Photograph by Allen Taylor via Unsplash

“Now, I am not going to preach a sermon this evening. I just want to tell you a few stories.” That’s how Ethel Barrett started speaking at one of the summer evening services held at the First Presbyterian Church in Schenectady, NY, led by a former President of the National Association of Evangelicals, Dr. Herbert Mekeel. My family attended the Baptist church, but having recently made a personal faith decision, I was eager to take in everything, so I would sit with my grandfather at his church on those Sunday nights listening to nationally known Christian men. It wasn’t until that moment that I recognized that my grandfather’s church did not allow women to preach. Ethel Barrett had started in children’s ministry in Schenectady and was a friend of Dr. Mekeel. Her popularity grew, but she chose to work in a world without women preachers. I like to think she chose to “become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel…” (1 Corinthians 9:22-23). Barrett became a nationally known Christian storyteller and author. She preached a wonderful sermon that Sunday night…I mean, series of stories. She knew what was going on and how the game was played.

Maybe she should have fought the good fight for full recognition as a preacher, but there have been women who chose another path: “To those under the law I became as one under the law…that I might win those under the law” (1 Cor 9:20 ESV). We must honor them as well.

Henrietta Mears was another of these women. Jason Byassee notes, “Mears never once stepped into a pulpit to preach, though several contemporaries called her the best preacher they knew.” At one point, her Sunday School class at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church had 6,000 people attending, and “Among her proteges were Billy Graham, Young Life founder Jim Rayburn, and Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright.” She made her mark while a young adult at the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, launching a Sunday School class that reached thousands, even while her fundamentalist pastor, William Bell Riley, would have forbidden women to preach. Go figure. She worked within the system, or despite the system, for the sake of the Gospel.

Catherine Booth was a hybrid. She supported her husband until that one Sunday in January 1860. William Booth, the pastor at Bethesda Chapel in Gateshead, was finishing his sermon when, in a surprise even to her, Catherine was moved to get up and ask William if she could “say a word.”[i] After only a few words, William told the congregation that she would be preaching that night. A year later they would leave the church to become itinerant evangelists, eventually forming the Salvation Army. The truth was that Catherine exceeded her husband in popularity and spiritual results. She championed women preaching and the power of the Gospel to change lives. Her “hearers were immediately taken by her gentle manner…caught by her powerful appeal to mind and conscience.”[ii] She was described in superlatives: “In intellect she far exceeded her husband’s modest gifts; in preaching she exceeded his powers of persuasion.”[iii]

Under Catherine’s influence, William came around, and the Salvation Army would be known as a Christian ministry where women’s gifts for ministry were advocated for. The Army would eventually choose to no longer practice baptism or the Lord’s Supper because worshippers were unwilling to accept the sacraments from a woman. The Army chose “…becoming all things to all people, that I might save some.” She advocated in her book, “Female Ministry,” for the full recognition of preaching women, and yet Catherine Booth never was ordained or pastored a church and never accepted a title in the Army.

The first church I served as pastor, the Sand Lake Baptist Church, had a strange caveat in its bylaws, that no pastor could stay more than 19 years. However, I learned that Pastor Mary Vining had stayed 20 years. (Apparently, no pastor was to outshine her.)  In 1928, it was about to lose their pastor due to poor health. He recommended the church invite Rev. Peter Vining to fill the pulpit while they searched for a new one. Rev. Vining was the pastor at Brushton, NY and would apparently cover the two churches, except during those times when he couldn’t and his wife, Mary Vining, would preach the sermon. It only took a few weeks for the congregation to realize her gifts for ministry. The church called her as pastor and within a couple years she was ordained. Nowhere does that local church’s history remark that Rev. Mary Vining’s position was unique because she was a woman. What it does say is that “…God worked marvelously in our midst.”[iv]

There have been many women who worked in the system or despite the system. In many ways, every woman in ministry is still playing the game. I did meet missionary Elisabeth Elliot while she taught classes at Gordon-Conwell, not on the faculty or in credit courses, but at informal events or alongside men. She hung out with pastors who practiced the “no women preacher” policy, while the whole time she was speaking to more people than any of them, in churches and hosting a daily radio program.

During this Women’s History Month, we recognize those who have fought the good fight to change the system, both in the past as well as today. We honor those women who faced the headwinds. Having a woman preach at President Trump’s inauguration worship service didn’t happen without a journey of many battles. But there have also been different kinds of women preachers. These were women who knew God had called them for ministry and through whom God “worked marvelously in their midst.” They submitted to the culture, so they could declare the Gospel and glorify God. At the end of every summer service, my grandfather would say, “Now that is a great man.” That night with Ethel Barrett, he changed it to “woman.” He knew godliness when he saw it.