Philip's Daughters

Women in Pentecostal-Charismatic Leadership

Alexander, Yong

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781630877002
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume brings together twelve scholars from a variety of scholarly fields including biblical studies, history, theology, sociology, anthropology, and missiology in a multi-disciplinary exploration of themes related to women's leadership within the three branches of the renewal movement: Holiness, Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions. These scholars - women and men - from both within and outside the traditions, draw on various methodologies including hermeneutics, ethnography, critical theory, and historical analysis to explore the experiences and contributions of women from the movement's inception to the present. They keep before us the challenges that still impact women's full participation as equal partners in ministry and leadership on both the American and global scene. The volume looks at the multiple roots of women's marginalization within the renewal movement while suggesting progressive solutions that take seriously the social locations of Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations and the theological foundations on which the movement has been built. At the same time, it locates these discussions within the broader postmodern realities facing the church as it attempts to faithfully live out its witness to the biblical truth that both male and female are created in the God's image and endowed with the capacity to work creatively toward the unfolding of the Kingdom.

1

Introduction

Estrelda Alexander

On the next day we who were Paul’s companions departed and came to Caesarea, and entered the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and stayed with him. Now this man had four virgin daughters who prophesied.

—Acts 21:8–91

This short passage in the book of Acts is easily passed over amid all the miraculous encounters and evangelistic activity that is the focus of Luke’s writing. We know very little about these four women—Philip’s daughters—for they remain unnamed as individuals. Despite the cultural restrictions of the time, they could not be completely left out of the narrative; they were recognized as prophets. We know nothing else about them, except that they were unmarried virgins who still resided in their father’s home. We do not know what they said, but what they said made enough of an impression on the writer that he noted that they were prophetesses—individuals set apart by divine impartation and recognition of the church to speak on God’s behalf.

The identification of their ministry as prophetesses begins a legacy of ministry of Spirit-empowered women and, at the same time, a history of suppression of that ministry by the church. Generally, as within the patriarchal setting of the New Testament, such suppression has been in line with the cultural setting in which women have found themselves. Historically, women were prohibited from leadership not only in the church but also in most other arenas of society.

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, however, women’s roles have changed dramatically. Women lead some of the nation’s most successful corporations, and head some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country and the world. They hold major political offices at every level, and for the first time in the United States a woman was a serious contender and a front-runner for the nation’s highest office. Yet, one of the most challenging issues facing the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement into the twenty-first century concerns the role of women in the ministry and leadership of the church.

Many Christian communities have taken the challenge of women’s leadership to heart and have involved women in ever increasing levels of ecclesial authority. Most mainline denominations ordain women with full clergy rights.2 A number of these have elected several women to the office of bishop. The United Methodist Church has fifteen active women bishops among the sixty-nine in its ranks, and presently a woman, Janice Riggle Huie, serves as the president of its Council of Bishops. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has three women among its twenty-one bishops and the Episcopal Church now has a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as its presiding bishop. Yet Evangelical churches, especially the classical Pentecostal movement, have been resistant to any genuine elevation of the status of women within their ranks.

The irony in this turn of events is evident when one notes that some observers have characterized Pentecostalism as essentially “women’s religion” because of the greater proportion of women than men who have historically participated in the movement. It is even more ironic when one explores women’s involvement in the unfolding of this movement which has come to be the fastest growing segment of global Christianity. Like its antecedent nineteenth century Holiness movement, the attraction of women to the nascent Pentecostal movement was partly because of its promise of greater freedom to participate in ministry. In the earliest stages of the movement, Pentecostal women took on more roles and enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than was true for their counterparts in most other branches of the Christian church.

In those earliest years, there appeared to be almost absolute freedom for women to pursue whatever course they felt God was leading them to follow. Women pastored churches, served as missionaries, preached, taught, exhorted, and held governing positions in the church. As the movement grew and attempted to gain respectability, women’s roles were curtailed by a number of formal and informal restrictions in most Pentecostal bodies. Women still had freedom to preach and exhort, but governing roles became more limited and these bodies grew to more closely reflect the gender-stratified hierarchy they once denounced in mainline bodies.

