FULLERTON : Mother and Daughter Serve God

Gayle Schoepf and her daughter Elaine work together in the family business: serving God. One preaches and the other feeds the poor, but they say they are tending branches on the same devotional tree.

The two were ordained as ministers in a double ceremony on June 28, 1987, at the First Christian Church in Fullerton.

Gayle, 62, is now the minister at Orangethorpe Christian Church. She preaches to a congregation of about 75 people and works on the revision of her church’s hymnal to remove sexist language.

Elaine, 32, runs the Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Service’s food and clothing distribution center, which she said helps 400 to 600 people each month.

“This is to me as much a form of ministry as teaching in a church on Sunday,” Elaine Schoepf said recently as she and her mother sat in the bustling distribution center. Her mother is the president of the board of directors of the interfaith center and sometimes comes by to help her daughter distribute food, toys and clothes.

Elaine Schoepf said she felt drawn to religion from an early age. “If it had been another time in history, I probably would have been a missionary.”

The Schoepfs are members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which was founded by frontier groups in Pennsylvania and Kentucky in the 19th Century.

Gayle Schoepf would have become a minister years before but didn’t see it as possible, she said. “Back in those days, there weren’t that many women ministers,” she said.

Gayle Schoepf said she was brought up in a religious family--her mother and father were Sunday school directors. Because she didn’t think that she could become a minister, she planned to meet and marry a minister when she was at Anderson University in Indiana. That didn’t happen.

Studying to be ministers has brought the mother and daughter closer, they both said. “No matter what my age is, when I went to seminary, I became just like those kids who were 24 to 32,” said Gayle Schoepf, who was 57 when she graduated from the School of Theology in Claremont.

Her daughter studied at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

Women ministers are “going to be on the cutting edge because it’s been an area of men,” Gayle Schoepf said. “For women to decide they have these gifts of ministry, they have to be . . . “

“Brave or crazy,” cut in Elaine Schoepf. “Brave or crazy,” her mother repeated.

One of Gayle Schoepf’s projects is her work on the Disciples Hymnal Development Committee to complete a new hymnal for 1995. An important change is to make references to God without gender. “I haven’t (led prayers) using the word Father in about 10 years, and I don’t think anyone has noticed,” she said.

“God is so much more than an old guy with a white beard,” Elaine Schoepf said.

“We’re searching for new metaphors for God,” her mother said. “That is a fun task.”

Elaine Schoepf said she has no plans to lead a congregation now, even though her mother calls her a “sensational preacher.”

“It’s not where I want to be right now,” Elaine Schoepf said. “I think that the work of the Gospel is to get out in the community and prove God’s love--not by pushing words in peoples’ faces, but by doing what Jesus taught us to do: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the mourning . . . and frankly, irritate the comfortable,” she said with a grin.