Chapter 10 Modern Pentecostalism and Denominationalism: Tent-toting Evangelists and Ordained Ministers

Chapter 10

Modern Pentecostalism and Denominationalism: Tent-toting Evangelists and Ordained Ministers

The early years of the twentieth century brought little change in the position of women in the established mainline churches. In most instances women were denied leadership roles, and in churches where they were permitted to vote in conference sessions, they found themselves hopelessly outnumbered by men. Most women accepted their inferior status as society’s and Scripture’s place for them, and they willingly filled the roles that were described as women’s work. In the sectarian movements, however, the case was significantly different. The holiness movement and the emerging Pentecostal movement, like sectarian movements of previous centuries, offered wide opportunities for women, and some of the most influential voices in the early twentieth century were those of females. Their authority they believed came directly from God. Indeed, it did not come from men, for the men in those churches were not necessarily any more eager to allow them positions of leadership than were men in the established churches. But at the very core of holiness and Pentecostal belief was the emphasis on the Spirit being poured out “on all flesh” (Acts 2:17 KJV).

The Pentecostal Movement

The Pentecostal movement has been a significant part of twentieth-century religion. Indeed, that movement ushered in the twentieth century, and the leading character was a woman. “It was after midnight and the first day of the twentieth century when Miss [Agnes] Ozman began ‘speaking in the Chinese language’ while a ‘halo seemed to surround her head and face.’” Not only did she speak in another language, but she also said, “When I went to write I did not write in English, but made characters in another language.” Her experience at the Bethel Bible School convinced its founder, Reverend Charles Fox Parham, that glossolalia (speaking in tongues) was “the only evidence of one’s having received the baptism with the Holy Ghost” and “that it should be a part of ‘normal’ Christian worship rather than a curious by-product of religious enthusiasm.”¹ It was Parham’s teachings that became the basis for the Azusa Street revival and for the subsequent Pentecostal movement that spread across the country and throughout the world.

Charismatic phenomena were not new to sectarian Christianity, but prior to the twentieth century they had been associated with a crisis experience of ecstasy. With the inception of Pentecostalism, however, tongues and healings were deemed to be part of Spirit-filled living; and for those with sufficient faith, language study and medical treatment were thought to be unnecessary. This new gospel spread rapidly in America in the early decades of the twentieth century, and one of the factors relating to its spread was “that very early in their history the Pentecostals recognized the vital role that women could play in a spiritual awakening. They utilized them as pastors, evangelists, and missionaries.”²

Although most of the leaders of Pentecostalism were men—Parham, Seymour, G. B. Cashwell, Nickolas J. Holmes, J. H. King, C. H. Mason, A. J. Tomlinson, and others—women were not excluded from the ranks. Indeed, women were involved in every aspect of the movement as it moved from Topeka to Los Angeles and spread throughout the world. William J. Seymour is generally credited with leading the Azusa Street revival that broke out in Los Angeles in 1906, but with him was Lucy Farrar, “who had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Kansas.” According to a contemporary who participated in the meetings, “the teaching here came by a colored man, (Seymour), and a mulatto woman, (Lucy Farrar).”³ Farrar, like so many of the other women who would enter the movement, eagerly took advantage of the Pentecostal emphasis on spiritual gifts over and above education and ordination and moved into the ranks of leadership.

Florence Crawford and the Apostolic Faith

One of the early Pentecostal leader’s was Florence Crawford, who founded the Apostolic Faith church in Oregon. Prior to this she had attended the Azusa Street revival in 1906, and it was there that she experienced her “baptism.” As she explained it:

A sound like a rushing, mighty wind filled the room, and I was baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire. Rivers of joy and love divine flooded my soul. God also gave me the Bible evidence of receiving this experience in letting me speak in another language…But the greatest joy in my heart was the knowledge that I received power to witness for Christ, power to tell others what great things God can do in a human life.⁴

At the same time that she underwent this ecstatic experience, Crawford claimed that she was healed of an assortment of physical problems: “Once diseased from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, I now was made sound and well through the blood of Jesus. The Christ of Calvary touched my body and made me whole.”⁵

According to her contemporaries, Crawford was the first of the Azusa Street “converts” to take the message on the evangelistic circuit. She began in Los Angeles and then went on to Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and Canada, before settling down in Portland in 1907, where she established her headquarters. There she founded an extensive city mission work, which included two auditoriums with a combined seating capacity of more than three thousand. The philosophy of the work was not to attain rapid growth, but, as she explained it, “Rather, its concern is with members who have ‘prayed through’ to that born-again experience which enables them to live a life of victory over sin and to keep themselves ‘unspotted from the world.’”⁶

Being “unspotted from the world” included a mandate that “remarried divorcees separate before being admitted to church membership,” as well as strict regulations regarding “worldly amusements” and also a straight-laced dress code for women, which permitted “no extreme fads, no facial makeup or bobbed hair.” The Apostolic Faith was an exclusivist body, considering itself the only true church. Indeed, her followers were to be so “separated” that they were not even permitted to participate in religious functions with other Pentecostal groups.⁷ Other women who helped spread the Azusa Street revival throughout the country were Mrs. Rachel Sizelove in Missouri and Marie Burgess in New York.⁸

Open Bible Standard Churches

Women were certainly not without opposition in the early Pentecostal movement. Even Crawford, who seemed so securely established in the Northwest, encountered antagonism from her male colleagues. Indeed, a group of male evangelists in the Apostolic Faith Movement split off to form the Bible Standard Mission in 1919. There were a number of reasons for this, including the strong stand Crawford took on personal and ecclesiastical separation. But another factor was that “a considerable number in this group were men of uncommon abilities and experience who, though not expressing it in writing, were chafing under what they thought was feminine domination.”⁹

The antagonistic feelings toward Crawford and female ministry were brought with the men into the new Open Bible Mission. “One of the important items of controversy which had to be settled at the first conference after leaving the Apostolic Faith,” writes Robert Mitchell, “was the question of ministerial credentials for women preachers.” The record of debate that ensued during this first meeting and the effect it had on one Mrs. Harrison is a fascinating account in the history of women’s struggle for equality in the church:

When the question came up, there were not enough men to talk the women down. Fred Hornshuh told Mrs. Harrison that women had led people astray in religion. He named Mary Baker Eddy, etc. However, Mrs. Harrison retorted by saying that ten times as many men had led people astray, and she quoted from church history all the men who had led people astray, and won her point. They then decided that women could preach, but were not to lead. She was ordained that night but they muzzled her and kept her quiet two years. She chafed under this. Finally, this bondage was broken. Harry Neat apologized to her at a public conference. Dr. Conlee asked her to preach in Lighthouse Temple.¹⁰

In spite of the opposition women faced, they conducted a significant portion of the evangelistic work in the movement, and women, particularly “single lady evangelists,” started “small new works where men could not support a family.” On the denominational level, however, “they were not placed in positions of executive leadership.”¹¹

Maria Woodward-Etter

One of the leading spirits of the Pentecostal revival in the early twentieth century was Maria Woodward-Etter, whose revivalistic ministry began in the 1890s in central Indiana, where many of her followers claimed miraculous healings and the gift of tongues. So significant was her career that Janet Wilson James suggests “her ministry may have been the origin of the worldwide pentecostal movement.”¹²

Woodworth-Etter was born in Ohio in 1844, and it was through the Disciples of Christ that she was converted as a teenager. Almost immediately she felt called to the ministry, but the obstacles seemed insurmountable: “The Disciples did not believe that women had any right to work for Jesus. Had I told them my impression they would have made sport of me. I had never heard of women working in public except as missionaries, so I could see no openings—except, as I thought, if I ever married…” She did marry and had six children (five of whom died in childhood), but her dream of having a husband who would be a partner in the ministry did not come to fruition. Although others encouraged her to begin a revival ministry, Woodworth did not: “My husband was not willing for me to go, or to engage in the work any place.” He did not prevent her from preaching locally, however. “I continued to keep house, and spent as much time in holding meetings as I could, to give my husband a chance to attend his work.”¹³

So successful was this ministry that she was in great demand:

The United Brethren wanted me to take charge of the Woman’s Missionary Society, or take a circuit; the Bible Christians wanted me to unite with them, and take charge of three large churches; and the Methodists wanted me to take charge of one church. These were all within ten miles of home and I would have received a good salary. But I felt that my mission was that of an evangelist.¹⁴

Soon after this she joined the United Brethren Church, which gave its blessing to her preaching and church planting, and the following year her husband agreed to accompany her on an evangelistic tour. The ministry was hers, though, and virtually nothing is mentioned of him after that.¹⁵ In 1902 she married S. P. Etter, who became for her the perfect preacher’s “wife”:

He takes the best care of me, in and out of the meetings. It makes no difference what I call on him to do. He will pray, and preach, and sing, and is very good around the altar. He does about all of my writings, and he also helps in getting out my books, and looks after the meeting, in and outside.¹⁶

Maria Woodworth-Etter, Turn-of-the-Century Healing Evangelist. From Maria Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders (Tulsa: Harrison, 1916).

According to her own account, her ministry extended beyond the unchurched. Indeed, many of her “converts” were from the ranks of the clergy: “At Munice and Anderson I met twenty-one licensed ministers who were converted or anointed in our meetings for the work. Some are ministers in the Church of God, some in the M. E., U. B., Friends, Baptists, and Newlights.”¹⁷

Woodworth-Etter functioned as more than simply a female evangelist. She organized churches and conducted baptisms. In fact, people traveled from long distances just to be baptized by her, “and they felt that they were well paid for the sacrifice they had made in coming so far.” The most widely publicized aspect of her ministry, however, was her emphasis on charismatic gifts—most notably tongues and healing. Her own account of these “mighty miracles” and “signs and wonders” details hundreds of spectacular stories.¹⁸

An example is a service held in Moline, Illinois, in 1903:

A woman brought her boy, six years old, full of tumors all over his body, the most awful sight you ever saw, so deformed. They were in his throat and in his windpipe, he had a bad cough with it, nearly choking him to death; he had been treated by twenty doctors…From the first time we prayed for him he never suffered any more…The people could see how fast the tumors were disappearing…Scores of deaf people of all ages were healed…Over two thousand came or were brought to the altar. We prayed for them, and most all were converted or reclaimed. Nearly all were healed from one to a dozen chronic diseases.¹⁹

Other charismatic “wonders” were in evidence as well: “many fell under the power of God and had wonderful visions…Sinners were struck down like dead men and women…One sister spoke in unknown tongues all night,” and another sister, Sarah Nelson, testified of being raised from the dead.²⁰

In 1912 and 1913, when she was approaching seventy years of age, she held her largest revivals, many of them in camp-meeting settings. One such series of meetings took place at Alexandria, Indiana, where as many as twenty-five thousand were estimated to have attended. Another, held in Montwait, Massachusetts, is described in her book Marvels and Miracles: “Thousands attended the meetings. The miracles were as great as in the days of Christ and the apostles. The fear of God came on the people as they saw the sick carried in, dying on beds, and then rise up and shout praises to God and walk and run. They saw them leap and dance.”²¹

