The History of Women in the ECC
The Evangelical Christian Church
(ECC) welcomes and ordains women in ministry according to our history.?In the
midst of shifts in theology and church policy, the ECC became the first institution
where both women and blacks made an important contribution in leadership roles.
Women in many black churches came, to an even greater degree than in white
churches, the backbone of church life; many became preachers. Black women so
reared upon joining integrated churches, found it difficult to accept less
crucial tasks where white men dominated. In the face of chaos, women pressed
ahead with the duties of pastor. The ECC acknowledges that women as pastors
were valuable assets to the preaching and teaching the Bible.
The contribution of women to the
carrying out of the Great Commission is sometimes sadly overlooked. What would
the history of the Restoration Movement (RM) look like without its women? The
influence and efforts of women to bring about changes in the lives of
individuals through the knowledge of the gospel of Jesus has been greatly felt
and should be acknowledged, recorded and remembered. Kind and benevolent acts
have been done through their work that has forever changed the course of this
nation because of women. There have been loving and devoted wives, such as
Elizabeth Rogers, who have borne the business of raising children and running
the day to day activities of home life while their preaching husbands spent
months away preaching and planting churches. There have been women, such as
Charlotte Fall Fanning, who have actively pursued the education of young women
to help train them for successful life. Women such as Emma Page Larimore, who
was not only known for her encouragement to T.B. Larimore in his senior years
as his second wife, but excelled in writing for publications, and was an author
of children's literature as well as biographical information. There were
wealthy benefactors, such as Emily H. Tubman, who through their blessed
fortunes blessed churches, evangelists, schools, and missionaries through
financial assistance.
Many of the achievements of women
of the Restoration Movement, as well as their influences have been recorded.
While documentation is scarce, efforts are being made to record and give
tribute to their efforts. This chapter is dedicated to these women in hopes
that greater awareness of their commitments and contributions will be
remembered.
Women in the Stone-Campbell
Restoration Movement believed that the church defaulted within its beliefs
found in Holy Scripture. They understood God's amazing grace and felt
liberated, knowing that God was no longer angry with man, and they too, were
accepted before our Lord as one body and one church. Women everywhere are loved
and commissioned to preach the gospel of grace to every living person by our
Lord Jesus Christ. Gender or race means nothing to God because all who accept
Christ have been saved through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus
Christ on the cross.
The women currently serving in the
ECC pastorate often face an uphill battle in their efforts to garner respect
and cooperation from male churchgoers. These RM women experience difficulties
in transcending what church historian Dr. David Lavigne of the ECC in Canada
defines as, "barriers to female advancement even in denominations with a
long tradition of women's ordination - gender does not disqualify one from the
preaching of the gospel." Few historians recognize that a significant
number of black and while women took up the cross as preachers more than a
century before the Civil War.
Few contemporary women ministers
know that they hail from a long line of women who willingly sacrificed
emotional and financial security and respectability to “labor in the harvest.”
Moreover, because denominations that once eagerly ordained women eventually
shunned them and chose to ignore their contributions, each generation of women
preachers has been obligated to defend its right to preach the gospel of grace.
The stories of one hundred women who heeded the call to preach the gospel
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been resurrected. These
black women's determination to heed God’s call helped swell the membership
roster of many churches during the RM and the Great Awakening.
Because of their contributions and
their heroic deeds in the ECC, we acknowledge the importance of women in
ministry. Our scriptural references have proven that many denominations and
organizations are in fact wrong in their theological interpretation about why
women should not be in ministry. So boldly we stand with all women who dare to
answer the call to ministry as leaders in the church of Jesus Christ.?The
witness of the New Testament to the ministry--service and participation--of women
in the New Testament Church is ambiguous. This ambiguity should neither
threaten nor discourage us; it is, rather, reassuring. God has called no
“plastic saints”; they are all flesh and blood, and they all fail. We are
called to patience born of love. We are saved only by grace, and not by our
understanding or by our work.?Women follow Jesus, and Jesus encourages their
ministries to him, for him, and with him. At no time did Christ discourage
women from following him. Records show that during the time of Christ, many
great women experienced healings, and leave a legacy of great testimonies. At
the end of the Gospels, when the men who followed Jesus have fled, the women
remained with him. Women were “faithful to the end.” Women were the first
witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus. The men who followed Jesus, and then
fled, did not see the resurrection and did not believe the testimony of the
women. Even when they finally saw the risen Lord, they doubt. The women never
doubted.
