Chapter 7
Evangelical Roots of Biblical Feminism
It comes as a surprise to most Evangelicals — if not a shock — to discover that the feminist movement that has completely revolutionized male-female relationships in the 20th century has its origins — not in Marxist socialism, nor in secular humanism, nor even in theological liberalism, but in the great evangelical and holiness revivals of the last two centuries. Donald Dayton asserts, in Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, that "modern revivalism gave birth to the women's rights movement."1 He points out that "a recent anthology of The Feminist Papers collected by Alice Rossi begins to set the record straight by tracing the roots of American feminism to the revivalism of Charles G. Finney and the reform movements it spawned."2 Janette Hassey, in her study of "Evangelical Women in Public Ministry Around the Turn of the Century" agrees: "Evangelical feminism in America first surfaced in the mid-nineteenth century and accelerated at the turn of the century . . . [It] mobilized women and freed leaders such as Phoebe Palmer and Frances Willard to preach."3
These movements, however, were foreshadowed in the rise of the Quakers, but even more so in the great evangelical revival that swept across England under John Wesley's leadership and leapt the Atlantic to become a major
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catalyst in the Great Awakenings. These in turn unleashed an avalanche of social reform movements, including the drive for temperance, the abolition of slavery, and the right of women to vote. There was an implicit leveling force in vital, experiential Christianity that paralleled the egalitarian philosophies and democratizing revolutions that were challenging monarchies and destroying autocracies all across Europe.
Even more important, however, was the dramatic shift from confessional to experiential religion. Ecclesiastical hierarchies, which vested religious authority in trained clergy and closed sacramental systems, gave way to a more immediate spiritual authority in which all believers might freely participate, validated by the "inner light" and the "witness of the Spirit." First George Fox in the 1600s, and then the Wesley brothers in the 1700s, encouraged and empowered the laity to assume a more active role in the life of the church. One did not need official ecclesiastical ordination to engage in preaching, evangelism, and the care of souls. The call of God evidenced by positive spiritual results was the final validation of fitness for ministry. With the increasing dissolution of the walls between clergy and laity came also the removal of the historic barriers locking women out of full participation in the life and ministry of the church. Since such a high premium was placed upon spiritual sensitivity, it was inevitable that new roles would open for women, since it became abundantly apparent that the Holy Spirit was no respecter of gender when it came to spiritual things. Let us trace this historical development.
THE QUAKERS
As a result of a profound religious experience, George Fox (1624-91) began to preach that God's revelation is received not only from the Scriptures — though they are a true Word of God — but also from an "inner light" that enlightens
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every true disciple. Fox's preaching attracted a nucleus of followers who would become the Society of Friends or Quakers. Fox initiated a democratic form of worship marked by simplicity and spontaneity, in which every believer could speak, pray, or sing as the Spirit moved. He rejected a professional clergy, deferential titles, and all distinctions that would elevate certain classes of people over others.4 Men and women, rich and poor, learned and unlearned were equally the "people of God." All were encouraged to participate fully in the life and ministry of the church as led by the Spirit. In their wedding ceremonies, Quakers rejected traditional vows where the wife promised to "love, honor, and obey" her husband and replaced it with expressions of mutual submission and partnership.5 In his position of leadership, Fox set the example by submitting himself to the counsel and advice of women. It is not surprising, therefore, that women were drawn to this new religious movement from the beginning.
Most radical of Fox's innovations was his willingness to open the preaching ministry to women as well as to men. By eliminating a professional ministerial class, the way was opened for every believer to participate in worship ministry and leadership. By disposing of the sacraments as part of worship, there was no need for an ordained clergy to administer them. While Fox never ordained anyone, he and his movement did "acknowledge" certain members, both male and female, upon whom the Spirit of God came with unusual power and in whom exceptional gifts for preaching and pastoral care were evident. He made a strong defense of women preachers in this 1656 treatise: "If Christ be in the Female as well as in the Male, is not he the same? And may not the Spirit of Christ speak in the Female as well as in the Male? Is he there to be limited? Who is it that dare limit the Holy one
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of Israel? For the Light is the same in the Male, and in the Female, which cometh from Christ."6
One is his early converts, Elizabeth Hooten, became the Quaker's first woman preacher. She did not shrink from challenging an Anglican priest on doctrinal matters, and she refused to kneel before King Charles II. For such behavior she was beaten and imprisoned several times. She preached throughout the American colonies. While visiting a fellow Quaker in Boston, she was publicly whipped and banned from ever entering the city again. She later served as a missionary to the West Indies.