One of the most amazing aspects of Woodworth-Etter’s ministry was the wide acceptance she enjoyed from ministers and leaders of many different denominations. She faced some opposition, but probably no more than a “miracle-working” male evangelist would have encountered. One description of her ministry came from the Reverend Stanley Smith, one of the “Cambridge Seven” who served as a missionary with the China Inland Mission for many years: “Mrs Etter is a woman who has had a ministry…unparalleled in the history of the Church.” Of her book Acts of the Holy Ghost, he wrote, “It is a book I value next to the Bible. In special seasons of waiting on God I have found it helpful to have the New Testament on one side of me and Mrs. Ettcr’s book on the other, this latter is a present-day record of ‘the Acts’ multiplied.”²²

The Assemblies of God

The Assemblies of God, the largest white Pentecostal denomination, offered women unparalleled opportunity for ministry during the early years of the twentieth century. But even in this denomination, certain restrictions were upheld, except in extraordinary circumstances. An editorial in the Evangel in 1915 reflected the church’s position:

We know of no Movement where women of ability and filled with the Holy Ghost have been more highly honored or given much more freedom than among us. She is given the right to be ordained, to preach, witness, give advice, act as evangelist, missionary, etc. The only thing not thrown unscripturally upon her weak shoulders is the making of her a Ruling Elder…Even here we allow such liberty as not to interfere [sic] with special calls God in His sovereignty may give to women under exceptional circumstances.²³

This open attitude toward women began to change, however, as a new generation of leaders emerged in the Assemblies of God. That view was expressed by the Reverend Robert A. Brown, the husband of a leading female preacher. He argued that his own wife “always refrained from ‘acts of priesthood’” and that he did not like “to see women put on a white garment and try to look like angels, and go into the baptismal pool to baptize converts.” Brown’s position prevailed at the General Council in 1931, and it was resolved “that ordination certificates of women shall clearly state that women are ordained only as evangelists.”²⁴

Although the General Council reversed that decision in 1935, “it had become apparent,” write Charles Barfoot and Gerald Sheppard, “that women would never have the freedom they once had during the earlier years of the movement.”²⁵

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Foursquare Gospel

Of all the women church leaders and evangelists of the twentieth century, Aimee Semple McPherson certainly ranks at the very top in the influence she wielded over others religiously. Indeed, she would take second place to very few male church leaders and evangelists. Time called her “the most spectacular U. S. evangelist since Billy Sunday.” She was the founder and lifetime president of the Foursquare Gospel Church and the senior pastor of the famed Angelus Temple in Los Angeles.²⁶

Soon after she was converted at a revival as a teenager, Aimee sensed a call to preach the gospel, but her immediate response to God was, “How can I, a daughter of the farm…ever hope to be a soul winner? Besides, only men are allowed to preach.” She queried her mother about the ban on female preaching, to which her mother responded that women could “go to heathen lands as missionaries,” an answer that left her even more puzzled. “If they are good enough to exhort the black, the brown, and the yellow man, why not the white?”²⁷

Although that question remained unanswered, foreign missions was the only option for many young women who desired Christian ministry in the early twentieth century, and Aimee soon found herself bound for the mission field. She had married Robert Semple, the evangelist whose preaching prompted her conversion, and soon after their marriage in 1908, they sailed for Hong Kong. The mission term was cut short, however, after Semple’s sudden death, and Aimee returned to the United States with her infant daughter.²⁸

Back in the United States, Aimee married Harold McPherson and settled into the domestic duties of a housewife, but the strain was too much for her physically and mentally: “The doctors said I would lose my reason if something was not done. I became very ill in body and inside of one year two serious operations were performed.” The cause of her problems, she concluded, was her failure to respond to God’s call: “Through all these strenuous days…a voice kept hammering at the doorway of my heart. It shouted, ‘Preach the Word! Do the work of an evangelist.’” She was convinced that there was no other alternative but to leave her husband and begin an evangelistic ministry. The decision, however, did not come easily: “Oh, don’t you ever tell me that a woman cannot be called to preach the Gospel,” she later wrote. “If any man ever went through one-hundredth part of the hell on earth that I lived in, those months when out of God’s will and work, they would never say that again.”²⁹

With her two young children, a threadbare, patched, “push pole” tent, and a 1912 Packard, she began her itinerant ministry. Her husband “Mack” soon joined her, and in 1916 they traveled together down the Atlantic coast from New England to Florida. The following year she was back in New England, and encountered such enthusiastic and generous crowds in Boston that they were able to purchase a truck and hire a driver. The success, however, did not last. Within months they were in dire financial circumstances, and Mack insisted they return home, but Aimee refused. From then on their lives went separate directions, with Aimee traveling alone with her mother and her children.³⁰

Aimee Semple McPherson, Nationally Known Evangelist and Founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. From the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Los Angeles.

Aimee’s mother, Minnie Kennedy, served as her manager and press agent and soon scheduled city-wide “Holy Ghost Revivals” in large cities, including San Francisco and New York, where Aimee received national newspaper coverage and was described as seeking to “drive the Devil from New York.” After that she traveled to cities throughout the United States and Canada, making eight trips across the continent between 1918 and 1923, and earning as much as two thousand dollars a week after expenses.³¹

In 1921, while she was conducting meetings in a half-vacant arena in San Diego, Aimee announced her first healing service. That was a turning point in her career. “Canes, Crutches Discarded Upon Prayers of Woman Preacher,” blazed the headlines of the San Diego Union. That article provided free publicity that set the stage for her future ministry:

Jamming the seats of Dreamland Arena, filling the aisles and overflowing the sidewalks into the streets, more than three thousand people came to hear Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson, evangelist, pray for the sick and to see with their own eyes just what miracles were performed in the ring last night. After the altar call, the afflicted crowded to the ring by the score and sought the aid of Mrs. McPherson. The woman evangelist prayed for them, anointing them with oil.³²

It was an eventful year for her. Mack filed for a divorce, construction began on the five-thousand seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, and the Foursquare Gospel was born, later to become the basis for her Pentecostal denomination.

Perhaps more than any preacher before or since, with the possible exception of Billy Sunday, Aimee had a flare for the dramatic. According to one report, “Sister, in football togs, carried the ball of the Foursquare Gospel for a touchdown, Jesus ran interference.” In another service she played the part of a motorcycle cop: “She drove recklessly to the front of the auditorium, slammed on the brakes, blew a screech on a police whistle, raised a white gloved hand to the congregation, and shouted: ‘Stop, you’re going to hell!’”³³

Aimee’s most dramatic theatrical event, in the eyes of her critics and many others, was her alleged kidnapping in 1926. On May 18, the headlines of a Los Angeles paper read, “Evangelist McPherson Believed Drowned!” and for weeks the newspapers were filled with rumors and conjecture about her sudden disappearance. Nearly six weeks after her disappearance, Aimee appeared from out of nowhere in the small desert town of Douglas, Arizona, claiming she had been kidnapped. Many reporters initially accepted her story at face value. The Los Angeles Times headlined the incident with “Aimee Tortured for Huge Ransom.” But others were more skeptical, claiming she had been spotted in a hideaway with Kenneth Ormiston, her radio announcer. So serious were the accusations against her that she was brought to trial on the charge that the kidnapping story was a hoax, but she was acquitted and soon returned to her ministry. However, the scandal lingered. Her most recent biographer, Robert Barr, rejects outright the kidnapping version of her disappearance and maintains that indeed she did run off with Ormiston, but Aimee maintained the veracity of her story until her death and “officials of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel still insist, at least formally, that Aimee’s kidnap story is true, apparently believing the church’s future stands or falls on the issue.”³⁴

Although she had some serious financial problems in the decade that followed her alleged kidnapping, she continued her preaching and her popularity nationwide soared beyond what it had been before the scandal. But scandal continued to plague her. In 1931, she married David Hutton, who almost immediately was faced with a law suit from a previous lover. Less than two years later Hutton filed for divorce from Aimee. Only months later, however, she was back on the revival circuit. She made a fifteen-thousand-mile, twenty-one-state tour, during which time she preached more than three hundred sermons in nearly fifty cities to crowds totaling a million.³⁵

After her death in 1944, her legacy continued. Since that time, according to a recent report from the Foursquare Gospel Church, the number of churches in the denomination “has risen from four hundred to seven hundred eighty-three; foreign mission stations from two hundred to over two thousand.”³⁶

Unlike many female religious leaders, McPherson did not view herself as an anomaly. She was a staunch defender of not only her own preaching, but also that of other women:

This is the only church, I am told, that is ordaining women preachers. The Assemblies of God are not ordaining women, to my knowledge…Four-squaredom is the only work that has given such acknowledgment to women preachers, as well as men. Even the Pentecostal works, in some cases, have said, “No women preachers.” But I am opening the door, and as long as Sister McPherson is alive, she is going to hold the door open and say, “Ladies, come!”³⁷

Did female leadership of a denomination increase the percentage of women members? This is an issue that has been fiercely debated. John Nickol writes concerning Pentecostal women preachers, “Perhaps this accounts for the multitudes of women who were won to Pentecostalism in those early years.” The answer is far less certain, however, when statistics from various Pentecostal churches are taken into account. According to a survey taken of four Pentecostal denominations in 1936, McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel had the highest percentage of men—sixty-five men to every one hundred women. In the male-dominated Assemblies of God, there were fewer than fifty-nine men to every one hundred women; and in the small black Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, there were fewer than thirty males for every one hundred females.³⁸

Even though women far outnumbered men, the contention that women predominated in “enthusiastic” or ecstatic forms of religion is not necessarily supported by the above statistics, since women in the Anglican Church at times outnumbered men by as much as seven to one.³⁹

Holiness Denominations

The holiness movement initiated by Phoebe Palmer and others during the mid-nineteenth century was unable to flourish in the Methodist or other mainline denominations. The opposition was intense, and as a result those who cherished the doctrine of entire sanctification separated themselves into new movements and denominations. Many of these movements began in the late nineteenth century and continued growing in the early decades of the twentieth century alongside, but often in opposition to, the Pentecostal movement.

Like the Pentecostal churches, the holiness denominations’ emphasis on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts opened the way for female ministry. The Pilgrim Holiness Church, founded in 1897, is an example. Seth Rees, who served as president from 1897 to 1905, made his own view on the subject abundantly clear:

Nothing but jealousy, prejudice, bigotry, and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented woman’s public recognition by the church. No church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women. We know of scores of women who can preach the gospel with a clearness, a power, and an efficiency seldom equaled by men. Sisters, let the Holy Ghost fill, call and anoint you to preach the glorious Gospel of our Lord.⁴⁰

Rees’ wife Hulda exemplified his ideal of the female preacher. She began preaching at age sixteen and continued throughout the rest of her life, serving alongside her husband as a pastor and evangelist. Although she initially was “excessively timid” and dreaded standing before a congregation, she overcame her fear after she was “sanctified wholly” and she began preaching “in the power of the Spirit.” She became well known in holiness circles and was often referred to as the “Pentecostal prophetess.”⁴¹

Alma White and the Pillar of Fire

Another early-twentieth-century revivalist and church leader was Alma White, the founder of the tiny “Pillar of Fire” movement that was distinguished by its emphasis on the “holy dance.” White was born in Kentucky in 1862, and immediately after her conversion as a teenager she felt God’s call to ministry. Soon after that she set out on a two-thousand-mile trek to the territory of Montana to serve as a school teacher. Almost immediately she was embroiled in controversy with the school board because “for one hour each day she turned the school into a mission; and taught the children to pray, read the Bible, and commit sacred hymns to memory.” Although “there was an uprising against her,” she refused to back down, and in the end, with community support, new board members were elected, and she was allowed to continue her “mission” work.⁴²

Although the Pillar of Fire movement was initially organized as the Pentecostal Union in 1902, it was a holiness church strictly in the Wesleyan tradition. “The existence of the Pillar of fire,” according to J. Gordon Melton, “is due in part to the reluctance of the Methodist Episcopal Church to allow female ministers in its churches in the late nineteenth century.” As a Methodist minister’s wife, Alma White began preaching after she experienced the “baptism of the Holy Ghost.” In the words of an admiring contemporary, “Her tongue was touched with a live coal from the altar; she began to preach the Gospel in her husband’s church; and later preached in forty different localities in the State of Colorado, where the great Pillar of Fire movement that now belts the globe was launched out through her efforts; her converts multiplied until it was necessary to effect an organization to take care of them and train them for missionary work.”⁴³

White might have remained in the Methodist Church, but the publicity from all her success led to opposition from Methodist churchmen, and that prompted her to organize a movement of independent missions similar to Wesley’s early societies. When the organization became more structured, it took on the episcopal form of government, and White became its first bishop.⁴⁴

Alma White, Founder of the Pillar of Fire Movement. From Alma White, Looking Back from Beulah (Bound Brook, N.J.: Pentecostal Union, 1910).

