Holiness women: recovering a tradition - Column

Christian Century, June 29, 1994 by Stan Ingersol

I TOLD THEM I can't come to the White House this weekend, I have to |come to the water'!" Addie Wyatt, co-pastor of Chicago's Vernon Park Church of God, was explaining why she had rejected an invitation to a briefing on the Clinton health care plan in order to attend the first International Wesleyan/Holiness Women Clergy Conference. The April gathering of nearly 375 women clergy in Glorieta, New Mexico, was a historic event for Wesleyan/holiness churches.

After decades of slackening commitment to women's ordination and placement, the pendulum seems to be swinging back. The sponsoring churches included the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Church of the Nazarene, Evangelical Friends International, the Free Methodist Church and the Wesleyan Church. The Salvation Army offered support and sent 107 participants--the largest contingent. The plenary sessions were characterized by dynamic preaching and vibrant song, with African-American rhythms and Salvation Army tambourines adding an echo of the camp meeting tradition in the holiness denominations.

The Spirit was mentioned frequently. Susie Stanley, a professor at Western Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Oregon, reminded listeners that the Wesleyan tradition has regarded Pentecost as the charter of female ministry and Galatians 3:28 as the scriptural basis for their ordination. She urged them to remember that they were surrounded by a "cloud of witnesses"--the scores of earlier women clergy and lay preachers whose photographs lined the walls of the auditorium. Among them was a portrait of Methodist laywoman Phoebe Palmer, who wrote Promise of the Father (1859), a scriptural defense of women's preaching and the primary influence on the practice of women's preaching and ordination in both United Methodism and the holiness churches,

A century ago the holiness tradition was in the forefront of women's ordination. The Salvation Army, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) and the Church of the Nazarene ordained women from the beginning. Evangelical Friends, with Quaker and Wesleyan precedents, have always "recorded" women ministers. Wesleyan Methodists (now the Wesleyan Church) and Free Methodists ordained women later in their histories (but decades before the United Methodist Church)

But times changed. Beginning in the 1920s, new and potent varieties of fundamentalism opposing the historic Wesleyan/holiness doctrine of the ministry influenced the holiness denominations. Wesleyan/holiness women found secular avenues of ministry, especially during and after World War II. The Salvation Army's historic commitment to the leadership and ministry of women was the least affected by these trends. The Nazarenes, by contrast, went from having over one-third of female clergy in the late '30s to fewer than 6 percent today. Only 1 percent of U. S. Nazarene churches have a woman pastor. Other denominations in the tradition show a similar pattern.

The Glorieta conference grew out of the vision of Stanley and others who organized a 1989 conference for Church of God women clergy. The same year women ministering in the Wesleyan Church held their first annual conference. The groups soon had newsletters, and they met each other through the Wesleyan Theological Society and the Christian Holiness Association. Wilbur Brannon, director of pastoral ministries for the Church of the Nazarene, convened a Women in Ministry Strategy Committee in 1991, and the New Horizons newsletter for Nazarene women clergy appeared soon afterward. Brannon also committed the first seed money toward an interdenominational conference and solicited similar gifts from counterparts in other churches. Soon church representatives were planning "Come to the Water: A Celebration of Our Call."

The conference bookshop exhibited dozens of titles that gave another sign of the resurgence of energy for women in ministry. Just out from Warner Press was Juanita Evans Leonard's Called to Minister . . . Empowered to Serve. Also available were Rebecca Laird's historical Nazarene Women in Ordained Ministry (1993) and C. S. Cowles's A Women's Place? (1993), a biblical and theological study of women's roles in church and the family (both from the Nazarene Publishing House). Free Methodist founder B. T Roberts's classic Ordaining Women (1891) was available from Light and Life Press in a reprint edition. And Stanley had just completed Wesleyan/Holiness Women Clergy: A Preliminary Bibliography.