Fox's most eminent early convert was Margaret Fell. Her home became a prominent meeting place for Quaker preachers. She wrote on behalf of the movement, served as its financial secretary, became an important adviser to Fox and, in later years, became his wife following the death of her first husband. While in prison she wrote a pamphlet defending women's right to preach, which declared its central thesis in its extended title: "Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures, and such as speak by the Spirit and Power of the Lord Jesus, and how Women were the first that preached the Tidings of the Resurrection of Jesus and were sent by Christ's Own Command, before He ascended to the Father, John 20:17."7 In it she makes three compelling points: (1) Men and women were equal in status before the Fall in Genesis and were restored to that equality by Jesus. (2) Paul's instructions prohibiting women from speaking were directed to specific problem churches that had not yet received the fullness of God's grace. (3) God himself anointed many women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, to be witnesses and proclaimers of the Word.8
Even though Fell's line of interpretation was regarded as heretical, Quakers defended it on the basis of the "inner light" that enabled them to understand the Scriptures, not
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only in their literal sense but in their spiritual sense as well. The Quakers' most illustrious convert, William Penn (1644-1718), led some 800 Quakers to the American Colonies, eventually obtaining the grant of Pennsylvania in 1681, which allowed him to begin his unique colonial "Holy Experiment." Quaker women, who played a prominent role in spreading the Quaker version of the gospel, were the only female preachers during the colonial era. Some even returned to England and Ireland as missionaries.
English Quakers, branded as Dissenters, paid a fearful price to hold their "heretical" doctrines and exercise their unorthodox form of worship. Over 400 died in prison, and many more were ruined financially. Even in the colonies, women were subjected to persecution. Mary Tompkins and Alice Ambrose were put in public stocks, whipped, and expelled from Virginia. Mary Dyer, another Quaker preacher, was hanged in Boston, in 1660, after refusing a reprieve conditioned upon her promise to leave and never enter the city again.9
Though the main body of Friends tended toward quietism as the church matured, an activist wing emerged in the late 1800s in the West, which identified with holiness causes such as programmed ministries, missions, education, and women's right to preach. Southern California Quakers organized the Training School for Christian Workers in 1899, which later became Whittier College. Its first president was a prominent woman preacher, Mary A. Hill.
The Quakers were the first since apostolic times to make such a large place for women in their church and have the longest unbroken history of women preachers of any denomination. Their example and influence contributed mightily to the equal rights movement that finally resulted in the historic adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, giving women the right to vote.
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JOHN WESLEY
John Wesley (1703-91), a devotedly conventional Anglican priest and Oxford don, experienced a slow but complete about-face in regard to women preachers. This "conversion" did not come easily for him, given the bias against women that he inherited and that was the unquestioned orthodoxy of his day. As late as 1748, ten years after his own heartwarming experience, he argued strongly against the Quaker practice of allowing women to preach by citing the two classic Pauline texts prohibiting women from speaking and teaching.10 What compelled him to gradually change his mind were at least three factors.
First, his mother, Susanna Wesley, coming from a long line of religious nonconformists, had an enormous impact upon him. In addition to her godly life and maternal influence, she broke new ground for women. So consumed was she by a desire to see the salvation of souls that she ventured forth into forbidden regions. She turned her family worship into a Sunday evening service to which she invited friends and neighbors. She became its worship leader, Bible teacher, and exhorter. Her gifts were so evident and her ministry so Spirit-anointed that the handful who initially responded grew into a congregation of over 200. Her husband, Samuel, a proper Anglican minister, questioned the propriety of her activities but could not deny the blessing of God upon her labors. He not only gave his approval but went to her defense when the local Anglican rector objected. Once the great evangelical revival began to sweep across England, Susanna encouraged John and Charles to permit both lay men and women to hold leadership responsibilities and preach. It was her example as a woman preacher, though never ordained, that contributed significantly to ultimately breaking down John's reservations.