Like most other holiness leaders, White took a strong stand against the emerging Pentecostal movement. In fact, she had the reputation for being one of the most vitriolic opponents of the movement. She believed tongues speaking was nothing less than “satanic gibberish” and “demon worship.” She was very critical of William Seymour. After he visited her at her headquarters in Denver, Colorado, she wrote, “I had met all kinds of religious fakirs and tramps, but I felt he excelled them all.” She was equally critical of Aimee Semple McPherson, calling her a “necromancer, familiar with the black arts,” and whose “words were the mutterings of a witch.”⁴⁵

White’s denunciation of other religious leaders and groups was not limited to Pentecostalism. Soon after she began her work, she began publishing The Good Citizen, a vicious anti-Catholic paper. According to a contemporary, “its fearless editorials and striking cartoons have opened the eyes of many thousands to the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and the efforts it is putting fourth [sic] to make America Catholic.”⁴⁶ By the 1920s White’s verbal warfare had caught the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, and she joined their efforts as a writer, crediting the Klan for serving as “God’s agent in maintaining social and racial distinctions.”⁴⁷ Several years earlier she had denounced the Azusa Street revival because of the race mixing it encouraged.⁴⁸

Amid all the controversy that she was involved in, White endeavored to defend her role as a woman preacher. Although she believed that “men are better qualified for leaders than women,” she was convinced that at Pentecost (in fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy) women were permitted an equal place in the church alongside men: “Let Christ reign in the heart, and woman will take her place beside man and help to fight the battles of life, and not only be a helpmeet, but socially and mentally his equal.” With the advent of her “New Testament Church,” she believed that this was already beginning to take place: “Great has been the loss the Church has suffered from the lack of proper teaching on this subject, but the world is no longer in darkness, women are now exercising their blood-bought privilege in wielding the sword of the Spirit.”⁴⁹

Church of the Nazarene

The largest holiness church in the early twentieth century was the Church of the Nazarene, which was formed out of smaller holiness groups that broke away from the Methodist Church in the late nineteenth century. It, too, opened the doors of ministry to women. The founder, Phineas Bresee himself, ordained a woman preacher, and women were the founders and teachers of the first Bible institute for that denomination. As was the case with other sectarian movements, there was a shortage of ordained clergy, and thus laymen and women actively served as itinerant evangelists and lay pastors. The denomination’s constitution, in fact, specifically granted women the right to preach, and Mrs. W. S. Knott became the first ordained Nazarene preacher.⁵⁰

The holiness groups that had merged to form the Church of the Nazarene also depended heavily on women preachers. This was particularly true of a tiny denomination the New Testament Church of Christ that merged with the Nazarene Church in the early twentieth century. Like the Nazarene Church, it had left the Methodist Church over the issues of worldliness and entire sanctification. It had congregations in Texas and Tennessee and almost all of its pastors and itinerant evangelists were women.

The women who carried on this independent gospel work seem to have combined piety and practicality to a remarkable degree. Between revivals they maintained a normal and apparently stable family life, if the few surviving letters may be taken at face value. Their husbands joined happily in their meetings when they were near home and accepted periods of separation without much protest.⁵¹

There were those who opposed these women preachers, but at a business meeting in 1899, it was decided that women could be ordained; however, as the individual churches and the denomination grew, “a group of aggressive men were replacing the women evangelists as the real leaders…By the time the annual council met at Jonesboro in October, 1901, the new men were clearly in charge.”⁵²

This move was part of a general feeling of opposition to women preachers. How did the women respond? Most testified that God had called them into ministry, and though they resisted the call, they found no peace until they obeyed. In 1905 one of them published a volume entitled Women Preachers, in which twelve of them wrote autobiographical accounts of their religious pilgrimages. They all insisted, according to Smith, that they had been “called” to ministry—first to foreign missions (where women were welcome), but that God had providentially led them into home missions and then pastoral work.⁵³

The Salvation Army

One of the most influential “holiness” denominations of the twentieth century is the Salvation Army—the movement that incurred the wrath of H. A. Ironside in his widely circulated volume, published in 1912, Holiness: The False and the True. Following the turbulent decades of the late nineteenth century, the Army emerged in the twentieth century as a highly acclaimed Christian humanitarian organization. As was the pattern in other sectarian movements, the role of women declined as the Army acquired respectability.⁵⁴

This trend was disguised, however, by the visibility of the Booth daughters, who served in high-level positions. Catherine served as a marshal in western Europe. Emma served as consul in India for eight years before she was transferred to the United States where she served as co-commander until her untimely accidental death in 1903. Lucy, the youngest of the Booth children, served as commander in various western European countries for more than thirty years and then became commander in South America. And Evangeline served as the commander in Canada for eight years, the commander in the United States for thirty years, and finally general of the organization for five years during the 1930s.⁵⁵

Evangeline Booth was one of the most noted woman religious leaders of the twentieth century. She was her father’s favorite, and when she was yet a teenager, he recognized her potential value to the Army. When opposition flared up somewhere in the ranks, she was often sent in as a trouble-shooter, and she quickly earned a reputation as a calm and effective navigator in turbulent waters. Indeed, General William Booth’s immediate response to many explosive

Salvation Army Lassies at the Turn of the Century. These women invaded poverty-and vice-ridden areas. From Harry Edward Neal, The Hallelujah Army (New York: Chilton, 1961).

situations was, “Send Eva.” With charm and tact, she dispersed angry mobs and dissuaded arrogant magistrates.⁵⁶

Although her sisters—Catherine Booth-Clibborn, Emma Booth-Tucker, and Lucy Booth-Hellberg—had married with their father’s blessing, Evangeline confronted strong opposition. She wanted to marry a Salvation Army major, Thomas McKie, but when the young man requested permission from her father, the request was denied. Soon after that, perhaps as a consolation prize, McKie was promoted to commissioner and dispatched to Germany. Although Evangeline found time in her busy schedule to conduct wedding ceremonies, she herself remained single the remainder of her life.⁵⁷

Wedding ceremonies were only one aspect of Evangeline’s “ministerial” duties. As was the case with other Army officers, she was not ordained and did not serve a parish, but she filled the role of a minister and evangelist to the same extent that male officers did. She conducted camp meetings at such well-known retreats as Old Orchard, Maine, and Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Of these meetings her biographer writes: “Old-timers remember the tremendous ‘battle for souls’ in her meetings, with seldom less than a hundred seekers at the penitent form.”⁵⁸

Evangeline’s promotion to commander in the United States in 1904 did not occur without controversy. “That the General had succumbed to a certain inclination to nepotism,” writes Edward McKinley, “could no longer be denied.” Yet Evangeline proved to be very successful in that position. Although she was “vain of her appearance…impetuous, given to emotional flourishes, and something of a poseur…she was at the same time a compassionate soul, thoughtful, full of little kindnesses, genuinely sympathetic with the poor and lonely in their sufferings, and a dedicated, fearless evangelical.” Likewise, she manifested a powerful personal magnetism. She “could hold large audiences spellbound for hours” and was “adept at charming large fortunes for the Army out of rich men.”⁵⁹

Evangeline Booth With Her Father. From Brian Lunn, Salvation Dynasty (London: William Hodge, 1936), frontispiece.

Soon after she became general of the Salvation Army, Evangeline launched her “World for God” campaigns, which entailed travel, speaking, inspecting of stations, and initiating new centers of work throughout the world. One of her meetings in India drew a crowd of more than twenty thousand.

General Evangeline spoke for an hour on “His Name Shall Be Called Wonderful.” Although there was no available space for a penitent-form, at the General’s invitation, 5,000 seekers lifted their voices in prayer, “the sound rising like the waves of a mighty sea.”⁶⁰

But as significant as her five-year term as general was, her lasting legacy was the power and popularity she brought to the Army in the United States. For thirty years her personality pervaded the Army on the American scene, and her tens of thousands of loyal followers revered her to the very end.⁶¹

Holiness-Pentecostal Denominational Restrictions

The Salvation Army was not unique among holiness sects in the decline of the leadership of women during the twentieth century. Janet James writes that

where the sects coalesced into organized churches, women’s leadership and influence dwindled. In denominational structures, church life was routinized; charisma randomly distributed no longer provided sufficient authority. The holiness Church of the Nazarene and the pentecostal Assemblies of God ruled that female evangelists could no longer administer the sacrament, and many lapsed into the secondary role of teachers and missionaries.⁶²

In a similar vein sociologist Max Weber maintained that in virtually every new religious movement, female leadership declined as soon as the movement stabilized:

Only in very rare cases does this practice continue beyond the first stage of a religious community’s formation, when the pneumatic manifestations of charisma are valued as hallmarks of specifically religious exaltation. Thereafter, as routinization and regimentation of community relationships set in, a reaction takes place against pneumatic manifestations among women, which come to be regarded as dishonorable.⁶³

Women and the Social Gospel

While women in sectarian movements were actively involved in virtually every level of ministry and were moving into influential leadership positions, women in the mainline denominations had less opportunity for meaningful roles in the church. Leadership positions were filled by men who had high praise for women as wives and mothers but were not eager to share their places of responsibility with them. This is evident particularly in the social-gospel movement. Women had been actively involved in the “social gospel” long before it was known by that term, and more recently historians have come to realize that the women’s role in the movement has been virtually ignored. But as with so many other areas of church work, the women were activists, not administrators. Indeed, all of the nationally recognized leaders of the social-gospel movement were men. “Protestant churchmen,” writes Mary A. Dougherty, “assumed full paternal responsibility for the social gospel in 1912, when it already had matured.” John R. Commons assessed the situation even more critically when he charged that Christian men “have hired someone else to love [their neighbors]. They have left it to the women.”⁶⁴

During the 1920s, the social gospel came under fire from more conservative elements in the church, but this, according to Gladys Calkins, did not have a significant effect on the work the women were doing.