Even where official dogma was egalitarian, unofficial tradition concerning “male-only” leadership was often very palpable. While official polity may have opened all levels of ministry to called and qualified persons, unofficial tradition saw only men holding top positions, such as presiding elder, district overseer or superintendent, bishop, or other denominational head. Furthermore, within this unofficial tradition, women could not hope to be appointed as pastor of congregations of any substantial size.

The original freedom given to women in the Pentecostal move-ment—even when limited—derived from several factors. First, Pente-costal eschatology supported the premillennial understanding that saw the revival as a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of Joel 2:28a: “And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” Early Pentecostals understood themselves as living in those last days, before the return of Christ, when he would establish his millennial kingdom on earth. As such, they felt an urgent need to involve everyone in the task of winning as many souls into this kingdom as possible. Therefore, women as well as men were enlisted to preach the gospel.

Secondly, these early Pentecostals held that individuals were empowered through Holy Spirit baptism to do ministry as the Spirit willed. They believed God supernaturally anointed individuals, without regard to social constriction, education, or other formal preparation. Proof of one’s call lay in the person’s own testimony to such a call and in the perceived fruit of a Spirit-empowered ministry, rather than in a formal ecclesiastical system of selection or promotion. Men or women who demonstrated preaching skill and ability to convey a convincing gospel message, and who displayed charismatic ministry gifts and evangelistic ability were urged into action. This radical egalitarianism was coupled with a general disdain for hierarchical church structures and denominationalism.

Yet competing theologies complicated the status of women ministers. Preaching women modeled themselves after their Holiness predecessors, who also took their authority from the Joel 2:28 passage, and held to a radical concept of the equality of the sexes in ministry. However, restorationist elements within Pentecostalism sought to return the church to “New Testament simplicity and purity.” While for some, an essential rudiment of this restoration was the full empowerment of all believers for service, for a substantial number of others it involved the felt need to follow Pauline restrictions on the ministry of women within the church, despite the witnesses of passages such as that found in Acts and the testimony of Jesus’ inclusion of women found in the Gospels.

These competing understandings and values were played out in a number of interesting ways. Under Charles Fox Parham’s leadership, a woman is credited by many with ushering in the entire modern Pentecostal movement when shortly after midnight on January 1, 1901, Agnes Ozman became the first reported person to speak in tongues publicly with the explicit understanding that it was the initial evidence of Holy Spirit baptism. Parham organized his Bible School in Topeka Kansas to “fit men and women to go to the ends of the earth to preach.”3 He ordained women, as well as men, and commissioned both to ministry. Many of these women and men assisted Parham in the later evangelistic campaigns that he conducted throughout the country.

Names like Lucy Farrow, Florence Crawford, Clara Lum, and Jennie Evans Seymour are representative of the significant contribution women made to the Azusa Street Revival. Additionally, several outstanding women were among the many evangelists and missionaries who went out from Azusa Street to take the message of Pentecostalism across the country and around the world. In much of the historiography of Pentecostalism, these women’s names and legacies have been all but forgotten. Since male leaders have dominated the historical record, the roles of these women have been basically ignored, and, like Philip’s daughters, they have largely remained unnamed.4

Further, despite these auspicious beginnings, evidence of erosion of women’s leadership opportunities runs through the breadth of the movement. From the outset, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), arguably the largest Pentecostal denomination, and certainly the largest black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, placed restrictions on women’s ministry that have remained in place during its entire history. Within COGIC, women are not ordained, but can be licensed as “evangelists” or “missionaries” to preach and teach primarily other women and work in what the COGIC leadership has termed “vital” roles.5 In these roles, women raise funds for local congregations and the national denomination; direct local, regional, and national women’s programs; and provide material support for the pastor and his family.