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Second, though ever loyal to Anglican doctrine and traditions, John Wesley was a pragmatist. He recognized that revival movements cut their own channels and called for fresh methods. In addition to such new and strange practices as "field preaching" and setting hymns to popular tunes, he gave the church back to the laity through the aegis of the small-group class meeting. Wesley encouraged both men and women to sing, pray, testify, exhort, remonstrate, and encourage one another in the Society meetings. This represented a radical departure from convention in that women ordinarily did not actively participate in religious services. Such freedom proved to be so compelling that women far outnumbered men in early Methodist Societies.
Third, it became evident that God was mightily using women in evangelism, exhortation, and even preaching, whether or not John gave them his blessing. As early as 1739, the year following his own heartwarming experience, Wesley appointed women as class leaders in Bristol and allowed them to exhort so long as they did not take a text and discourse upon it. The line between exhortation and preaching, however, became exceedingly blurred as can be seen in this letter from Mrs. Sarah Crosby to Mr. Wesley:
In the evening I expected to meet about thirty persons in class; but to my great surprise there came near two hundred. I found an awful, loving sense of the Lord's presence, and much love to the people . . . I was not sure whether it was right for me to exhort in so public a manner, and yet I saw it impracticable to meet all these people by way of speaking particularly to each individual. I, therefore, gave out a hymn, and prayed, and told them part of what the Lord had done for myself, persuading them to flee from all sin.11
Sarah realized that she had come perilously close to preaching and was troubled by engaging in an activity
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prohibited by the Methodists at that time. Wesley responded that "I do not see that you have broken any law,"12 but he suggested that she confine herself to prayers, testimonies, and short exhortations. Her continuing success, however, caused him to change his mind, and he gave her his permission to preach after recognizing her "extraordinary call." She became Methodism's first duly recognized woman preacher. When Wesley saw that the Holy Spirit increasingly honored the preaching of women with converts, and blessed their labors with abundant spiritual fruit, he could no longer withhold his general approval.13
While it is difficult to determine precisely when he made the final move from qualified approval to positive encouragement for women to preach, Wesley scholar Paul Chilcote believes that it occurred sometime after receiving an extraordinary letter in 1771 from one of his most productive class leaders, Mary Bosanquet. In it she makes a lengthy defense of women's right to preach. Her reasoned argument is based upon Scripture. Undoubtedly aware of how Mr. Wesley had not been able to get around the so-called prohibitive passages in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, she begins there by stating that these are directed only to certain women who were causing trouble in two specific problem churches and were not intended to be applied to all women generally. Otherwise these texts would be in direct contradiction to 1 Cor. 11:5 where Paul acknowledges women "praying and prophesying" (NASB) with no word of condemnation, as well as other passages where he commends women and speaks of them as his "fellow workers in Christ Jesus" (Romans 16:3, NASB; see also Romans 16:1-9; Phil. 4:2-3; Col. 4:15). By pointing to the examples of the handmaiden of 2 Samuel 20, Deborah, the Samaritan woman at the well, Mary the mother of Jesus, and the women who first proclaimed the Resurrection, she
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also rejects the notion that preaching is inconsistent with the modesty required of women professing godliness.