Their approach to social issues was essentially pragmatic and not doctrinaire. Women were concerned about the welfare and needs of individuals; while this had made them sympathetic to the preaching of the Social Gospel, it had not left them dependent upon it. To try to bring a more abundant life to women and children in foreign lands, and to do what was needed in this country and in the community, was still their motive and purpose. The battle of Fundamentalism versus Liberalism might rage in the pulpits, and the Scopes trial make headlines in the newspapers, but these would not throw the women off course. There was too much that needed to be done.⁶⁵

Unlike the reform movements of the nineteenth century, the social-gospel movement did not concern itself with women’s rights. Indeed, according to Janet James, “the last phase of what might be called the social action revival was the Men and Religion Forward Movement, which by preaching a muscular Christianity sought to bring men back into the mainline churches and restore the balance of the sexes.” And as far as women were concerned, their primary place was in the home. “Walter Rauschenbusch declared that Christianity had already achieved the ideal family.”⁶⁶

Walter Rauschenbusch

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1916), a Baptist minister who is considered the “Father of the Social Gospel in America,” demonstrated no particular zeal to open up more leadership opportunities for women in the church. In his view, “most women feel that their life gets its full meaning and dignity only when they can have and make a home.” Yet he expected women to use their nurturing qualities outside the home, and this is where their sphere was crucial to the social gospel:

The mother instinct is but a narrow thing if a woman forgets all other children and loves only her own. Her experiences as a mother have done their work on her soul only if they have broadened her intelligence and sympathy for all child-life. When a woman is through raising her own brood, she should graduate to the high school of motherhood and care for all children within her reach.⁶⁷

As to a women’s leadership role in the church or religious organizations, Rauschenbusch believed there was an underlying danger. Although he praised women for their sensitivity, he believed that this very attribute could “warp her judgment and make her less safe for teaching and administration.” He pointed to Christian Science and Theosophy, and queried, “Is there any connection between the characteristics of these two religions and their feminine habitus?” He also lamented the fact that the churches had become “overwhelmingly feminine.” As such, he was opposed to efforts to broaden women’s responsibilities. “Regarding the teaching and administration of the church, Rauschenbusch found women’s judgment less safe than that of men. He implied that due to the peculiarities of ‘womanly character’ it would not be wise to invest women with too much responsibility.”⁶⁸

Washington Gladden

Washington Gladden (1836–1918), a liberal Congregational pastor and theologian who was also closely identified with the social gospel, supported many aspects of the women’s movement, including suffrage. Yet in reference to church ministries, he held a traditional line. Although he argued that “there seems to be no longer any good reason why women may not do any kind of work in the church that thy are fitted to do,” he indicated that they were fitted mainly for social work and fund raising, and in doing so making the pastor’s duties “easy and delightful.” Because his concept of women’s work in the church seemed to be very limited, Rebecca Garber concludes that he probably was “not favorable to women preaching and teaching or sharing the leadership responsibility with men.”⁶⁹

Lyman Abbott

Lyman Abbott (1835–1922), another social-gospel leader and the pastor of Brooklyn’s prestigious Plymouth Congregational Church, also perpetuated the cult of motherhood. In his book The Home Builder he “sentimentally portrayed the ideal woman from her youth to her death as she existed within the context of her home and family…She asked little for herself, but was willing to give all of herself for her family. She was a wife and mother, and she was most definitely not a feminist.”⁷⁰ Abbott’s concept of the proper wifely role was to be cultivated even before a woman was married, as is evident in his descriptions of a bride’s thoughts on her upcoming marriage:

She wishes, not to submit a reluctant will to his, but to make his will her own. She wishes a sovereign and is glad to have found him—no! to have been found by him. She laughs at the virgin reformers who have never known the mystery of love and are protesting against the subjection of women.⁷¹

Women in Mainline Denominations

In 1927 a study entitled “The Relative Place of Women in the Church in the United States” was conducted by a joint committee representing the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and two other groups. Out of twenty-two denominations surveyed, only seven granted women full equality with men. But even in the instances where women were granted full equality, women fell far behind in leadership positions in the church. Yet, women had a great deal of influence in their respective churches, and the committee made an interesting observation along these lines:

It seems to be generally admitted that women frequently contribute the largest proportion of attendance at meetings, the majority of Sunday school teachers, the largest missionary intelligence and interest, the greatest spiritual power and loyalty, the largest devotion to personal needs, to visitation and philanthropy, the keenest value of team work and responsibility, the encouragement of the highest ideals, in addition to those duties once designated as “woman’s church work” which consisted of furnishing flowers, serving food, raising funds by the “chore method.”⁷²

Roman Catholics

In most mainline Protestant denominations women fared far better at the turn of the twentieth century than they did in the Roman Catholic Church. On such issues as women’s suffrage, the church took a hard line. Archbishop Sebastian Messmer’s views were typical. His rationale against women’s suffrage was simply “the essential inequality of man and woman.” The widely read Catholic writer, John Boyle O’Reilly, expressed similar views: “Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality…It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.”⁷³

Some Catholic women rose to the occasion and defended their sex. In 1910 British Catholic women founded the St. Joan’s International Alliance to support women’s suffrage. Although Rosemary Ruether calls it the “original Catholic feminist organization,” it was hardly a radical group. Not until 1961 did it make an appeal for the diaconate to be opened up to women, and even then it was in mild terms. A call for women’s ordination to the priesthood two years later was equally mild: “St. Joan’s International Alliance re-affirms its loyalty and filial devotion and expresses its conviction that should the Church in her wisdom and in her good time decide to extend to women the dignity of the priesthood, women would be willing and eager to respond.”⁷⁴

Because of the powerful male-dominated hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, women have found themselves overwhelmed by a clergy and by dogma that are slow to change. Indeed, some of the commentary relating to women sounds more like that of the Middle Ages than of the twentieth century. Are the souls of women equal to the souls of men? This issue actually made its way into the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia. One of the articles presented the position that “the female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul.”⁷⁵

Whether women should sing in choirs was also an issue that was raised by church leaders. In 1927 Bishop William Hickey of Providence called for priests, in keeping with the teachings of Pius X, to eliminate women from choirs. “In Motu Propino, issued in 1903, the Pope had affirmed that church singers filled a ‘real liturgical office’ and that women, being incapable of exercising such office, cannot be admitted to form part of the choir’; soprano and contralto parts must be sung by boys.”⁷⁶

While such views were not characteristic of the church as a whole, they do illustrate the opposition women confronted when raising the issue of sexual equality in the church. But the issue could not remain in the clerical camp forever. Spurred on by the liberating forces of Vatican II and the feminist movement of the 1960s, Catholic women along with some sympathetic male voices began demanding equality in ministry. This was in part due to a statement contained in a Vatican II document that gave renewed hope to some women who had feared the church had forgotten them: “With respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, colour, social condition, language, or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.”⁷⁷

By the 1970s, widespread rumblings of dissatisfaction began to shake the church. In response, the Vatican issued the Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood in 1977.

The statement makes a rather amazing effort to separate the tradition of exclusion of women from priesthood from the concepts of women’s natural inferiority and status of subjection…It asserts that, following Jesus, the Church has always believed in the equality of women with men in the natural order. Exclusion from priesthood is not based on any such concept of inferiority or subjection, but rather on some mysterious sacramental bond between Christ, maleness and priesthood.⁷⁸

American Catholic laity, according to a Gallup poll, reacted against the Declaration. Support for women priests jumped from 29 percent to 41 percent immediately following its release.⁷⁹ But wholly unmoved by Gallup polls, the Catholic Church remains firmly committed to a secondary role for women in ministry, and in that sense it stands alone among major denominations.

Anglicans (Church of England)

The early twentieth century was one of slow but steady progress for women in the Church of England. Although women had actively lobbied for official recognition, they had no voting privileges in church affairs at the turn of the century. When the matter was brought before the church in 1903, little headway was made, and Charles Gore (later Bishop of Oxford) referred to the efforts as a “positively and definitely retrograde step.” The following year a committee was appointed to investigate a limited form of franchise, “so as not wholly to exclude women.” Further extension of the franchise was granted in 1914, when women were “admitted to the parochial lay franchise on the same terms as men” and permitted to serve as representatives on the parochial councils, though they were barred from higher councils. One of the fears of men regarding the increased power of women was the fact that women so heavily outnumbered men in the local parishes—sometimes by as many as seven to one. “The women, by sheer weight of numbers will be able to capture the whole government of the Church,” wrote one opponent of equality for women. The opposition was strong, and it was a hard-fought battle, but finally in 1919, the church granted full lay rights for churchwomen, and the following year, more than 10 percent of the lay representatives at the National Assembly were women.⁸⁰

An issue that took far longer to settle in the Anglican Church was the status of women in ministry—an issue that was very unclear in the early twentieth century. A general convention ruled in 1889 that deaconesses would be “set apart” for ministry, and in 1920 the Lambeth Conference ruled that “ordination of a deaconess confers on her holy orders,” but a decade later Lambeth reversed the ruling, maintaining that a deaconess could not be ordained to holy orders.⁸¹

A strong voice against sex discrimination among the Anglicans of the early twentieth century was that of Dr. A. Maude Royden, who conceded that women were allowed certain privileges as long as their ministry was couched in the proper terminology. She described this situation from her own standpoint in England: “In the Church of England I have myself been allowed to preach in churches so long as I was not said to ‘preach’ but to ‘give an address.’ Only a priest or deacon can preach; not a layman or woman. Did John the Baptist then give addresses on the banks of the Jordan? What nonsense is this?” The situation in the Church of England was not so different from the situation in other denominations in the British Isles, according to Royden. “I myself have been invited to preach in Free Churches. Yet women are rarely called to take charge of a church.”⁸² Even after the Lambeth Conference voted to permit women to preach “at non-statutory services,” Bishop Winnington-Ingram forbade Royden to speak at a nonstatutory service because “it was a specially sacred service.”⁸³

Royden was a staunch Anglican who was singled out by one of her contemporaries as being the “world’s greatest woman preacher.” In her early career she served in various capacities in religious work—as an inter-city social worker, as curate to an Anglican minister, and as the first woman lecturer in the extension program at Oxford University. Then in 1917 she accepted a call to become an assistant pastor at the City Temple, a Congregational church, in London, and that launched her into her preaching ministry. After only two years, she left and founded a new independent mission work with another pastor. During her seventeen-year tenure in this ministry, she conducted regular meetings, except for Sunday morning, so as not to compete with Anglican Church services. She also “established a radio ministry and traveled on preaching and lecture tours to the United States, Australia and New Zealand, India, and China.”⁸⁴

Although she could not be ordained in the Anglican Church and was forbidden by the church to preach on a number of occasions, Royden continued to be loyal to that church all her life. In addition to her speaking ministry, she wrote a number of books, including The Church and Women. She was ever optimistic about the future of women’s role in the church, as is evident in a tract she wrote, entitled The Ministry of Women.

