Prayer Shawl Ministries and Women's Theological Imagination by Bowman Donna;

Prayer Shawl Ministries and Women's Theological Imagination by Bowman Donna;

Author:Bowman, Donna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


Her commentary would sound familiar to Carolyn and Gwendolyn: “It is a mourning song, a lament for a lost sister or friend. But it is also a song about work. When a woman dies, someone else must pick up the tasks she left.”[54]

In most of the groups I contacted, it was commonplace for the shawl makers to buy their own yarn—if not all the time, certainly with regularity. Some of the women I interviewed were sensitive to the limited funds of their group’s members—older people on a fixed income, or a community in a lower socioeconomic stratum. Josephine, one of the National Baptist shawl makers in the Midwest, mentioned that her group had made formal requests to major yarn manufacturers for donations, on church letterhead, and had received yarn twice from one of them: “And that is because some of my girls just didn’t have money. This is an urban area and some of them just did not have the money. I also have a few senior citizens on a fixed income, they don’t have money for yarn. We keep new yarn for anyone who wants it to use for their project.”[55] If a group leader is willing to be a fundraiser, it’s possible to set a policy like the one at the organ recovery agency: Nobody pays for their own yarn. Clara, the energetic staff member who organizes the shawl group, told me, as just one example of her efforts, about going to a large corporation to talk about the program in connection with the business’s casual dress day, where employees can wear blue jeans to work for a donation, and a charity is designated for those funds. “They’ve donated money two years in a row,” she told me. “And all the money we get donated, we use to buy more yarn. Constantly buy more yarn. . . . And we supply all our volunteers with yarn. They don’t buy their own yarn.”[56]

Of course, with the vast majority of shawl ministries operating within churches, a fundraising apparatus already exists through the church’s general offering or stewardship programs. Out of the thirty-six church-affiliated groups I contacted, just over a dozen indicated that the church holds their funds. Juanita, the Northeastern Catholic, has an account at the church to accept donations and funds raised at the group’s pancake breakfasts. She commented, though, that her fellow parishioners sometimes make some incorrect assumptions about the ministry’s budget. “And people are amazed,” she told me, “because a couple of years ago I gave a presentation after mass, because we were running out of funds. And a couple of people came up to me and said, ‘Well, we thought the church bought the yarn,’ and I was like, ‘No . . .’”[57] I’m sure she’s not alone. Lay ministries have the imprimatur of the church, but whether they have general fund resources to draw upon is no doubt highly variable, congregation to congregation.

Some lucky (or assertive) shawl ministries have funds allocated from the church’s general revenue.



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