In the decade prior to Wesley's death in 1791, there was a great flowering of women preachers within Methodism all over England. Mary Fletcher often preached to crowds of 2,000 to 3,000. Upon the death of her husband, Wesley encouraged her to preach as much as possible. He described her preaching as "fire, conveying both light and heat to all that heard her . . . . Her manner of speaking [is] smooth, easy, and natural, even when the sense is deep is strong."14 It is interesting to note that in deference to those who objected to "female preachers," she preached from the pulpit steps and not the pulpit itself. Chilcote summarizes this final stage of development as follows:
As a result of Wesley's changing attitude about the role of female preachers in his movement and the testimony of many witnesses to the abundant fruit of their labor, the English Methodist Conference was eventually led to recognize officially a number of these exceptional women. In these later years, when Wesley was asked why he encouraged certain of his female devotees in this practice, the elderly sage replied simply, "Because God owns them in the conversion of sinners, and who am I that I should withstand God."15
In his study of early Methodist women, Earl Kent Brown states that "we have varying amounts of information on 110 women whose active Methodist lives overlapped Mr. Wesley's."16 By "active" he means women who distinguished themselves as preachers, class leaders, advisers, and counselors. Adam Clarke, Bible scholar and a close Wesley associate, said this about women preachers: "Under the blessed spirit of Christianity, they have equal rights, equal privileges, and equal blessing, and let me add, they are equally useful."17 Methodist historian Robert F. Wearmouth points out that before Wesley it was unheard of
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in England for women to hold positions of leadership in government or church. Wearmouth goes on to say, "It might be claimed that the emancipation of womanhood began with him."18
Sadly, it nearly ended with him as well, for upon Wesley's death in 1791, bitter controversy exploded among his followers over the issue of women preaching. Within a decade of his death, women were either formally forbidden to preach or were so restricted that it became almost impossible to function as before. Nevertheless, a door had been opened that could not be closed permanently. Methodists today lead all denominations in both numbers and percentages of women ministers. Likewise, the seeds of equality for women had been planted that would germinate and sprout in historic new ways in the next century, particularly in America.
CHARLES FINNEY
Charles Finney (1792-1875) has been called the father of American revivalism. Like Wesley, Finney was an innovator. He was the first to popularize the "protracted meeting" and the first to employ the use of "the anxious bench" for those under conviction of sin, later known as "the alter call." Most revolutionary — and controversial — of his "new measures" was his practice of encouraging women to pray, testify, and speak in mixed assemblies. This eventually opened the door wide for women lecturers and preachers. Along with abolitionist Theodore Weld, Finney encouraged women to take the platform in speaking out against slavery. From this time forward, the abolition and feminist movements proceeded hand in hand. Since Gal. 3:28 declared that "there is no longer . . . slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus," then why not press for the enfranchisement of women as well as freedom for the slaves?
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Finney influenced evangelist Dwight L. Moody who worked with and encouraged a number of women preachers including Frances Willard (1839-98), a powerful speaker. Since church pulpits were closed to women, she devoted herself to the cause of temperance, serving as a founder and first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She used this platform to promote the cause of equal rights and women's suffrage. She published a strong defense of female ministry titled Women in the Pulpit. In a letter to Mrs. D.L. Moody, Willard expressed her deeply held conviction succinctly:
All my life I have been devoted to the advancement of women in education and opportunity. I firmly believe God has a work for them to do as evangelists, as bearers of Christ's message to the ungospeled, to the prayer-meeting, to the church generally and the world at large . . . . It is therefore my dearest wish to help break down the barriers of prejudice that keep them silent . . . As in the day of Pentecost, so now, let men and women in perfectly impartial fashion participate in all services conducted in His name in whom "there is neither bond nor free, male nor female, but all are one."19
OBERLIN COLLEGE
Oberlin College in Ohio has the distinction of being the first coeducational college in the history of humankind. Oberlin was founded in the early 1830s to perpetuate both revivalism and the social reforms of Charles G. Finney. Finney served as professor of theology before succeeding Asa Mahan in the presidency. Oberlin was at the forefront of three historic social movements of the mid-19th century: the peace movement, the abolition of slavery, and the women's rights crusade. Donald Dayton argues that "feminist exegesis" grew out of abolitionism. He notes that
those who mastered Theodore Weld's "Bible argument against slavery" and learned to defend the egalitarian
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and liberationist "spirit" of the Bible against status quo literal interpretations, found that the same arguments could be used in support of the women's movement. Even Galatians 3:28 seemed to conjoin the issues by declaring that "There is neither . . . bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."20
Oberlin graduated many women who became leaders in both the abolitionist and feminist movements of the 19th century, including Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained and installed as a pastor in a mainline Protestant church in America, or anywhere else. Another was her classmate and eventual sister-in-law, Lucy Stone, a pioneer woman suffragist, abolitionist, and founder of the national Woman's Rights Convention. When Lucy married Henry Blackwell, she broke social convention by retaining her maiden name and became known as "Mrs. Stone." She and her husband signed a statement that guaranteed that she would be regarded as "an independent, rational being." In 1870, she and her husband founded the Woman's Journal, the principal suffragist paper.