The advance of feminism within the Church of England has already been very great. When the question of women missionaries was first raised, the great principle that women might preach the gospel was at once established. People, knowing only of the decision, and being perfectly accustomed to the idea of women missionaries, have forgotten how the battle raged, and with what earnestness and sincerity religious people pointed out that our Lord had only sent out men, chosen men apostles, and never even suggested that women could preach…In fact the controversy followed lines now exquisitely familiar, and reached its cheerfully inevitable end in the defeat of the opponents of women missionaries.⁸⁵

During Royden’s years of ministry, changes were slowly being made in the Anglican Church—partly as a result of feminists such as Royden who fought for equal status in the church. The long struggle for voting rights came to fruition in 1919, when the church followed the lead of the government and extended the franchise to women. The next battle to be waged concerned the ordination of women, and the League of the Church Militant was formed to pressure the church in this matter. After only a decade of existence, the League published an optimistic overview of the situation:

Since the League started its work of education and propaganda, thought on women’s service in the Church has advanced so rapidly that it was felt that ordination to the priesthood must inevitably follow in due time, and that the best way that women of this and future generations could further this cause was by prayer for its fulfillment and by preparing themselves mentally and spiritually to meet those opportunities and responsibilities of service in the Church that may open up to them in the future.⁸⁶

Ordination of women did follow in “due time”—but not until more than a half century later, and even then it included only the lowest clerical office in the Anglican Church—that of deacon. In July of 1985 the General Synod finally passed the measure that allowed the church’s 350 deaconesses to “take their place alongside male deacons, performing marriages and assisting priests in other ways.”⁸⁷

The Protestant Episcopal Church

On the American scene, Episcopalian women also struggled long and hard for recognition. In 1946 a female delegate was seated at the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, but three years later three more convention delegates were denied voting privileges. Then, in 1952, the House of Deputies “ruled for the third time against giving women the right to vote on church legislation.”⁸⁸

Ordaining women to the priesthood, however, was the most controversial issue the denomination confronted. Indeed, one of the most newsworthy events to occur in the twentieth century regarding women in ministry was the “irregular” ordination of eleven women to the Episcopal priesthood in 1974. The service took place before a crowd of nearly two thousand at the Church of the Advocate located in an economically depressed section of Philadelphia, and was presided over by bishops who supported the women’s cause. After that, things moved quickly in the Episcopal Church—though not without heated debates and many closed-door meetings. In 1975, four more women were ordained in the Washington D. C. diocese, and at the 1976 General Convention the leading church officials, realizing the issue would not lose its volatility, decided in favor of women’s ordination.⁸⁹

Voting in favor of legalizing the ordination of women in the church was a simpler matter than deciding the fate of the fifteen women who had already been “illegally” ordained.

The irregularly ordained women had always raised emotional hackles as well as theological questions. Not only had they gone “beyond” the institutional Church’s normal procedures to obtain ordination to the priesthood, but they had subsequently proclaimed that priesthood with baptisms, weddings and public celebrations of the eucharist. These were not contrite women recognizing the “error” of their ways but priests who had grown quickly and deeply in their sense of spiritual power.⁹⁰

But that issue, too, was settled in favor of the women, and the fifteen women were recognized as priests in the Episcopal Church.⁹¹

Presbyterians

The Presbyterians were among the most restrictive of the mainline Protestant denominations in the early twentieth century regarding women in ministry. Like women in other denominations, Presbyterian women had formed their own mission boards in the late nineteenth century, but even in their mission work they had very little autonomy. But in 1923 “Presbyterian women received a shattering blow…when a denominational reorganization resulted in the termination of the woman’s Board of Home Missions and the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions.” For many women it was a devastating ordeal. “Apart from the disappointment in seeing their power base destroyed, the women bitterly resented the fact that they had been excluded from any vote in the entire reorganizational process.”⁹²

Katharine Bennett was one of the leading women in the Presbyterian Church in the early twentieth century, and it was through her initiative and persistence that the Woman’s Board of Home Missions had been independently incorporated in 1915. She and other women had worked so hard to win independence that it naturally was a blow when it was taken away. They “watched the absorption of their mission societies without an outcry, but within two years morale and revenues plummeted.”⁹³

It was not just in the area of organizing for missions that women had difficulty. The “Women of the Church” was organized in 1912. Although this was a duly recognized organization, the chief officer was not permitted, because of her sex, to read the annual report before the General Assembly. Instead it was read by a male member of that body. In 1925, a woman was allowed to read the report, but the following year when some of the “brethren” took a public stand against female participation, the report was voluntarily turned over to a man. In 1927, the issue was finally settled in favor of the women.⁹⁴ It is interesting to note that time and again women deferred to men over such issues—and were far from what could be termed “women’s rights” activists.

The general dissatisfaction of women did not go unnoticed by church officials, but the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s threw the church into so much turmoil that the problems of women seemed very low on the list of priorities. Indeed, when a committee was formed in 1926 to identify the issues causing divisiveness in the church, “the last item in the long list of contributing factors was the status of women.” The report of the committee noted that there were “many women in the church who are not satisfied with present administrative conditions” and that “some of them fear the loss of organization through which they worked so long. Likewise, “some regard as unjust the lack of representation of women in the church.”⁹⁵

Because of the findings of the committee, Katharine Bennett and Margaret Hodge were appointed by the General Council to study the reasons for dissatisfaction among women. Their findings, entitled Causes of Unrest Among Women of the Church, told more about the character of the Presbyterian women than about the restrictiveness of the church polity. They “candidly admitted that most churchwomen were either unaware or uninterested in issues of freedom and equality,” and those who were concerned about such matters “preferred to accept the status accorded them rather than to criticize the church openly.” Yet they concluded their report by calling for equality for women in the church, and warning the leadership that beneath the surface there was real unrest: “Her mind rebels even if her heart keeps her tongue quiet.”⁹⁶

But if her mind was rebelling, it was not over the issue of ordination—at least not in the 1920s. When Robert Speer, an ardent advocate of women’s ministry and the head of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, suggested the possibility of ordaining women as evangelists, Margaret Hodge was not particularly enthusiastic. The issue disturbing women, she reminded him “is not so much a desire to be admitted to the diaconate, the eldership, or even the ministry, as it is to have removed all discrimination against them as women.” Katharine Bennett responded similarly.⁹⁷

It is significant to note that Speer was far more open to the full ministry of women than were the vast majority of female “feminists” in the church. He argued that

it would be strange and anomalous to deny to women equality in the church, which is the very fountain of the principle of equality. It is Christ who has made women free and equal. Is she to be allowed this freedom and equality elsewhere and denied it in the Church, where freedom and equality had their origin?⁹⁸

Likewise, he had high praise for “the Christian Churches on the foreign mission field” that were “apprehending the measure of the Gospel in this better than we…God shuts no doors to His daughters which He opens to His sons.”⁹⁹ Speer’s influence had a significant impact on the course of events leading to equal status for Presbyterian women.

The issue of equality was debated in committee at some length before it was put before the General Council in 1929, and at that time, by a significant margin a resolution was passed to remove from the church rules “any form of speech which is inconsistent with the recognition of the complete equality of men and women in the life and work of the Church.” The council then sent the resolution to the presbyteries. It was at this point that bitter strife ensued. David S. Kennedy, editor of the Presbyterian, referred to the proposal as “ungodly and unscriptural” and called on God to give the church a “full and prompt deliverance from this violence and sin.” Kennedy quickly rallied conservatives against the measure, and when the final tally of presbytery votes came in, the measure lost, as did a proposal to license women as evangelists. The supporters of women, however, won a major victory in the passage of a proposal permitting women ordination as ruling elders in the local churches.¹⁰⁰

During the 1930s and 1940s, following this decision on women, “the subject of ordination of women disappeared almost immediately,” and very few women became ruling elders in the churches. In 1940, a survey indicated that fewer than 7 percent of the churches had any women elders at all. By the mid 1950s the number of women elder’s in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. had increased, but their numbers were still a small fraction of the total—that being less than 5 percent. Why the ranks of women elders did not immediately swell is a thought-provoking question. It is true that in many cases men were not eager to share their authority with women, but “in most Presbyterian congregations, women outnumbered men three to one.” It would seem, then, that the women themselves were largely responsible for their lack of leadership positions in the churches. Most women were satisfied working as they had in the past in ministries to women and children and for missions and humanitarian causes.¹⁰¹

In spite of the strong male opposition and the lack of female aggressiveness regarding the issue of ordination of women, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. granted women equal status with men in 1956, before many of the other mainline denominations were willing to make such a controversial move. The following year, when the church merged with a smaller Presbyterian denomination that did not ordain women, the officials of the new United Presbyterian Church upheld the equal status of women in the church, but made it clear that “no congregation would be forced to accept women elders or ministers against their will.”¹⁰² Nevertheless, it was a major advance for those women who had long been struggling for greater equity in church affairs. Few would deny that Presbyterian women had made considerable progress during the twentieth century. Indeed, of all the major denominations it is “one of the few in which women in the past seventy years moved from having no status, except as church members, to full ecclesiastical equality.”¹⁰³

Even though women had achieved full equality with men in the church, their influence continued to be far less than that of men—a reality that is reflected in the title of Elizabeth Verdesi’s book In But Still Out. Although they had been permitted ordination in 1956, in 1975 there were fewer than two hundred ordained women ministers out of a total of some thirteen thousand, and only about 10 percent of those had pastorates of their own.¹⁰⁴ Prior to the 1956 ruling, Presbyterian women, like women in other denominations, had been able to circumvent tight restrictions against their sex by finding alternatives to an ordained ministry or by seeking ordination outside their church. Daisy Billings, who became the wife of Oswald J. Smith, is an example of the former. In 1914 she became a deaconess at the Dale Presbyterian Church in Toronto—a position that entailed mainly visitation and counseling. Her preaching ability, however, did not escape the attention of J. D. Morrow, the senior pastor. Indeed, “her greatest delight was taken in the fact that her pastor allowed her to preach once each month to his congregation, for she loved to preach.” These opportunities to preach, however, came to a sudden end when Morrow decided to hire a full-time assistant pastor—Oswald J. Smith. Her later decision to marry him was a difficult one, for she knew it meant giving up her preaching and independent ministry.¹⁰⁵

Some Presbyterian women sought ordination outside the Presbyterian Church. Jessie Bartlett Hess is an example. She and her husband started twelve churches in Colorado, Idaho, and Washington during their early married life. Although she was a full partner in the ministry as a pastor’s wife, she was not recognized as such. She sought ordination in the Presbyterian church where her husband held his credentials, but her request was denied, so she turned to the Congregational-Christian Church, one of the few churches that ordained women in the 1930s. While her husband ministered in a Presbyterian church, she served as the pastor of a nearby Congregational church. After he retired from the ministry, she continued serving in churches. Following her retirement from the pastoral ministry, she taught several large women’s Bible studies in the New York Metropolitan area, and continued this ministry past the age of seventy.¹⁰⁶

Reformed Churches

The Reformed Churches, like some of the smaller more conservative Presbyterian denominations, continued to place tight restrictions on women in ministry well beyond the mid-twentieth century. In Europe the situation was resolved sooner than in America, but controversy was hardly less bitter. This is illustrated in the life and ministry of Elisabeth Schmidt, the first woman ordained by the French Reformed Church. She tells her story in her book When God Calls a Woman: The Struggle of a Woman Pastor in France and Algeria. Her decision to seek seminary training and a pastoral ministry was motivated by a “compelling call which required complete availability and thus the abandonment of my teaching career.”¹⁰⁷

Elisabeth Schmidt, the First Woman Ordained by the French Reformed Church. From Elisabeth Schmidt, When God Calls a Woman (New York: Pilgrim, 1981).

