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Week of 23 October 1998 Vol. II, No. 11 Feature Article In the spirit of its frontier namesake Wiborg to be named Pioneer Woman by STH's Shaw Center By Amy E. Dean Margaret Suber Wiborg, director of the School of Theology's 20-year-old Anna Howard Shaw Center, has a lot of illustrative tales about the Center's colorful namesake. The identification Wiborg feels with Shaw is just about palpable. The second woman to graduate from STH (in 1878), Shaw was the first woman to be ordained by any branch of the Methodist Church (1880), the first ordained woman to preach in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, or London, and the first to be awarded a Distinguished Service Medal in World War I. She was, according to Wiborg, a self-described pot-stirrer and a leader in the women's suffrage movement. Wiborg, who joined the Shaw Center in 1984 as its first full-time director, will be honored by the Center as its fourth Pioneer Woman -- one who embodies "those values expressed in the life of Anna Howard Shaw" -- during a Re-Calling with Margaret on October 29. But before Wiborg can talk about herself, she has more to say about Shaw. "She was going to preach at a lumber camp," says Wiborg, "but the train didn't go all the way. She had to hire a less-than-respectable lumberjack type to take her to the camp. As they rode along, Shaw realized that he was taking her away from her destination. So she pulled a little revolver on him and spent the entire night wide awake, holding that tiny gun on this enormous man until he got her where she wanted to go. The next day "Shaw preached to a full house," says Wiborg. "It turns out that as soon as the lumberjack dropped her off, he headed straight for a saloon and told all the men about the tiny woman with the tiny gun who held him at bay. Of course the men had to see for themselves who this little gun-toting preacher woman was." Wiborg began her career in the trenches as well. After earning an undergraduate degree from Duke in 1962 and a master's in religious education from Union Theological Seminary in 1965, she took her concern about racism and white privilege and worked in a church in East Harlem. There, she says, she learned just how pervasive the evils of prejudice were. Margaret Wiborg Photo by Kalman Zabarsky During that time she married, lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and followed her husband to New Haven when he became a church pastor. That setting gave her the opportunity to direct a preschool where the teachers were mothers from local housing projects. "It became one of the first day-care centers," she says. "This is where my work with groups of women began. They helped me to see that it's not the credentials that get the job done, but how you're able to work together." Wiborg had two children along the way and moved to Boston in 1979. Here she worked in a prestigious preschool and was astounded by the extreme differences between her experiences in the inner city and in an area of privilege. Taking a course at BU sparked her enthusiasm to return to religious studies, and she went on to enroll in "courses that didn't exist" when she studied in seminary, such as those dealing with women in the Bible and women's role in religion. She would eventually earn a master's in sacred theology from STH in 1994. When Wiborg was hired as director of the Shaw Center in 1984, she fashioned her role as "identifying the needs and finding the people and the money to do something about it." One of the needs she identified was finding more role models for female students. "Many women told me they had never had the opportunity to hear other women preach," she says. That led to the creation of Women and the Word, the Center's national preaching event, held each spring. Bishops, teachers, artists, and theologians serve as the primary leadership as women get to hear other women preach. The Center also manages the Women's Oral History Project, a compilation of 10 histories of women in mission and ministry, recorded on tape and transcribed, available to the public at the STH library. Another project, the Center's recently completed Clergywomen's Retention Study, is a national survey of United Methodist clergywomen that looks at how women see their role as ministers and what influences them to stay in the parish or move on to other forms of ministry. The study, says Wiborg, sounding much like Shaw's spiritual descendant, "is being carefully considered by various levels of the United Methodist Church and is not sitting on a shelf somewhere." The Re-Calling with Margaret and celebration of two decades of the Anna Howard Shaw Center, on Thursday, October 29, begins with a worship at Marsh Chapel, includes a historical tribute and birthday reception for the Center, and ends with a celebration dinner and the award presentation to Wiborg. For more information or to attend, call the Center at 353-3075.