Antoinette's and Lucy's sisters-in-law were Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the history of medicine, and Emily Blackwell, who founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, America's first hospital for women.21 Asa Mahan, Oberlin's first president, was so proud of this record that he suggested an epitaph for his tombstone: "The first man, in the history of the race who conducted women, in connection with members of the opposite sex, through a full course of liberal education, and conferred upon them the high degrees which had hitherto been the exclusive prerogatives of men."22
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ANTOINETTE BROWN
As America's first regularly ordained woman minister, Antoinette L. Brown (1825-1921) deserves special attention. After graduating from Oberlin in 1847, she returned a year later to take its three-year course in theology. This created a crisis among the faculty since no women had ever studied theology at Oberlin before. Furthermore, there was no precedent of any college, university, or seminary admitting a woman to a preministerial course. Even her family opposed her; her father and brother ceased to support her financially. Though she and her friend, Lettice Smith, were grudgingly allowed to attend classes, they were not given degrees, nor were they permitted to participate in commencement exercises. Their names did not appear in the alumni catalogue as graduates of the theological class of 1850. It was decades before Oberlin rectified this omission and included them.
Denied access to pulpits, Antoinette lectured with great success, drawing large crowds. One of her ardent supporters, Horace Greeley, founder of The New York Tribune, offered her a pulpit in New York City with a large salary. She declined, considering herself too inexperienced for a metropolitan church, and instead accepted the call to a struggling little Congregational church at South Butler, New York. It was there that she was ordained by Wesleyan Methodist leader Luther Lee in 1853.
She resigned as pastor shortly before her marriage to Samuel Blackwell in 1855, believing such a position to be incompatible with her responsibilities as wife and eventually, mother of six daughters. Nevertheless she remained active as a much-sought-after lecturer and preacher. She also wrote 10 books. At 75 years of age she accepted the call as pastor of the Unitarian church in Elizabeth, N.J., where she served with distinction until she was 90. Oberlin awarded
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her the honorary degree of doctor of divinity when she was 83, the first such degree ever bestowed upon a woman by any institution of higher learning. By the time of her death at 96, there were more than 3,000 licensed and ordained women ministers in the United States.23
PHOEBE PALMER
The cause of women's rights received a mighty thrust from the work of Phoebe Palmer, a physician's wife and a Methodist lay evangelist. She is often referred to as the "Mother of the Holiness Movement." For 20 years she conducted the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness in her home. Hundreds of Methodist preachers were sanctified under her influence, including five bishops. Her success inspired scores of other women to initiate holiness meetings in their homes as well. It opened up an opportune door of ministry to women for spiritual leadership. She played a major role in the revival of 1857-58, preached to great crowds all over the country, and with her husband, Walter, engaged in 4 years of fruitful evangelistic campaigns all across the British Isles.24
Mrs. Palmer published a 421-page book defending the right of women to preach, The Promise of the Father. She based her argument primarily upon the prophecy of Joel, quoted by Peter in his Pentecost sermon, which declared that in the age of the Spirit both men and women would prophesy. This became the principal scriptural justification for women preachers throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. She makes an eloquent plea that women should be allowed to become full participants in the ministry of the church in view of the fact that more and more of them were preaching under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. She appealed to John Wesley who licensed women to preach, and blamed "the iron hand of Calvinism" for choking the work of the Spirit by artificially limiting women's work on
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the basis of gender. She chides men, particularly clergy, for keeping women down, and she invites women to claim their power and rights in Christ, as is evident in this sample:
The Lord our God is one Lord. The same indwelling spirit of might which fell upon Mary and the other women on the glorious day that ushered in the present dispensation still falls upon God's daughters. Not a few of the daughters of the Lord Almighty have, in obedience to the command of the Saviour, tarried at Jerusalem; and, the same impelling power which constrained Mary and the other women to speak as the Spirit gave utterance impels them to testify of Christ. . . . And how do these divinely-baptized disciples stand ready to obey these impelling influences? Answer, ye thousands of Heaven-touched lips, whose testimonies have so long been repressed in the assemblies of the pious! Yes, answer, ye thousands of female disciples, of every Christian land, whose pent-up voices have so long, under the pressure of these man-made restraints, been uttered in groanings before God.25
Mrs. Palmer was also active in establishing inner-city missions, relief work, and a settlement house for the poor in New York City. She served as editor for Guide to Holiness and engaged in extensive writing. She is credited with bringing in excess of 25,000 people to Christ for salvation. She also encouraged many women to assert themselves in preaching. Included among these were Frances Willard and Catherine Booth.