It was in 1945, after she had served for a number of years in parishes in a Reformed Church in France that the Presbyterial Council requested that she be ordained by the synod. She waited two years before she herself became involved in the struggle, and even then she made her noncombative position regarding her ordination very clear:

I have never asked for it in the twelve years in which parishes have been entrusted to me. I have refused to write or publicly debate on this question. I have imposed these twelve years of silence on myself, asking God to keep me from all error and to lead me. Today I believe that the hour has come for breaking this silence. I have not been able to shed God’s call, nor to avoid the charge to minister which he has entrusted to me. And I feel constrained to put this question to the church.¹⁰⁸

For her the issue was solely one of spiritual ministry, and she completely dissociated herself from those who sought to make her struggle a feminist issue. “The notorious feminists, men and women who were preoccupied with the promotion of womanhood, did not care what took place in Synod meetings and were not looking for victories in Christian milieus.”¹⁰⁹

Schmidt’s request for ordination was placed before the National Synod in 1948. Although the highly respected president of the synod, Pastor Boegner, made the motion, it was turned down by the assembly at large. Schmidt was personally devastated. “I left the temple, sliding noise-lessly into the sarcristy, where I let my tears pour out. I felt that between my church and myself there was a break.” The following year there were enough votes mustered at the National Synod to sanction her ordination—though without making any precedent-setting decisions for any other women in the future. It was not until 1965 that women in general were permitted to be ordained. Schmidt continued to maintain a low profile until 1972, when she retired after thirty-seven years of pastoral ministry.¹¹⁰

The Reformed Church in America also took a strong stand against ordaining women ministers, but in 1979 the General Synod voted to open the door for women’s ordination. Still, vocal and latent opposition remained. In 1982, James I. Cook, president of the General Synod, wrote:

Although we have opened the offices to women, we have been notably reluctant to open our pulpits to them on an equal basis. Congregations have sent their daughters as candidates to New Brunswick and to Western [seminaries] but have been less willing to receive them back in ministry. Little wonder that these candidates often experience feelings of frustration, rejection, anger, and despair!”¹¹¹

In the Christian Reformed Church there was even stronger opposition to an expanded role for women in the church. It was the debate over this issue more than anything else that prompted the decade of the 1970s to be called the “decade of unrest” in the church. “No other issue…appeared on the agenda of the Christian Reformed Church so regularly, so vigorously, as the so-called ‘women’s issue.’” In 1957, the synod gave women the right to vote in congregational meetings, but it was a limited privilege because “questions of whether and when women should be invited to participate were left to the judgment of each consistory.” In 1978 the synod “decided that the consistories may ordain qualified women as deacons, provided their work” was “distinguished from that of elders,” but the following year, because of strong protests, the synod “instructed consistories to defer implementing the 1978 decision.”¹¹²

Lutherans

The high priority placed on doctrine by Lutherans made the issue of women’s ordination a difficult one. Prior to the 1970s, the idea of women preachers was repugnant to most Lutherans. Their theology ruled out women in such a role by “orders of creation” if for no other reason. Likewise, Lutherans, unlike most other Protestants, had a profound reverence for the clerical office—a position inappropriate for a woman. An alternative to pastoral ministry for women in the Lutheran church was the diaconate, an institution revived by Theodore Fliedner in the 1830s. In Europe the deaconess movement thrived for more than a century, but in America the situation was entirely different. Although the movement grew during the early decades of the twentieth century, by 1940 there were still fewer than five hundred Lutheran deaconesses in the United States. In the years following, interest waned even though there were efforts to make the ministry more meaningful. Many women considered the diaconate a demeaning role for women in the church in comparison to the roles that were available to men. Yet, until the 1960s it was the only official ministry open to Lutheran women.¹¹³

Despite longstanding opposition, European Lutherans began ordaining women in the 1960s, and in 1970 the Americans followed suit. In that year both the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America voted to ordain women. The much more conservative Missouri Synod, however, strongly rejected the trend. By a vote of 674 to 194, this synod ruled that “the Word of God does not permit women to the pastoral office.”¹¹⁴

Methodists

Methodists, like most other mainline denominations, have split and merged over the centuries, and thus the historical roots are sometimes fragmented. The Methodist Episcopal Church was the largest body of Methodists, and it was not until 1906, after considerable struggle by women’s groups, that that body officially recognized women as lay people in the church. Women would wait another half century, until 1956, before they were granted full clerical privileges involving ordination. Long before this, however, there were Methodist women preachers. Indeed, it was two Methodist women who organized “An American Association of Women Preachers” in 1919. The official organ of the new organization was the Woman’s Pulpit, so the specter of women in the pulpit in 1956 was not a new phenomena in Methodist circles. By 1970 there were nearly four hundred ordained female ministers, and five years later that figure had surpassed six hundred.¹¹⁵

Disciples of Christ

The Disciples of Christ illustrate the significant change in attitude toward women in ministry that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1905, J. W. McGarvey, president of the College of the Bible in Lexington, Kentucky, defended the admission of women students to opponents who feared the school would soon be turning out women preachers. His response was reassuring: “I replied, that by the time they [the women students] studied the Scriptures with us they will learn that women are not to be preachers.” A half century later the scene had changed considerably. Riley B. Montgomery, the president of the college at the time of an inquiry in 1953, issued the following response:

We believe that women should have the same right to ordination for any position in the church that is accorded to men. Our educational program is planned on the basis of this belief. Although the function of ordination among Disciples of Christ is a function of the local church, The College of the Bible shares in this responsibility with the local churches when they are ordaining graduates from our institutions. We should recommend women to the local churches for ordination as readily as we would men.¹¹⁶

By mid-century, the Disciples of Christ were giving more than rhetorical support to women in ministry. In 1952, the denomination elected a woman as first vice-president of their International Convention, and she opened the convention that year with the president’s address because the president himself was ill. Yet, as with most other denominations, the role of women in the church was largely one involving traditional “women’s work”—that being foreign missions, humanitarian endeavors, and church women’s societies. Lorraine Lollis’ book, The Shape of Adam’s Rib: A Lively History of Women’s Work in the Christian Church, gives the impression that women’s work in the church is the work that is organized by women and serves women. “Our story,” she writes, “is that of our organized life in various forms as the ‘better half’ of the church.”¹¹⁷

Baptists

The various Baptist denominations are more diverse than the Methodists, and their policy on women has varied considerably. The American Baptist Convention, the most liberal of the large Baptist denominations, began ordaining women in the nineteenth century and has since permitted women great latitude in ministry. In fact, so open was the denomination toward women that by the 1950s three women—Mrs. Leslie Swain, Mrs. H. G. Colwell, and Mrs. Helen Barrett Montgomery—had held its highest executive office.¹¹⁸ The most well known of these was Montgomery. She was a leading figure in the women’s missionary movement, a prolific writer, and the first woman translator of the New Testament from the Greek. She served only one term as president, in 1910, but “it was the first time that any woman had held this position in any large Christian body, and when the name of Mrs. Montgomery was presented to the convention, the shouts made the rafters ring.” Although not ordained, Montgomery was a licensed preacher and took an active part in the preaching ministry of her church. She also served for forty-four years as the teacher of the Barrett Memorial class, “one of the most influential women’s classes in the city of Rochester.” The class numbered as high as 250 members.¹¹⁹

The giant Southern Baptist Convention remained adamantly opposed to equalizing roles for women in the church. It was not until 1929 that the president of the Woman’s Missionary Union of that denomination was permitted to report directly to the Convention. On that occasion “a number of male delegates walked out, necessitating a compromise whereby the session was held in the Sunday school rooms of the host church rather than violate the dictum of St. Paul.”¹²⁰

The first woman to be officially ordained in a Southern Baptist church was Addie Davis. The service took place in Durham, North Carolina, in 1964. Although she was a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and had served as an assistant pastor and as a supply pastor, there was bitter opposition to what was perceived as a new course of action. Warren Carr, the pastor of the church where her ordination took place, did not seek to justify women’s ordination in general but he did strongly defend his action in her case, claiming it “was almost solely due to her personal testimony.” As had been true of so many women before her, it was a “call” that propelled her into the ministry. It was that aspect of her testimony that was most convincing to Carr and his colleagues: “We took her seriously when she said that God had called her to the ordained ministry and that she could not rest until she answered that call.”¹²¹

Despite the fears of some of the Southern Baptist “brethren,” the ordination of Davis did not unleash a deluge of women clamoring for ordination. In fact, the next female ordination did not occur until 1971, when Shirley Carter was ordained in Columbia, South Carolina, by the Kathwood Baptist Church. So controversial was the ordination, however, that the following year the church rescinded it.¹²²

In the years that followed a few more women were ordained, and controversy continued to rage. In February of 1984 an article in the Chicago Tribune, under the title, “Women Pastors Split Southern Baptists,” told of the opposition to the installation of the Reverend Susan Wright as the pastor of a small Baptist church in the Chicago area. Several pastors from nearby Southern Baptist churches were seeking to disqualify the church that installed her from membership in the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association. When motion to that effect was defeated, some churches withdrew their membership in protest.¹²³ In June of 1984, spurred on by a conservative swing toward fundamentalism, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to deny women ordination in order “to preserve a submission God requires because man was first in creation and woman was first in the Edenic fall.”¹²⁴ Although individual churches remained autonomous, the vote was nevertheless symbolic of a mood that was evident elsewhere in both evangelical and fundamentalist circles.

Mennonites

The position of Mennonites toward women in the church is illustrated by the life and ministry of Ann J. Allebach (1874–1918). She grew up in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, attended normal school, became a school teacher and later principal, took university and seminary training, and finally threw herself into a full-time ministry with the poor and down-trodden of New York City. It was when she was in her early thirties, “after her years of education and her intensive training in church work at the Chapel, after her years of preaching and evangelizing at the Missions,” that she contacted two old friends—both Mennonite ministers—“and asked to be ordained by her own people—the General Conference Mennonite Church.” Their willingness to comply led to controversy within the movement, but she did not back down. “On a cold, gray Sunday, January 15, 1911, some 270 people parked their buggies in the rain at the first Mennonite Church” in Philadelphia. Her own pastor preached the ordination sermon, which dealt very specifically with women in ministry and Paul’s admonitions for women to be silent—an admonition that he argued had been determined by Greek culture.¹²⁵

Alleback’s ordination made the newspaper headlines: “WOMAN ORDAINED AS MENNONITE PASTOR: Miss Allebach Is First of Her Sex So to Act in America; SHE IS A SUFFRAGIST.” The publicity no doubt only harmed her cause, and she soon discovered that ordination did not translate into open doors of ministry. Her qualifications and experience were not enough to overcome long-held negative attitudes of congregations toward women pastors. She did receive several pastoral calls from congregations outside the Mennonites, but she turned them down, choosing to remain in nondenominational humanitarian and organizational work. In 1916, however, five years after her ordination, she accepted a pastoral call to Sunnyside Reformed Church. Her ministry there was different from that of many of her male counterparts. She sought to reach out to hurting people who were often neglected in fashionable religious circles. An article in the New York World captured the essence of her ministry:

Should you chance some Sunday morning to visit the Sunnyside Reformed Church, do not be surprised if the service opens thus: “If any of you here present are sick or hungry and need employment or help in your homes, come to me after the service and I will help you.” And the Rev. Miss Allebach does help. There are many men and women in New York City who can corroborate this, men and women who know that this woman minister not only preaches but practices the Gospel.¹²⁶

Her pastoral ministry, however, was short. She died suddenly of an apparent heart attack in 1918.

