First Woman’s Church Puts Feminine Focus on Beliefs : Worship: Leader says she founded congregation eight years ago because Christianity failed to address her concerns as a black and as a woman.
They write their own personalized “bibles,” they have created a mythological twin sister for Jesus and they pray to “Father/Mother/Everything God.”
Services celebrate the divine nature of what this church calls the four phases of womanhood: the menstrual cycle, virginity, fertility and menopause.
And except for three special services a year, no men are allowed.
This congregation is called the First Woman’s Church in the City of the Angels, and it celebrates its eighth anniversary today. Its reason for being is to “change the formula of the mother’s milk--the nurturing substance this universe seems to thrive on,” said the Rev. Crystal Bujol, the church’s founder. “Mother is the first god that any of us know, our greatest teacher.”
Bujol, 56, is a quietly charismatic woman who has spent most of her life in search of her own reflection in God and a church that spoke to her as an African-American woman.
“While I appreciate Christian values, there was also the black side and the female side of me that was not nurtured in the way I needed to be fed and nurtured,” she said.
“My question always was: ‘When is this going to address me as a person? When do I get to be like a Jesus? When is God going to have a daughter? When is there going to be a black savior?’ ”
Most members are African-Americans, but Woman’s Church has attracted some Anglos and one minister who is Latina and American Indian. “Everyone is welcome, but this is an Afro-centric church,” Bujol said.
Julia Coon, a doctorate candidate in USC’s School of Religion, says that Woman’s Church “could only come out of an African-American perspective. The emphasis on Egypt as a spiritual homeland and as source of all humanity is not common to a lot of white churches.”
Coon, who is white, said she loves Jessie Mae Chris(t), the twin sister the church created for Jesus. “I think she’s terrific,” Coon said. “She’s the comforter who’s here now. They made her up, but they still like the idea that she’s around.”
Jessie Mae is an “African-American goddess--the comforter who is a gift from the African-American community to the world,” Bujol said. The parenthetical “t” in Jessie Mae’s name is silent and “symbolic of the cross, the path, the way,” Bujol said, adding that it means that “with Jessie Mae you get to carve out your own way.”
As part of her research into women’s spirituality and feminist theology, Coon has been attending services regularly for about six months and calls herself a participant-observer. She said she knows of no other female-only Christian church.
If men were present, Coon said, “some things that happen in the service could not happen. There is a lot of talk about female body functions. If men were there, it would change things.”
The church teaches that everyone is part of the divine mind and that there is no such thing as sin, Coon said. “You just have to think correctly,” she said. “I think this is too much of a take-charge religion for women who still want the male God to tell them what to do. They want to have someone to blame.”
The congregation meets in a converted office suite in a Crenshaw district shopping center that was damaged during last year’s riots. About 125 members are carried on the church rolls, but attendance at Sunday services averages 25 to 40.
At a typical service, chairs are arranged in a circle around a table holding several flickering candles, and the scent of burning incense drifts across the room. An American Indian with a papoose on her back is among the symbols of femininity on the center table.
Every service includes the lighting of candles to the four phases of womanhood--a red candle for the menstrual cycle, white for virginity, green for fertility and black for menopause.
“We light these candles every Sunday to remind us of the beauty and the perfection and the loveliness and the spiritual nature and the divine nature of each one of these phases,” Bujol said. “And we talk about that every Sunday.”
The church’s teachings echo elements of metaphysics, mysticism, New Age thought and Christianity. But the clearest influence comes from Religious Science, the Los Angeles-based church that teaches individuals to look within themselves to find the essence of God.
Bujol readily acknowledges all of those influences, but she maintains that “African philosophy is the root of all religion. We want to acknowledge that all of Woman’s Church’s teachings came out of our African heritage.”
Services resemble a support group as much as a religious ritual, with women bringing the most personal details of their joy and their pain before the entire congregation rather than discussing them only in the privacy of a minister’s office.
Coon is impressed by the level of participation allowed in the services, saying that she has seen women talk for half an hour in the candle-lighting ceremony.
“If they cry, other women console them,” she said.
Mae Lee, 18, said Woman’s Church has taught her that she does not have to just sit and listen because she is a woman.
“At other churches you go sit and listen to the preacher preach, but at Woman’s Church you get the chance to voice your opinion,” she said.
Woman’s Church tries to encourage independence, said the Rev. Victoria Lee-Owens, an assistant minister. “You don’t always have to ask others--including ministers--what to do,” she said. “Wherever you are it’s OK because you’re still on the path. There is no right or wrong point. You’re at the right place where you should be at that time.”
Each member is a “graduate Christian” who writes her own “bible” to record her family history and genealogy and to commit to paper the songs, prayers and proverbs passed down from generations.
At Woman’s Church, the feminine is a concept broader than the female sex, encompassing the “nurturing, comforting, creative aspect of our being,” Bujol said. The feminine, she said, is the same as life-giving, birth-giving, and important among those births is “giving birth to our ideas.”
While that philosophy encourages men to get in touch with the feminine aspects of their being, Bujol said, Woman’s Church is “where women come together to gain deeper insight into the soul of the woman within.”
Some women may bash men when they start attending, Bujol said, but those attitudes are not indulged for long “because we remind folks that the purpose of our church is to heal and to lift the feminine. And you can do that without tearing down the masculine.”
Bujol was born in South-Central Los Angeles, graduated from Jefferson High School and attended several colleges intermittently over nearly 20 years before dropping out of UCLA.
She worked in data processing and was director of training at a Los Angeles computer school before becoming a full-time minister in 1981. She has been married four times and has five children--three of her own and two from her husbands’ previous marriages--three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
She decided to organize her church in 1980 after she completed a workbook for the Church of Religious Science. When the person who had given her the assignment decided not to use the workbook, she used it as the text for classes she organized.
The next spring she founded her first congregation, called Family Church. Woman’s Church followed four years later.
“There have been times when I’ve had services, and no one was there except me,” she said. “But when you’re doing something you believe in, you have to keep going.”
As Bujol began to shape the idea for Woman’s Church, she said, she knew the congregation would have total freedom to deal with women’s issues and shatter some of the myths terrorizing women.
She wanted to shatter some of the myths women were subjected to, especially those that made women feel that they were victims of their bodies. She remembers that as a junior high school student she saw a film “that brutalized women’s thinking about the menstrual cycle to the point where after seeing it, I asked my mother: ‘When do men get to be penalized?’ ”
She wanted to raise women’s consciousness about the menstrual cycle, virginity, fertility, menopause and pregnancy out of wedlock.
She was married when her first child was born, but not when she became pregnant, she said, “and the horrors I experienced in school, in my neighborhood and in my church. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she collected herself. “As much as I loved my church, thinking about (how she was treated) now makes me want to throw up,” she said. “It enrages me.”
Changing attitudes--Bujol would say reaching a healing--requires changing the formula of the mother’s milk, whether the mother figure is female or a single male parent.
“The words that come from the mother are what set the mold for our lives,” she said. “If mothers have been taught not to like women, that dislike spills out in the mother’s milk when they have a daughter. If a woman has anger toward men, that gets passed on in the mother’s milk. . . .
“It’s a gift to humanity if women love each other,” she said. “In order to do that, we have to love ourselves.”