THE SALVATION ARMY
Catherine Mumford Booth who, with her husband, William, cofounded the Salvation Army, was a powerful and popular preacher. In Portsmouth, England, crowds averaging over 1,000 came nightly for 17 weeks to hear her preach. Often she spoke to much larger gatherings. When
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her daughters were grown and married, they kept their family name and were among the first to use a hyphenated married name: Booth-Tucker, Booth-Clibborn, and so on. From its beginning, the Army welcomed, trained, and commissioned women as officers (ministers). In 1934 Evangeline Booth was elected as general of the Salvation Army, the first woman to lead any major denomination in Protestant history.
THE BIBLE COLLEGE MOVEMENT
Historian Janette Hassey asserts that "Bible institutes played an important part in shaping turn-of-the-century Evangelicalism . . . [and] provided a major training ground for Evangelical women of that era who entered public ministry."26 Albert B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance church, established North America's first Bible institute in 1883 in New York City, later relocated to Nyack. He gave women a prominent place in church ministry and leadership. He included women on his institute's executive board, employed them as Bible professors, and was proud of his school's record of sending forth women as missionaries, evangelists, and pastors. The May 1888 graduation prize for excellence in preaching went to a woman.27 Unfortunately, the General Council of the C&MA reversed its historic position in 1981, and no longer allows women to be ordained. Furthermore, all women's ministries must now be conducted under the authority of a male elder.
Among the many Bible colleges Hassey surveys, the formation of Moody Bible Institute is instructive. It would never had been established had it not been for Emma Dryer, a Bible teacher and friend of D.L. Moody, who strongly and insistently encouraged him to do so. Since his extensive evangelistic campaigns kept him away from Chicago, he appointed her to supervise the Chicago Bible Work in
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his church. Most of her earliest efforts concentrated on women whom she trained as Bible readers. They served as city missionaries, evangelized the poor, distributed tracts, visited the sick, organized home prayer meetings, and established morning schools for children. From this evolved the Bible Institute of the Chicago Evangelization Society in 1889, renamed Moody Bible Institute in 1900. Moody continuously pled for both men and women to respond to God's call to preach and minister, especially to the poor.
An extension department was organized in 1887 to promote Bible conferences, supply evangelists for revival meetings, and provide churches with guest preachers. Women were not only accepted as preachers and Bible teachers but also sought out by churches. By 1928 over 250,000 people had attended 25 Moody Bible Institute-sponsored conferences around the country. For 40 years Moody graduated women who "openly served as pastors, evangelists, pulpit supply preachers, Bible teachers, and even in the ordained ministry."28
Unfortunately, the sexist-chauvinist "spirit of this present Fundamentalist age" claimed another great evangelical institution, as is clear in this statement published by the administration of the Moody Bible Institute in 1979: "Our policy has been and is that we do not endorse or encourage the ordination of women nor do we admit women to our Pastoral Training Major."29
THE HOLINESS DENOMINATIONS
It was the denominations produced by the mid-19th-century holiness revivals that most consistently raised feminism to a central principle of church life. The Wesleyan Methodists began to ordain women in the 1860s, nearly a century in advance of the mainline Methodist church. Donald Dayton shows that there is a "striking connection" between the Wesleyan Methodists and the women's rights
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movement: "The Seneca Falls meeting of 1848 that launched the movement and first called for the franchise for women was held in a Wesleyan Methodist church — apparently because only the abolitionist denomination was at all receptive to such radical ideas. (Even here there was some equivocation. When the women arrived for the meeting, they found the building locked and had to climb in through a window!)"30
When the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, was established in the 1880s, 25 percent of its ministers and delegates were women. In a letter to a "sister in Christ," early Church of God leader F. G. Smith spelled out the movement's rationale for not only permitting but encouraging women to preach:
Again, I call your attention to the organization of the church by the Holy Spirit. A man is an evangelist because he has the gift of evangelizing. It is not because he is a man, but because he has that particular gift. The gift itself is the proof of his calling. If a woman has divine gifts fitting her for a particular work in the church, that is the proof, and the only proof needed, that is her place. Any other basis of qualification than divine gifts is superficial and arbitrary and ignores the divine plan of organization and government in the church.31