Several early Pentecostal denominations granted women “limited ordination” or ministerial credentialing without giving them governing authority. For example, in the early United Holy Church of America, another African American denomination, women were licensed or ordained to ministry, but received little material or spiritual support from male colleagues who only tolerated them.6 Practical restrictions on women’s ministry in the Assemblies of God were cleared in 1935 when they were granted full ordination. Yet this concession has not materially improved the opportunity for ordained ministry of most women or reduced the predominance of male congregational and administrative leadership. Within the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), however, women are still only allowed to attain two of the three ranks of ministry, and remain restricted from voting in the Assembly, from governance in the local congregation, and from holding regional and national offices. So by the end of the twentieth century, Pentecostal women find themselves in a place where their position has been reversed and they enjoy less freedom than their sisters in mainline denominations. Indeed, the current status of women within Pentecostalism is one of ambivalence.

Just as the limited freedom of women in early Pentecostalism resulted from several factors, other forces have contributed to the gradual decline of opportunities for women’s leadership. First, the eschatological, premillennial hope of the imminent return of Christ faded with the realization that several years had passed and Jesus had not yet returned. With this, the sectarian, anti-denominational, anti-structural bias of the Pentecostal movement gave way to the sense that some sort of organization was needed if the movement were going to endure. Loosely tied sects began to form denominations with written polity and doctrine. From the beginning, some level of restrictions on the ministry and leadership of women was generally incorporated amid these developments.

Second, Pentecostals sought to distance themselves from any association with modernity and “worldliness,” including ideas of the “new woman” that were coming into fashion by the middle of the century. They sought by dress codes, rhetoric, and social constraints to ensure there was a distinction between the modern, “unsaved” world and themselves. They also saw the modern women’s movement as representing rebellion against God and threatening the God-ordained social order prescribed in Scripture.

Third, the conservative understanding of women’s role within the family and society among Pentecostals only deepened when the movement sought to align itself more closely with the broader Evangelical community. Evangelicals believed that the proper place for women was in the home. Like Philip’s daughters, unmarried women were expected to remain under the protection of their fathers, and married women were expected to be submissive to their husbands and supportive of their work and/or ministry. Yet evangelicals, along with Pentecostals, made a place for those few, exceptional women whom God chose to use in extraordinary ways.7 For, again, like Philip’s daughters, it was impossible to ignore the prophetic witness of their lives and ministries.

Fourth, in some Pentecostal denominations, women who sought pastoral placements encountered another unofficial limitation. Leaders willingly allowed them to “dig out” or plant new congregations and nurture them to the point of viability. They also encouraged them to take on congregations that were at the point of failing and to use their gifts for preaching, evangelism, and administration to rebuild them to viability. Once these congregations had grown to the point that they could economically sustain the salary of a full-time pastor, the woman would be replaced with a new, male, pastor. Leaders then sent the woman to dig out another new work or repair another failing congregation. Over several decades, a woman might start or renew several congregations in this manner, but would never be allowed to take any of them past the point of viability.8

Along with more pronounced structures came a growing “professionalization” of the ministry. This professionalization was characterized by differing crit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Historical Perspectives
• Chapter 2: Wesleyan/Holiness and Pentecostal Women Preachers
• Chapter 3: “Cause He’s My Chief Employer”
• Chapter 4: Looking Beyond the Pulpit
• Chapter 5: Sanctified Saints—Impure Prophetesses
• Chapter 6: “Third Class Soldiers”
• Chapter 7: Leadership Attitudes and the Ministry of Single Women in Assemblies of God Missions
• Part 2: Biblical/Theological Perspectives
• Chapter 8: Pentecostalism 101
• Chapter 9: “You’ve Got a Right to the Tree of Life”
• Chapter 10: Spirited Vestments
• Chapter 11: The Spirit, Nature, and Canadian Pentecostal Women
• Chapter 12: Changing Images
• Chapter 13: Spiritual Egalitarianism, Ecclesial Pragmatism, and the Status of Women in Ordained Ministry
• Contributors
• Select Bibliography