In the Acts of Apostles, the women
who followed Jesus in the Gospels are among the “120” who “devoted themselves
to prayer” and, on Pentecost, they were “all” filled with the Holy Spirit. They
were also called disciples among the 120 who waited in the upper chamber. They
received gifts from the Holy Spirit, but the men who had taken charge did not
set them apart for any “office” or “work.” The men ignored, overlooked, and
denied the gifts and ministry of the women for the same reason that they denied
baptism to anyone who was not a Jew.?Jesus is male and the “apostles” of the
Acts were all male; they were also Jews. To assert on the basis of the
masculinity of Jesus and the “apostles” that women may not preach or pray or
serve the Lord’s Table or perform any public function in the worship of the
church or serve in any public “office” of the church is to suggest that the
church’s doctrine of ministry us based on gender. “Those who live according to
the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh” (Rom 8:5).
Paul’s declaration in Galatians
3:28 that “in Christ… there is no male and female” alludes specifically to
Genesis 1:27 (“male and female created he them”) and is based on Paul’s
fundamental teaching that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the
old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). This
teaching is essential to understanding the authentic Paul, as opposed to his
opponents, compromisers, revisers, and rehabilitators. It is present in every
authentic letter of Paul. Its absence is a certain sign of pseudo epigraphy.
The “new creation” in Christ
restores the primeval condition of humankind before sin erected barriers
between humankind and God and between human beings. The barriers of the old
creation--race, class, and sex--are broken down by the reconciling act of God
in Jesus Christ. While the new creation shall in the end time, at the return of
the Lord Jesus, be fully manifest, it is not merely “eschatological,” but it is
intended to be present in the here and now. It begins at baptism, when we “put
on Christ.” If it does not happen now, it will never happen at all.
Paul in Romans 16 names Phoebe of
Cenchrea as a diakonos--a “deacon,” not a “deaconess”--and also a prostates
(“guardian”) of himself and others. Priscilla and her husband Aquila are “my
collaborators” or “fellow workers.” Mary “has worked hard among you.” Junia,
with her brother or husband Andronicus, is a relative of Paul, a “fellow
prisoner,” and a person “well-known” or “outstanding among the apostles.”
Tryphaena and Tryphosa are “workers in the Lord.” In Philippians 4, Euodia and
Syntyche “have walked with me in the Gospel, with Clement and the rest of my
collaborators.” Paul does not distinguish the “work” of these women from the
“work” of men whom he names; clearly he mentions them because of the value of
their “work” and the faith their “work” expresses. These names, mentioned only
in passing, and only in the letters of Paul, remind us that there are many
heroes of faith whose names and biographies we do not know, and many of them
are women; we do not know their “works,” because no one wrote them down.
In 1 Corinthians 11 women pray and
prophesy. They are not forbidden to speak, but they are instructed to cover
their heads when they speak to God or speak for God, “because of the angels.”
In 1 Corinthians 14 “all” may prophesy, and “all” may learn and be encouraged.