The Pilgrim Holiness church, founded by Seth Rees (father of Paul S. Rees, prominent in the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in the 1940s), opened wide the door to women preachers who comprised 30 percent of its ordained elders in its early decades. Rees's wife served with him as copastor and coevangelist. Against those who opposed women preachers, Rees countered, "Nothing but jealousy, prejudice, bigotry, and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented woman's public recognition by the Church."32
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THE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE
From the time Phineas Bresee organized the first Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles in 1895, women preachers and leaders played a vital role in the life of the young denomination. The first printed flier produced by the new church advertising services listed six deaconesses, including Mrs. W.S. Knott who became the first woman ordained by Bresee. She and her husband founded the Mateo Street Mission, which later became the Compton Avenue Church. Bresee organized a Spokane mission founded by Elsie Wallace as First Church of the Nazarene in 1905, ordained her and appointed her as pastor. She went on to organize Nazarene churches in Ashland, Oregon; Boise, Idaho; Walla Walla and Seattle, Washington, serving as pastor for brief periods of time in most of these. She holds the distinction of being the only women to have served as a district superintendent in North America, having been appointed by Bresee to serve out a term vacated when C. Warren Jones when to Japan as a missionary.
Typical of the holiness groups that formed the Church of the Nazarene union at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1908, was the New Testament Church of Christ. It was organized by evangelist Robert Lee Harris in 1893 after he withdrew from the Methodist church. While slowly succumbing to tuberculosis, he encouraged several women, including his wife, to preach when he was ill. When he passed away in 1894, the fledgling church began to spread throughout the South on the wings of these women preachers "whose ordination knew no apostolic succession."33 One of these, Mrs. Fannie McDowell Hunter, published Women Preachers (1905) in which a dozen of her coworkers presented their defense of women preachers in autobiographical form.34 At the time of the 1908 union, all of the preachers of the New Testament Church of Christ were women.
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Three of the four regional groups comprising the 1908 Pilot Point union ordained women to the preaching ministry. The one exception was J.O. McClurkan who, even though 39 percent of his Pentecostal Mission's evangelists were women, objected to their ordination on "scriptural grounds." Six years after his death, his widow was ordained.35
At the time when the four main groups of holiness churches united, approximately 15 percent of the licensed and ordained elders were women. This swelled to over 20 percent during the next four decades, with some regions reporting more than 30 percent of their ministers as women. Yet the Church of the Nazarene's acceptance of women in the pulpit was not without its vocal critics, prompting this spirited 1930 Herald of Holiness editorial in which General Superintendent J.B. Chapman defends the young denomination's stance: "The fact is that God calls men and women to preach the gospel, and when He does so call them, they should gladly obey Him and members of the church and of the ministry should encourage and help them in the fulfillment of their task. This is the teaching of the New Testament, the logic of the new dispensation, the position of the Church of the Nazarene."36
In her definitive study of early women preachers in the Church of the Nazarene, Rebecca Laird identifies the common threads that characterized their lives and ministries. First, there was a deep conviction that they had been called of God and empowered to preach by the sanctifying grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Second, each struggled with the call, knowing that it was often deemed inappropriate and out of step with family, church, and societal expectations. Third, they evidenced a willingness to go ahead and preach, wherever and whenever they could, not waiting for official sanction. In every instance, licensing and ordination was granted after the fact of their
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demonstrated gifts and fruitfulness in preaching. Fourth, most served the churches they had planted through their own evangelistic efforts. Rarely was a woman called to pastor an established church or lead an existing institution. Fifth, they formed informal support networks among themselves. This was essential to their long-term survival in ministry, given the fact that even in the best of times, they battled against traditional patriarchal attitudes at all levels.37
Sadly, it has been a losing battle. Women comprise about 10 percent of currently licensed and ordained ministers, with less than 1 percent serving as pastors. Most hold no full-time position in the church. Noting the gradual demise of this noble heritage of equality and liberty for women, General Superintendent William M. Greathouse sounded an alarm when he wrote: "The partial eclipse of women ministers in the church of today is lamentable. It reflects the influx of teachings and theologies which are in basic disagreement with our historic biblical position." He goes on to affirm, however, that "the gospel is the Magna Charta for women's ministry. Once again the Lord is pouring out His Spirit on His handmaidens in the Church of the Nazarene and calling them to preach."38
The question is: Are we ready to receive them?
