When she was a young seminarian, the president of the Unitarian denomination actively opposed the ordination of women. He couldn't keep women from entering the seminary, but "he was very effective at discouraging congregations from hiring women."

Fast forward 20 years. Miller serves as interim senior minister at Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universality Church. Women now outnumber men in Unitarian Universalist seminaries.

Women have made uneven progress across faiths. But the stained-glass ceiling is a reality in many faiths that ordain women.

Rabbi Judy Shanks leads a task force of Union of American Hebrew Congregations that will look into why more women rabbis aren't taking their place on Reform bimahs.

"Is it that they don't apply? Is it that the congregations aren't ready?" she asked.

Shanks enjoys an unusual position as one of two senior rabbis at Lafayette's Reform Temple Isaiah.

More women are graduating from seminaries, but in most faiths few are senior or solo clergy.

"If you have a senior rabbi who is a man, and the congregation is looking for an associate rabbi, they will look for a man or a woman," Shanks said. "But if the senior rabbi is a woman, they will say 'We already have a Advertisement woman.' So that's another piece we're looking at."

The June 28 "State of Women in Baptist Life" survey shows Baptist congregations led by women are increasing -- but slowly.

"Women are inching up, but we still have a long, long way to go," said Karen Massey, religion professor at Mercer University in Atlanta and a member of the group that commissioned the study. "The more mainline churches are years ahead of us."

Nationwide, about 600 women ordained in moderate and liberal Baptist denominations serve as senior or solo pastors. In California, of a total of 10 female pastors, three women head congregations.

What clergywomen in other faiths call "the stained-glass ceiling" is more like a skylight in Miller's Unitarian Universalist faith. Women hold forth each Sunday on more than half of the denomination's pulpits.

She was the first female minister to bear a child during her tenure. Now, fertile leaders have formed a support group: They are the "Reverend Mothers."

"If the senior ministers of large churches tend to be male, (that is) because they are toward the end of their careers," said Unitarian Universalist Association spokeswoman Janet Hayes.

In the mainstream Presbyterian faith, women make up close to half the clergy.

But in most faiths, female clergy -- especially senior clergy -- are in the minority.

Women make up 27 percent of United Methodist clergy and 24 percent of that faith's senior or solo pastors.

Among Evangelical Lutherans, women comprise about 25 percent of more than 3,000 active clergy. Of 12,000 Episcopal priests, 4,000, or one-third, are women.

The trend holds true in the Jewish faith. Female rabbis in the Reform denomination number 464; in the Conservative, they are a slim fraction of that number.

The Orthodox denomination has withstood pressure to ordain women. The Modern Orthodoxy is gradually developing comparable-track educational programs to prepare women to work as teachers or advisers on Jewish law.

One Walnut Creek faith leader hit the ceiling hard when a sense of longing to become a priest first stirred her. Her calling meant leaving the Catholic Church. Finding the right place for herself required "a series of unlocking steps" out and away from the world Sylvia Vasquez knew.

Vasquez struck another barrier when she and her husband moved north to Fresno from San Antonio to help care for his 90-year-old mother. Episcopal Bishop John-David Schofield has barred women from the priesthood in the San Joaquin Diocese. Today, Vasquez is senior pastor of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Walnut Creek.

Barring all women from a diocese is "getting to be more of an anomaly than a reality" among Episcopals, said sociologist Jack Carroll, professor emeritus at Duke University Divinity School, who has tracked the movement of female clergy.

His 2001 study found that female faith leaders made up 20 percent of clergy in mainline Protestant churches, but they comprised 3 percent in historic African-American churches and 1 percent in conservative denominations.

"You don't see (women) in evangelical churches, unless the woman has started her own church, and there are numbers of African-American women who have started their own storefront churches," he said. "They don't show up on anyone's radar."

Despite the objections of some longtime members, the Conservative Congregation B'nai Shalom last month hired a woman as a senior rabbi -- one of a very small number of women ordained in the denomination in the United States.

"There were people who said, 'I am going to have to leave if you do this,'" said Shanks. "And they went ahead, they said she was the best person for the job, and they hired her."

Temple Isaiah bucks the trend: It recently hired another woman as associate rabbi.

Even some vocal advocates for women question the value of achieving senior status.

They include Barbara Brown Zikmund, the author of the groundbreaking "Women Clergy: An Uphill Calling."

"Some people will say this senior pastor thing is a whole male thing," she said. "What makes you important is you are top dog. There are women who don't want to be a part of this pecking order. They want to be part of a co-pastor, collaborative team. They don't want to play this game. They want to transform."

Managing a large religious organization with a complex budget disconnects the spiritual leader from the most meaningful aspects of ministry, she said.

Others say women miss out on the experience of preaching by settling into care-giving roles, such as youth minister or pastor in charge of senior outreach.

"There's something about the power of the pulpit," said Baptist Women in Ministry's Massey. "They are given power, prestige. If men would step aside and let women preach, it would become a more natural thing."

The group last year launched the Martha Stearns Marshall Day of Preaching, named for an early orator. This year, 50 congregations took part.

"It's not a lot, but it's a good start," Massey said.

Vasquez says she feels comfortable in the pulpit, and the congregation has embraced her energetic style.

"It was a big step for them," she said. "They had never had a woman priest before. It's always that first step that's hard. At the end of the day, what's important is your ministry, who you are."

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