This month, we're spotlighting women whose professional and personal contributions help shape our collective future — women who are making points we should all listen to. The people you will read about are remarkable, but this is not a contest or a ranking. Rather, we present women whose contributions, just like those of so many other people of all genders, warrant our attention. Listen up.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF WEST TENNESSEE
The Bishop is stubborn. You can tell because her favorite Biblical personality is Jonah, who famously was told by God to go to Nineveh. “And Jonah was like, no, I don’t think so,” says Phoebe Roaf, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee. “I’m going to go the opposite direction. And then of course we know what happened for God to finally get his attention. But I feel like my spiritual journey has been a lot like Jonah’s.”
Bishop Phoebe was consecrated and ordained as bishop in May 2019 following several instances of telling people, “No, I don’t think so.” Stubborn, yes. But also persuadable.
Hers was a roundabout journey from growing up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to heading up a diocese (although no whales were involved). She got degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and earned her law degree from the University of Arkansas – Little Rock. She clerked for two years for a judge in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked at a law firm in New Orleans. Along the way, she was devoted to her church as an active layperson and her abilities were noticed.
“My first priest asked me about a calling to ordination, probably in the mid-1990s,” she says. “But it took a number of people saying that, over a number of years, for me to hear that God was calling me to something different.”
“I think we have a very significant environmental crisis and not sure if we can pull that genie back into the bottle. I think we have a political system that may be broken beyond repair, and we’re having a serious reckoning with the extent to which racism is embedded in all aspects of our lives as Americans, and especially here in Memphis.” — Bishop Phoebe Roaf
She finally said yes to the process, but wasn’t convinced she would ever be ordained as a priest. “Of course, you know God has the last laugh and it did work out,” she says. “And when I made it through, I loved parish ministry so much, loved being with a single congregation and journeying with people as their relationship with Christ strengthened.”
Roaf was in her forties when she attended seminary, so when she found her joy being in parish ministry, she calculated that she’d do that for 20 years and then retire. Evidently, God was still chuckling, because that’s not quite how it worked out, she says: “Some folks that I really trusted and respected in the church said they thought, given my public policy and legal background, that I had a great profile to be a bishop.”
She certainly had the liturgical and pastoral aspects down, but, “when you’re a bishop, you’re at the 35,000-foot level,” she says. There are meetings and administration and “helping an entire diocesan system figure out what is our purpose in this era of our lives together.” In a word: vision.
So it happened that, in her fifties, Roaf was elected bishop of the diocese that covers the state between the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. That made her the first woman and first Black person in that position, and she was ready. “I’m a Southerner through and through,” she says, “but I felt I needed to learn and I couldn’t unilaterally formulate a vision for the diocese without a whole lot of input and feedback.”
And then the pandemic happened. “In some ways, I think Covid means some things are going to take longer, but in other ways, it’s expediting things,” Bishop Phoebe says. “I think we have a very significant environmental crisis and not sure if we can pull that genie back into the bottle. I think we have a political system that may be broken beyond repair, and we’re having a serious reckoning with the extent to which racism is embedded in all aspects of our lives as Americans, and especially here in Memphis.”
Yet Roaf remains optimistic about the city. “We’re small enough that it is possible to be a part of the conversation and to make a difference,” she says.
The diocese, she believes, can enable that conversation. “There are such extremes in Shelby County: great wealth and great poverty and tremendous suffering,” she says. “The church has to say something about the conditions of the most vulnerable members of society, but it’ll be up to the diocese as a whole to figure out in what small way might the Episcopal church collaborate and partner with folks who are already doing amazing work. I really want our diocese to be a full contributing member of this community and to work to make things better.”
