Christianity

Women's Roles in Christian Churches

Today, women exercise formal leadership as ordained ministers, preachers, teachers, and even bishops in almost every Christian denomination. But that is quite a recent development. While Quakers allowed women to preach as early as the 17th century, most Christian groups did not allow women to study theology, to preach, to lead prayer, or to vote in church assemblies until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exclusions were grounded in the churches’ understanding of certain biblical passages that enjoined women not to speak in church and on the idea that leadership in the early church was exercised almost exclusively by men.

In the 19th century, a surge of religious fervor, at least in the Western world, and a rising movement for women's suffrage both contributed to the rise of women's missionary movements. Women began to organize around providing food, housing, education, and other social services for the poor in their own home countries as well as in such mission fields as China, India, and Africa. Believing that women could do more than serve as quiet helpers to the men in the field, they also established educational programs to prepare women for the work of the missions.

Christianity today is found in a multitude of denominations-as many as 30,000 worldwide. While Christian denominations share the core belief of Jesus Christ being the son of God, they vary widely in further expressions of that belief and its implications.

[Page 289]At the same time, women began to seek an official voice in the churches. In the United States, Antoinette Brown Blackwell completed the theological seminary at Oberlin College in 1850. Although at first she was neither granted a degree nor ordained, she held a pastorate in the Congregational Church and was ordained in 1853. In November 1919, the International Association of Women Ministers, still an active group, gathered for the first time in St. Louis, Missouri. The Methodist General Conference declared women eligible to be licensed preachers in 1920, and in 1947, stated that women ministers should be accorded equal status with their male colleagues. Lutheran churches saw a movement in the 19th century to ordain women as deacons, but it was not until the 1970s that the Lutheran Church of America and the American Lutheran Church voted to ordain women as pastors. During the 1980s, the worldwide Anglican Communion carried on a lengthy discernment regarding the ordination of women. The Anglican Communion agreed in 1992 that ordination of women was approved but left an opening for individual dioceses to limit ordination to men, and at the time of this writing some Anglican and Episcopal dioceses still do so. A few denominations such as the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox still reserve ordination to men alone, although other administrative and teaching roles are open to women.

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