The local Mennonites, even after her death, did not quite know what to make of this woman so unlike her kind. Ann’s name never appeared in any of the standard Mennonite leadership lists. It was penciled in, as an after-thought, on an ordination list of “Men Ordained…” They shook their heads and marveled, and in several years, they forgot.¹²⁷

The opposition to an equal role for women in the church continued, and few other women sought to break the barriers. Barbara Bender Reber summed up the situation in 1982: “Although Mennonite women, almost without exception, have been excluded from ordination, their ministry has been essential to the growth of the home, the church, and the communities in which they lived and worked.”¹²⁸

Fundamentalists and Free Churches

It was not uncommon for the women’s issue to be associated with liberalism during the early twentieth century when the controversy between modernism and fundamentalism was raging. Yet with few exceptions it was the more conservative sectarian movements that permitted women the most latitude in ministry, and in many such churches women also sat on governing boards.

The Free Church Movement

The openness to women in ministry was seen in the Free Churches that broke away from European State Churches in the late nineteenth century. In Fredrik Franson, the Free Church movement in Scandinavia and the United States had a staunch advocate of women in ministry. But what he was advocating was a limited ministry—one that was focused on the foreign mission field. Although Donald Dayton and others have asserted that in his widely read pamphlet, Prophesying Daughters, Franson “defended the right of women to preach,” such an interpretation is unwarranted. Franson seems clearly to be defending women’s evangelistic work, especially on the foreign mission field, and he distinguished that from “preaching” per se.

When we realize that nearly two-thirds of all converted people in the world are women, then the question of women’s work in evangelization is of great importance. In China each day 30,000 people go into eternity without having heard the gospel. There is no prohibition in the Bible against women’s public work, and we face the circumstance that the devil…has been able to exclude nearly two-thirds of the number of Christians from participation in the Lord’s service…The loss for God’s cause is so great that it can hardly be described.”¹²⁹

In regard to women “preaching,” Franson appears to have had serious reservations about it and cautioned women against it:

One matter that all missionary sisters in the homeland should be especially careful about is that they not seek to defend preaching by women, especially in public. As soon as they would do so, they would appear as teachers concerning questions in dispute and would be in a field where their place, to say the least, is ambiguous. It is enough that they themselves in their heart have assurance concerning God’s Word, that they have the right to evangelize, and they don’t need to talk much about it.¹³⁰

What should women do when they confront opposition? “If mission houses or churches sometimes are closed against them, they should accept this as from God in that it helps them to come just to those places where the need is the greatest and which opportunities would be lost to them if too much acceptance was theirs.”¹³¹

The history of the role of women in the Free Churches is one that needs further study. Della E. Olson, in her book A Woman of Her Times, writes that “it appears from writings of the early church leaders that the participation of women in preaching and teaching had a high period just before and after the turn of the century,” and that “the practice did not actually stop.” Yet the vast majority of examples she cites relate to women doing home missionary work in the West, particularly among the Mormons and those doing itinerant evangelistic work, such as Alma Olson, who in the 1920s conducted tent meetings and held “services and Sunday school in the homes or in a hired hall.”¹³²

But despite their often lowly position, these lay preachers were crucial to the early development of the Free Church movement.

Although few of these women were gifted speakers, they were sincere, Godfearing persons with a passion for souls. In view of the fact that this movement was a new phenomenon, still the women evangelists drew crowds for many years and many people were won to the Lord through their simple testimonies and songs of faith.¹³³

Another early writer stated:

A notable portion of our work in North Dakota was launched by women workers. With one or two exceptions they were the only workers who had ventured into the sparsely populated Dakota districts…Meetings were held mostly in homes; now and then a schoolhouse would be available. The gatherings could not have been large at any time, yet seasons of refreshing were frequently sent from God.”¹³⁴

Although few people denied the contribution that women evangelists made to the spread of the Free Churches, there was strong resentment against their work among certain factions in the movement. This antagonism is evident in the book by Frank Lindberg on the Swedish Evangelical Free Church of America, Looking Back Fifty Years. He introduces a section entitled “Women Evangelists” by focusing on the controversial nature of the subject:

Now we come to a period within the Free Church work which I dread to write about, because mention of the matter is so apt to cause irritation…This was the period in which women ministers were active. It was started by Franson who conceived the idea that women ought to preach, and published a book entitled “Prophesying Daughters”…[which] contained only the passages of Scripture that he thought were fitting.¹³⁵

Lindberg conceded that there were others besides Franson who supported women’s ministry: “The first of these interested ministers was Axel Nordin, who got some sisters from Chicago to come to Phelps County, Nebraska. August Davis also approved the idea, and being President of the Scandinavian Mission Society of the U.S.A., he arranged that women might secure clergy fare on various railroads.” According to Lindberg, that single act had such a powerful impact that “the movement went forward by leaps and bounds.” “I am not stretching the truth,” he wrote, “when I say that at least fifty were out on the field. It went so far that at one Sunday service about ten of us preachers sat listening to one woman preach.” Although many of them were trained in Bible school, Lindberg ridiculed the qualifications of the women: “If a girl could play the guitar, it was taken as a sure sign that God had called her to preach.” The solution, in Lindberg’s mind, however, was certainly not further education. He clearly was not among those who supported Ellen Modin’s fund-raising efforts for a school for women preachers. Indeed, he lamented that “Free church ministers…had fallen so deeply that God no longer could use them but must call out the women.”¹³⁶

Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America

Another movement that took a strong stand against “modernism” and yet allowed women to have an active role in ministry during its formative years was a movement that became known as the Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America. This organization dates its origins to the early 1920s when the American Conference of Undenominational Churches was formed in Iowa. Its purpose was to be a “fundamental fellowship” free of modernism and denominationalism. In the ACUC, the forerunner of the IFCA, women were permitted full membership, and the constitution used the phrase “his or her” in specifying its requirements for membership. “Most women members,” according to IFCA historian James Henry, “were listed either as pastors or as assistants to their husbands who were pastors.” But such egalitarianism was not to endure. “In 1930, when the name was changed to the IFCA,” continues Henry, “it was evident there was a need for some ‘tightening of the reins’ in the area of membership…The first major change was the elimination of women from membership.”¹³⁷

Mid-Century Evangelical Church Women

Although opportunities for women in evangelical churches were decreasing as the century wore on, a number of women continued to work effectively within the church or in close association with the church. One means was to give lip service to the authority of men in the church, as the ordained Kathryn Kuhlman did, while at the same time preaching, performing marriage ceremonies, and conducting baptisms. Another means of carrying out such a ministry was to assume a nonpastoral title, such as Henrietta Mears did as Director of Christian Education. And still another means was to accept less desirable work within the church. An example is that of Dr. Hilda Ives. She was the mother of four children and was left alone to rear them after the death of her attorney husband following World War I. As the responsibilities for her children lessened, Ives sought personal fulfillment through church ministry. She became an ordained minister herself and then began traveling back and forth across New England, preaching and working with floundering rural churches and establishing men and women pastors in parishes that needed them.¹³⁸

Kathryn Kuhlman

The age of dynamic women evangelists did not end with the death of Aimee Semple McPherson. By mid-century, hundreds of thousands of Americans had become enamored with another Pentecostal healing evangelist, Kathryn Kuhlman. She began preaching at age sixteen, after she “felt a definite call to the ministry,” and for most of two decades she did itinerant evangelistic work in the rural Midwest. In 1946, after experiencing the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” Kuhlman began preaching. Following one of her sermons that same year, a woman reported that her tumor had miraculously disappeared. This testimony launched Kuhlman into her thirty-year healing ministry.¹³⁹

Like other prominent women in the church, Kuhlman faced strong opposition. A particularly harsh attack came in 1952, when she conducted tent meetings in Akron, Ohio, at the invitation of Rex Humbard, another well-known Pentecostal evangelist. Her flamboyant antagonist was Dallas Billington, pastor of the large fundamentalist Akron Baptist Temple. Besides “exposing” her as a divorcée, he lambasted her for her healing ministry: “There is no greater racket in America, whether it be horse jockeying, dog races, or the numbers racket, than the so-called divine healers of our day.” But even if divine healing was valid, it was not an activity for women: “Nowhere was the power of divine healing ever given to be administered by any woman. Women have their rightful places but when you put one in the pulpit it is unscriptural.” The efforts to silence her, however, only increased interest in her meetings, and the Sunday following Billington’s attacks, more than twenty thousand attended her meeting.¹⁴⁰

Kuhlman did not seek to defend her ministry scripturally, as was the case with so many women before her. She had no desire for a public ministry, and she cautioned other women against it:

I’d give anything if I could have just been a good housewife, a good cook. And I’d like to have had a big family. It would have been nice to have a man boss me around…Let women be sure—very sure—that they have a call from God before they ever decide to enter such a ministry. If you are not definitely called, don’t do it.¹⁴¹

Kuhlman was not a feminist, and she went to great lengths to convince her followers of that:

I never think of myself as a woman preacher, I tell you the truth. I am a woman; I was born a woman, and I try to keep my place as a woman. And I want to say to the women here in this auditorium: please, whatever you do, don’t try to be a man…I recognize the fact that I was born a woman, and with it I try to be a lady. I never try to usurp the place of authority of a man—never! That’s the reason I have no church. I leave that to the man. I am a woman. I know my place…I do not believe that those who know me best think of me as being a woman preacher.¹⁴²

Yet Kuhlman did not object to her followers calling her “pastor,” and she “wanted to be known as a Bible teacher, not a miracle worker.” And indeed she was—at least by a select few. “Her Monday night Bible studies at the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh were attended by some of the most elite Bible scholars in the city.” And, although she did not want people to think of her as a “woman preacher,” she was “an ordained minister of the Gospel” and she sometimes baptized her new converts in mass outdoor baptismal services. She also performed marriages and conducted funerals. And despite her disclaimers about women in authority, there was little doubt in her inner circle of associates who was in control. She was a strong leader who demanded high performance from those who worked with her.¹⁴³

Henrietta Mears

One of the most influential women in mid-twentieth-century religious life was Henrietta Mears, the founder of Gospel Light Publications and the Hollywood Christian Group, Director of Christian Education at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, developer of Forest Home Conference Center, and a respected Bible teacher who “produced more than one generation of some of the most prominent Presbyterian ministers in America.”¹⁴⁴

Mears was deeply involved in Christian ministry long before she became nationally known. As a high school chemistry teacher in Minneapolis in the 1920s, she accepted the challenge of teaching a Sunday school class at the First Baptist Church. It was a class of eighteen-year-old girls—a clique of five—who referred to themselves as “The Snobs.” From that unpretentious beginning developed a class of over five hundred, for which a special hall was built to accommodate them.¹⁴⁵

In 1928, Mears accepted a position as Director of Christian Education at the prestigious Hollywood Presbyterian Church, and from that time on she was involved in full-time Christian ministry. When she began her ministry there, the Sunday school enrollment was four hundred and fifty; in two and one half years that number increased to more than four thousand. It was soon after she began her ministry in Hollywood that she developed her own Sunday school curriculum, and within a few years orders for her “homemade” Sunday school lessons were coming in from all over the country. It was out of this humble beginning that Gospel Light Press was born.¹⁴⁶

Next to her publishing ministry, Mears’ most lasting impact was in the realm of her teaching—particularly her teaching of young men. Among her protègés were Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ and Richard Halverson, pastor of the influential Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Harold Ockenga, the noted evangelical leader in Boston, wrote a moving tribute to her:

What a work you have done! There is no young peoples’ work in this nation equal to yours. When I think of the tens of thousands who have studied the Bible under your leadership, of the thousands who have faced the claims of Christ and made a commitment to Him, of the hundreds of young men who have gone into the ministry, and other young people into Christian service, I cannot but be struck with amazement.¹⁴⁷

The late Clarence Roddy, a professor of homiletics at Fuller Seminary, used to refer to Mears as the best preacher in Southern California. “She was not ordained and had no formal theological training, but the impact of her life and teaching on her boys was comparable to the influence some of the world’s greatest theologians had on their students.”¹⁴⁸

Itinerant Speakers Outside the Church

Kathryn Kuhlman’s refusal to acknowledge that she was a “preacher” who wielded authority in the church was perhaps a natural response to the turnaround that had occurred in evangelical circles as denominations that had emerged out of the holiness, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist movements matured. There had been a backlash against women in leadership positions in the church, and one way to circumvent the opposition was to publicly acknowledge the “headship” of men. Another way to circumvent opposition was to work outside the parameters of the church. Indeed, most women who sought full-time Christian ministry found their opportunities outside the church. This was certainly not a new concept. Women such as Phoebe Palmer and Hannah Whithall Smith, had wielded powerful influence outside the church a century earlier. They were able to sustain an unprecedented ministry to large mixed audiences in middle-class circles with biblical and theological subject matter.

