressed up as progress.

To my White sisters in ministry—especially those newly welcomed into pulpits and positions of power—don’t confuse being let in with the door being open. Don’t mistake your acceptance as proof that the church is now inclusive. Just because someone holds the door for you doesn’t mean they won’t slam it shut behind you. In fact, your presence may be used as the very excuse for locking others out: We’re not [fill in the blank]—we have a woman pastor.

We must be wiser than tokenism. We must see beyond symbolic gestures and individualized progress. Inclusion isn’t real if it only reaches as far as you.

This isn’t a guilt trip—it’s a gut check. If I hadn’t accidentally landed in a BA program in African American Studies (I was after an elective), I wouldn’t know even a tenth of what I do now. It was chance, dumb luck if you will, that cracked open my lens. Which is to say: learning this stuff isn’t automatic. It's not intuitive. It’s work. And it’s never done.

If this feels harsh, consider the long and painful history of selective inclusion.

The early U.S. women’s suffrage movement was notoriously exclusionary. While leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for White women’s right to vote, they often distanced themselves from Black women. Stanton once argued that educated White women were more deserving of the vote than “Sambo.” Black suffragists like Ida B. Wells had to fight for inclusion within a movement that claimed to speak for all women.

Similarly, the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s often sidelined issues of race, sexuality, and class. White middle-class women centered their own experiences while ignoring the struggles of women of color, queer women, and poor women. Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw had to name these exclusions and build new frameworks—like intersectionality—to tell the whole truth.

Even today, this dynamic is alive and well. The church will fast-track White women into leadership while continuing to box out Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, differently abled, and leaders who aren’t rich in connections or resources. And when those leaders do make it through, watch closely—because visibility isn’t the same as power, and tokenism wears a thousand faces.

May we be challenged to tell the truth—not only about our own stories of marginalization, but also about the layered, interconnected struggles of others.

May we use our seats at the table well and very well AND pull up more chairs.

May we lift as we climb, as Mary Church Terrell told us.

Listen: if the door doesn’t swing wide enough for everyone, it’s not the church. It’s a clubhouse with a cross on the wall.

And God is calling us to so much more than that.

Read more for yourself:

  1. Stanton’s racist comments – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in The Woman's Bible (racism and Christianity have been longtime bedfellows) and speeches post-Civil War, used derogatory comparisons when arguing for White women's suffrage over Black men’s. See:

    • Faye E. Dudden, "Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America," Oxford University Press, 2011.

  2. Ida B. Wells’ exclusion from suffrage marches – Wells was told to march at the back during the 1913 suffrage parade in D.C.

    • Paula Giddings, “Ida: A Sword Among Lions,” HarperCollins, 2008.

  3. Intersectionality – Crenshaw coined this term to critique the way systems of oppression overlap. Lorde and hooks likewise critiqued White feminism for excluding race/class/sexuality.

    • Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.

    • Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider.

    • bell hooks, “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism,” South End Press, 1981.