In many Churches of Christ in the twenty-first century women are forbidden to
pray and prophesy, but they are permitted to join in the worship assembly and
to join the men of the congregation in singing various prayers and prophecies
(many of them composed by women), with uncovered heads. Here we may pause to
marvel at the convoluted consequences of exegesis.?The entire case against the
public ministry of women among the ECC clergy rests on a misunderstanding of
two controversial proof texts, both attributed to Paul. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
plainly contradicts the instruction of Paul in 11:2-16 and 14:31. That is why
Paul responds in the way that he does in 14:37: “Did the word of God come out
from you? Has it reached you only?” Paul is quoting the letter or statement of
a Corinthian faction--just as in 1:11-12, 3:4, 5:1, 6:12, 6:13, 7:1, 8:1, 8:4,
10:23, 11:18, 15:12--and his response is swift, direct, and appropriate. Those
who presume to exclude women from speaking in the worship assembly are claiming
a monopoly of the word of God from which they seek to assume the prerogatives
of God.
In 1 Timothy 2:8-15 we should
translate the words from the Greek "aner" as “husband” and
"gyne" as “wife” (as in 1 Corinthians 11:3); read in this way the
text is more coherent, but no less troubling. The author is concerned
throughout not with teaching and encouraging a “new creation” but with winning
the respect of polite society. The vocabulary is unique in the New Testament.
The proof text from Genesis is misapplied in a way that “Paul” elsewhere never
uses. Among other things, 1 Timothy 2:15 plainly contradicts Paul’s instruction
in 1 Corinthians 7. The author is attempting to rehabilitate Paul and align him
with conventional mores.?The Pauline epistles are consider by the ECC to be the
fourteen books in the New Testament, traditionally attributed to Paul the
Apostle, although many dispute the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews as being a
Pauline epistle. A common objection is that Paul only restricted the women of
Ephesus from teaching (1 Timothy was written to Timothy, who was the pastor of
the church in Ephesus). The city of Ephesus was known for its temple to
Artemis, a false Greek/Roman goddess. Women were the authority in the worship
of Artemis. However, the book of 1 Timothy nowhere mentions Artemis, nor does
Paul mention Artemis worship as a reason for the restrictions in 1 Timothy
2:11-12.
While Paul was preaching in the
church which was in the house of Onesiphorus, a certain virgin named Thecla
(whose mother's name was Theoclia, and who was betrothed to a man named
Thamyris) sat at a certain window in her house. She claimed that Paul spoke on
the topic of celibacy in Rome, asking women and married women alike to keep
their flesh undefiled (or pure). She took this message as a call for those
married to remain sexually pure by practicing total abstinence. Her beliefs
spread over East and West to many women in different countries while making her
the most famous of virgin martyrs. However, 1st Corinthians 7 appears to share
more ambivalence about marriage, with the statement "it is well for a man
not to touch a woman." This opened a can of worms among their husbands in
the church because the women abruptly share their views in the light of these
beliefs. The Corinthian women were determined to speak out these views towards
the leadership by interrupting the church services.
Paul addresses this same problem in
many well-known passage of Scripture where it teaches us much more than the
simple fact that husband and wife ought to have ongoing sexual relations. In a
very important respect, a Christian woman has authority over her husband.
"Nevertheless, because of
sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her
own husband. . . . The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the
husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own
body, but the wife does" (1 Cor. 7:1-5; emphasis added).
That is why Paul is only referring
to husbands and wives with this problem, not single men and women in general.
The Greek words in the passage could refer to husbands and wives; however, the
basic meaning of the words refers to men and women. Further, the same Greek
words are used in verses 8-10. Are only husbands to lift up holy hands in
prayer without anger and disputing (verse 8)? Are only wives to dress modestly,
have good deeds, and worship God (verses 9-10)? Of course not. Verses 8-10 clearly
refer to all men and women, not only husbands and wives. There is nothing in
the context that would indicate a switch to husbands and wives in verses 11-14.
Since 1945, the ECC believes that there is scriptural
evidence indicating that women were used in many areas of ministry. Jesus in
the four gospels never hesitated to use a majority of women as front runners to
his miracles and work. Women continue today to fulfill these roles effectively
in areas where men are unable to perform. The only objections churches face
today is a misunderstanding of what the scriptures are really saying from the
perspective of Paul. After all, Paul was facing "in-house" family
problems within the church. None of his statements were meant to be
"law", but "order" in the House of God.
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