In the mid-twentieth century a new breed of female speakers arose—women whose subject matter came primarily out of their own struggles in the Christian life. And in virtually every instance the speaking ministry was supplemented by a writing career—the one ministry that has always been safe for Christian women. Two well-known examples of such ministry are those of Corrie ten Boom and Joni Eareckson.

Corrie ten Boom

Born in Holland and raised in a Christian family, Corrie ten Boom lived an inauspicious life until World War II broke out—when she was in her fifties. Her family home became “the hiding place” for Jews who were seeking to escape Nazi terror. As a result of her involvement Corrie herself spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. It was that story along with her vivacious Christian witness that propelled her into an international speaking and writing ministry. Her first major work The Hiding Place, detailing her wartime activities, was an immediate bestseller. Her second successful book, Tramp for the Lord, detailed her ministry following the war, though the ministry actually began while she was still interned at Ravensbruck, “the notorious women’s death camp.” There she held “clandestine Bible study groups for an ever-growing group of believers, and Barracks 28 became known throughout the camp as ‘the crazy place, where they hope.’”¹⁴⁹

Corrie’s ministry entailed travel and involved more than three decades of speaking in more than sixty countries, beginning in the United States. After her release from the death camp, she set out for the United States—“to carry the Gospel as a missionary to the Americans.” The opportunities for speaking, however, did not come easily. “The Americans were polite and some of them were interested, but none wanted me to come and speak…As the weeks slipped by, I found more and more resistance to my ministry. No one was interested in a middle-aged spinster woman from Holland who wanted to preach.” That situation suddenly changed after she was introduced to an influential Christian man, whose recommendation led to a flood of speaking requests, which in turn opened up even more opportunities not only in churches, but also on college campuses and in prisons and women’s clubs.¹⁵⁰

Corrie ten Boom, Internationally known Speaker, and Author of The Hiding Place.

Following her speaking tour in the United States, Corrie returned to Europe—specifically to Germany, the place she most dreaded to go. There, with the help of the Lutheran Sisterhood of Mary, she rented an abandoned concentration camp and turned it into a refugee home. “Barbed wire disappeared. Flowers, light-colored paint and God’s love in the hearts of the people changed a cruel camp into a refuge where people would find the way back to life again.” From Germany she began traveling and speaking throughout the world. She visited Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. She stayed in Korea three months, and while there had more than 250 speaking engagements. From there she went to New Zealand and then on to India. Although she told her story time and again, it was always with an evangelistic thrust, and always with a personal interest in individuals. She was straightforward and blunt and was quick to offer counsel to people with special needs—from a political prisoner in Africa who could not forgive his captors to a Christian university student in Korea who was struggling with doubts after having read the works of the liberal biblical scholar, Rudolph Bultmann.¹⁵¹

Joni Eareckson

Joni Eareckson, a quadriplegic as a result of a diving accident in 1967, has, like Corrie ten Boom, developed her ministry from her personal struggles. Initially life seemed not worth living. But “after waves of depression and a phase of reading existentialists and atheists, she gradually came back to a deepened version of the orthodox Christianity in which she had been raised.” She began sharing her experience publicly and soon became a “popular speaker on the Evangelical Protestant celebrity circuit.” In addition to having a speaking ministry, she became a “successful commercial artist, a bestselling author and the star of a two-hour, $2 million film version of her life.” She also founded a ministry, “Joni and Friends,” that reaches out to people who are disabled and suffering.¹⁵²

Joni Eareckson Tada, Author and Public Speaker, Pictured With Her Husband, Ken Tada. Photo by Arthur Tilley.

Parachurch and Independent Ministries

Through the burgeoning increase of parachurch organizations and independent ministries women have become more visible in religious endeavors than they ever had been before. By the mid-twentieth century, “respectability” no longer permitted middle-class evangelical women to be “called” to “preach” or conduct a revival ministry, but a wide variety of new ministries opened up to accommodate their desire to publicly serve God.

Youth and Children’s Ministries

The area outside the church in which women found ample opportunity for career Christian ministry was in parachurch organizations. Although women were often barred from leadership roles, they were eagerly accepted for lower staff positions in such campus and youth ministries as Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Life, and The Navigators and in such children’s ministries as Child Evangelism Fellowship and the Bible Club Movement. Although these organizations have required staff members to be trained professionals, they have not generally paid salaries but rather have required their staff to do deputation in order to raise their own financial support. Thus, while parachurch ministries have been open to women, the positions they have offered have not been comparable to those positions that have been easily available to men in salaried church ministries. Further study needs to be done on this issue, but on the surface it seems that a much higher percentage of women than men have been restricted to ministries requiring the “faith” concept of personal finances.

Self-Help Ministries to Women

During the 1960s and 1970s a number of ministries were founded that were focused specifically on women. Unlike the voluntary associations of women in the nineteenth century that were primarily service oriented, many of these associations of evangelical women were “self-help” groups, with an emphasis on health and exercise, marriage enrichment, or political action.

Overeaters Anonymous and Overeaters Victorious are examples of groups that focus primarily on self-help. The latter was founded by Neva Coyle in 1977. “She weighed 248 pounds and always gained back what she lost—until she used her born-again Christian faith in her fight against fat.” By 1980 some sixteen hundred people had finished the program.¹⁵³ Like the diet ministries, marriage-enrichment groups often focused on women—often telling them that it was their spiritual responsibility as godly wives to insure a happy marriage. Helen Andelien, the founder of Fascinating Womanhood, and Marabel Morgan, author of The Total Woman, were the most prominent in spreading this antifeminist message across American during the 1970s.

Also coming from a strong antifeminist position were political action organizations that appealed directly to conservative Christian women. Phyllis Schlafly, head of Eagle Forum, and, for a time, Anita Bryant were in the forefront of such movements. But even more closely tied to conservative religious values was the movement founded by Beverly LaHaye, Concerned Women for America, which claimed well over one hundred thousand members in 1980, one year after it was founded. By 1985, it boasted a membership of some five hundred thousand. The thrust of the movement has been antiabortion, antigay, and profamily, its leaders blaming the feminist movement for much of the failure of modern-day society. “The philosophy of rebellion and hatred underlying the modern-day feminism,” points out LaHaye, “has been largely responsible for the destruction of the American nuclear family.”¹⁵⁴

Women’s Conference and Retreat Speakers

Paralleling the growth of various parachurch organizations was the increase of women’s retreats and conferences, which offered women spiritual self-help and opened opportunities for women to travel the speaking circuit. Well-known authors such as Joyce Landorf and Jill Briscoe received more invitations than they could accept, while less-well-known women tried desperately to obtain a hearing. Some conferences and retreats have been denominationally related, while others have been sponsored by such groups as Christian Women’s Clubs, an organization known mainly for its monthly women’s luncheons with celebrity speakers and an evangelistic focus.

The role of women’s speakers has been one that has brought new opportunities for women since the 1960s. But even that ministry role was viewed by some as too elevated to be spiritually proper. Jo Berry, the founder and director of Creative Ministries, which trains women to “discover and develop their gifts,” relates in her book Growing, Sharing, Serving how she initially “quenched” the “Spirit-planted desire” the Lord had given her to be a women’s speaker:

The first time I was aware of a Spirit-planted desire, I thought I was sinning. My dear friend Georgia Lee, who is a Christian actress and speaker, was standing in the podium at a large conference center, speaking to about eight hundred women. As I watched her I remember thinking, “Someday I want to do what she is doing. I want to talk to huge groups of women about the Lord.”

Immediately she felt guilty for such thoughts, but later, after she herself had become involved in a speaking ministry, she became convinced that the desire for the ministry was from God.¹⁵⁵ It was on that basis that she founded her Creative Ministries training center.

Women’s Bible Studies

Like the retreats and Bible conferences, women’s Bible studies have mushroomed since the 1960s, and have involved vast numbers of women in the United States and world-wide. Many of these groups have been church related or entirely independent, but a significant number have been part of organized movements such as Bible Study Fellowship or Neighborhood Bible Studies. Both organizations focus primarily on women but have entirely different philosophies of approach to Bible study. The former, founded by A. Wetherell Johnson in 1952, has offered extensive training for its teachers and has been highly structured, with uniform lessons for all Bible study groups. During its first twenty years the movement grew from five to over one hundred thousand class members who had completed the five-year course.¹⁵⁶

Neighborhood Bible Studies, on the other hand, has been loosely organized ized with an emphasis on small discussion groups. It was founded in 1960 by Marilyn Kunz and Catherine Schell, and by 1985 there were thousands of such groups meeting worldwide, using the organization’s various study guides that were available in some thirty languages.¹⁵⁷

Christian Feminist Organizations

The “creative” ministries that Jo Berry has recommended for women involved ministries to other women, as have the vast majority of week-day Bible studies. Not all evangelical women, however, have accepted such boundaries for women’s ministries or the prescribed marriage role recommended by such women as Marabel Morgan or Beverly LaHaye. In reaction to such traditional approaches and in an effort to provide support networks, conferences, and literature, feminist organizations have arisen in evangelical circles. The Evangelical Women’s Caucus and the Daughters of Sarah are examples, both of which are small organizations—the Evangelical Women’s Caucus having fewer than six hundred members in 1984.¹⁵⁸ Outside evangelical circles, church women have organized for various functions, but most notably for humanitarian efforts. The largest such interdenominational organization is Church Women United, which rallies to the cause of the oppressed, and specifically to oppressed women.

A Century of Opening and Closing Doors

In spite of the official gains women have made in the church since the mid-twentieth century, women in the 1980s continued to be in a minority in leadership positions—particularly in the evangelical churches that have grown most rapidly since the 1950s. Even in parachurch ministries, where women were theoretically granted equal status, they fall far behind their male counterparts. That has been due in part to a conservative reaction that developed not only among evangelicals but in society as a whole in the late 1970s and 1980s. By that time the issue of women in the church became a hotly debated topic that often created splits in individual churches and denominations. Seminaries and Bible colleges continued to bar women from certain exclusively male areas of study, and mission boards tightened their restrictions on women, who had long been involved in extensive teaching and preaching ministries overseas. The stricter controls on women’s ministries among evangelicals appears to have developed largely as a reaction to the feminist movement. The trend manifested itself in many ways—one notable example being the introduction of a bachelor’s degree in marriage and motherhood by the fundamentalist Hyles-Anderson College.¹⁵⁹

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