Female Of The Species

By NADYA LABI

I love being a woman. We are courageous and emotionally wealthy," Patsy Clairmont declares. The silver-haired author of Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer is framed by four overhead TV screens as she roams a circular stage of the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Ore., one of a series of speakers commanding the attention of the 12,000 women gathered there. She stops abruptly and pulls hundreds of rubber bands out of a bag, an embarrassment of riches meant to represent the psychic entanglement she has had to deal with. "This is me," she says. "All of me." Agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, she explains, kept her housebound for two years.

Clairmont isn't alone in her troubles. Another keynote speaker was hospitalized for depression, another lost two of her sons, a third was abandoned by her father. Their burdens differ, but they are all Women of Faith, adherents of an evangelical Christian movement that is rapidly becoming both complement and antidote to the all-male Promise Keepers. And despite the problems, the tenor of the weekend becomes resolutely cheerful. "Joy" is invoked almost as frequently as God. Members of Women of Faith don't trade promises or admonishments; they swap stories and compliments. Since 1996, when the for-profit enterprise was founded, predominantly white women of all Christian denominations have been drawn to revivals staged in churches and cozy sports arenas across the nation. For a $52 advance-registration fee, women can take part in a spiritual slumber party punctuated by hushed confessionals, occasional jokes about PMS and giggles aplenty.

The sisterhood is getting crowded with similar Christian groups. The women's ministry of James Dobson's Focus on the Family expects to pull in tens of thousands of participants at five conferences this year, and African-American pastor T.D. Jakes will host a "Woman, Thou Art Loosed!" rally at Atlanta's Georgia Dome this week. But WOF attracts more followers than its competitors. Attendance has grown from 36,000 in 1996 to 156,000 in 1997 to a projected 350,000 by year's end. It is a subsidiary of New Life Clinics, a private company that is the largest Christian counseling chain in the U.S. WOF, with headquarters in Plano, Texas, has its own management; its revenues, largely from fees and souvenir sales, totaled $6.1 million in 1997. They are expected to more than double this year. The appeal? Good old-fashioned therapy, cloaked in the Ten Commandments.

The idea, well, it began with a man. Stephen Arterburn, who owns 10% of New Life Clinics and is paid a salary of $160,000 plus stock options, had offered a program of New Life seminars, which failed dismally. "Those were seminars where you had to admit you had a problem before you came," he says. "I thought we could reach more people if we could ask, What can we do for you?" That psychotherapy-under-another-name worked, and the movement collected a roster of upbeat dispensers of inspiration, such as Sheila Walsh, author of Never Give It Up, and Barbara Johnson, of Where Does a Mother Go to Resign? To enhance the illusion of intimacy, the speakers eschew the talk-and-run approach customary at most mass gatherings and listen intently to soft Christian rock and tales of hard knocks.

"Ladies, when God made you, he broke the mold. Be aware of who you are. Eliminate the negative!" preaches Thelma Wells, one of the few African-American regulars, who catalogs her battle against financial ruin. Everyone has a tale of woe overcome that underlines the theme of the conference: life is tough on women, but God is ever loving. Kathy Wilson, a mother of three who runs a pottery studio in Vancouver, Wash., heeded the message. "These women are sharing things that most women are embarrassed to talk about," she says. "We feel vulnerable. We all have problems, and God is there for us."

Women of Faith advocates warm hugs, not revolution. At Memorial Coliseum, "ladies" and "gals" are still occasional appellations, and the guest of honor is indubitably male. "He is the Lord forever," the ladies sing. But don't expect the group to follow the lead of the Southern Baptist Convention, which declared last month that "a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." WOF executive director Christie Barnes maintains a decorous silence on the subject: "We don't make comments about the whole submission issue. We just believe God will bring everything to light." That's the group's credo: Keep it light on the sermons, heavy on the anecdotes, and they will come. In Portland, Walsh brushed up against the issue of abortion, revealing her fear of bearing a child with Down syndrome, then retreated from taking any political position. Johnson talked about her son's homosexuality but stopped short of promoting or disapproving of gay rights.

Such circumspection has helped forestall criticism. Mainline Protestant organizations that have been critical of Promise Keepers are inclined to reserve judgment on Women of Faith; meanwhile, members of the religious right don't complain about its nonactivist stance. "The purpose of these conferences is to change the heart," says Tom Minnery, a vice president of Focus on the Family. "And obviously, from a proper heart comes a proper world view."

WOF has already scheduled its first mass meeting for couples, and plans to target children too. Is it expanding too fast too soon--like its male counterpart? Arterburn for one isn't fazed by the Promise Keepers' downslide. "We are tapping into a need for a deeper connection among women and for spiritual renewal," he says. "Women of Faith was not the genius of our organization. I think God allowed it to grow."

--Reported by Richard N. Ostling/Portland

With reporting by Richard N. Ostling/Portland