The Wesleyan Church (TWC) has a proud history of celebrating women in ministry dating back to the 1850s, when Antoinette Brown became the first woman to be ordained in the United States.
To continue that legacy, TWC is once again promoting PreacHer Sunday — a day for Wesleyan churches throughout the denomination to invite a gifted and called woman to preach, especially if the church does not already have such a woman in the pulpit regularly.
Rev. Carla Working, director of clergy care and development for TWC, said the topic of women’s roles in the church matters deeply for many reasons, one of which is that the Wesleyan position on women in ministry also speaks to Wesleyan beliefs about who can receive from the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit works.
“Women in ministry isn’t a celebration of women as much as it is a celebration of what God can do through willing and obedient people,” Working said. “God doesn’t care about your gender as much as he cares about your heart.”
Working said that in her experience, whenever women and men serve and lead in a church together, the Holy Spirit unleashes in a fresh way. “Both men and women are created in the image of God,” she said. “And so in order to draw as close to God as we can, and to be his hands and feet in the world, you need both men and women.”
For anyone interested in learning more about the Wesleyan position on women in ministry, multiple resources are available on TWC’s website. “Women in Ministry Leadership: Our Wesleyan Commitment,” written by Dr. Kenneth Schenck, exists in print and PDF formats. It uses a Scripture-focused approach to outline why Wesleyans favor women in ministry.
Also on the website is a short document originally created by Dr. Miranda Cruz. The two-page PDF lists an array of Scripture references from the Old and New Testaments that support women in ministry.
Beyond these textual resources, the Education and Clergy Development Division has some upcoming online courses as well. Through partnerships with Kingswood University’s Kingswood Learn and Wesley Seminary’s Lantern program, they will release recorded lectures that will help equip people to have healthy conversations on the topic of women in ministry.
All of these resources — both written texts and recorded lectures — are or will be accessible in both English and Spanish, just like the materials for PreacHer Sunday.
Ultimately, Working said, these resources and our emphasis on women and men working together in the church “Is never about elevating a gender or calling someone who doesn’t feel the call. But we have, in The Wesleyan Church, amazing, gifted, women, and men, and sometimes churches have only heard from the men,” Working said. “So that’s what PreachHer Sunday is all about. It’s recognizing and celebrating how God calls women and men to preach.”
This is especially crucial in a cultural moment in which the world and culture are grappling with what it means to be male or female. “Some Christian circles have a tendency to become more restrictive and tighten their understandings of what a man or a woman is and can do,” Working reflected. “In the process,” she said, “they’re actually undermining Biblical equality and promoting a hierarchy that is unbiblical.”
The Wesleyan view is that biblical manhood and womanhood do not include a hierarchy. To Working, this means Wesleyans are in a fairly unique position as far as the kind of example they can set.
“We get the opportunity to demonstrate, what does it look like to be a denomination that affirms a historic Christian stance on marriage, and also celebrates women and men serving equally?” she said. She believes TWC is evidence that “you can actually stay true to a biblical sexual ethic and embrace women and men serving equally in ministry.”
A crucial part of that witness is committing – not only in our theology, but in our practice – to the importance of men and women working together to proclaim and embody the Gospel as truly good news. PreacHer Sunday creates an embodied opportunity to practice that belief, and gives our congregations opportunities to see and hear how God can use all people for faithful ministry.
For more information about PreacHer Sunday and other initiatives through ECD, visit Women in Ministry.
