Two days after she officially assumed the mantle as the senior minister of Riverside Church, the Rev Dr Amy K. Butler, the first woman to hold the job, was chuckling on the couch of her 19th-floor office in the church's Gothic tower in Morningside Heights.

War stories? Does she have any war stories? Well ... .

There was the man in New Orleans who, after hearing Butler's first sermon, announced that watching a woman preach was akin to watching a dog walk on its hind legs. There was the hospital security guard in Washington who insisted several years ago that she must be a sickly congregant's girlfriend, not his pastor, until she directed him to her photo on the church's website.