Chapter 8 || Table of Contents
1. Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, "The Evangelical Roots of Feminism" (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 86. [BACK]
3. Janette Hassey, No Time for Silence (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), xii. [BACK]
4. Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church (New York: Scribners, 1970), 421. [BACK]
5. Barbara J. MacHaffie, Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 89. [BACK]
6. Cited in Paul Wesley Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism (Methuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 10. [BACK]
7. Ruth A. Tucker and Walter L. Liefeld, Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 231. [BACK]
8. MacHaffie, Her Story, 90. [BACK]
10. Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women, 57. [BACK]
11. Cited in ibid., 121. [BACK]
13. See Earl Kent Brown, Women of Mr. Wesley's Methodism (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1983), 15-31. [BACK]
14. Thomas M. Morrow, Early Methodist Women (London: Epworth Press, 1967), 14, as cited in an unpublished paper by Lucille Sider Dayton and Donald M. Dayton, "Women in the Holiness Movement" (Christians for Biblical Equality), n.d. [BACK]
15. Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women, 182. [BACK]
16. Brown, Mr. Wesley's Methodism, 219. [BACK]
17. B.T. Roberts, Ordaining Women (Rochester, N.Y.: Earnest Christian Publishing House, 1891), 59, as cited in Dayton and Dayton, "Women in the Holiness Movement," 3. [BACK]
18. Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth Press, 1945), 223, as cited in Dayton and Dayton, ibid., 2 (emphasis added). [BACK]
19. Tucker and Liefeld, Daughters of the Church, 274. [BACK]
20. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 90. [BACK]
21. Edith Deen, Great Women of the Christian Faith (Westwood, N.J.: Barbour and Company, 1959), 377-78. [BACK]
22. Asa Mahan, Autobiography, Intellectual, Moral and Spiritual (London: T. Woolmer, 1882), 169, as cited in Dayton and Dayton, "Women in the Holiness Movement," 4. [BACK]
23. Deen, Great Women of the Christian Faith, 376-78. [BACK]
24. Timothy L. Smith, Called unto Holiness (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962), 12, 23. [BACK]
25. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America: Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 217-18. [BACK]
26. Hassey, No Time for Silence, 11. [BACK]
30. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 91. [BACK]
31. Susie Stanley, "Women Evangelists in the Church of God at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century," Called to Minister, Empowered to Serve, 38. [BACK]
32. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 98. [BACK]
34. Ibid., 155-56. Fannie McDowell Hunter's book, Women Preachers, was the first and only defense of women in ministry published by the denomination until this work. Strictly speaking, even hers was not produced by the Church of the Nazarene in that it was published before the 1908 union at Pilot Point. [BACK]
35. Rebecca Laird, "The First Generation of Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene," Pacific School of Religion, an unpublished master of arts thesis (Berkeley, Calif.: 1990), iv and v. [BACK]
36. James Blaine Chapman, "October Gleanings," Herald of Holiness (Oct. 15, 1930), 5. [BACK]
37. Laird, "The First Generation," chap. 6. [BACK]
38. William M. Greathouse, "Women in Ministry: An Editorial," Herald of Holiness (June 15, 1982), 1. [BACK]