Chosen and Ordained

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. JOHN 15:16

Amanda Smith preached for over forty years on four continents, to crowds of thousands and to handfuls in thatched chapels, and she was never ordained by any church. She never asked to be. When the question was raised, and it was raised often, she gave the same answer: she had received her ordination from the One who said, Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you. It is one of the simplest and strongest defences of a woman’s call to preach ever made, and it came not from a treatise but from a life.

A preacher woman

She did not set out to preach. For years after her conversion she prayed with the sick, led a class and the women’s prayer meeting, and spoke to people at the altar. When the call to go out came, it came as a word: Go, and I will go with you. The word she heard next was Salem. She went, and at Salem the old presiding elder who had been her pastor years before met her on the boat. When she told him her story, he said something she never forgot: “Well, Sister Smith, you know I don’t believe in women preaching. But still, honey, I have got nothing to say about you. You go on. The Lord bless you.”

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. JOEL 2:28

Nashville

The fullest account of the question in her Autobiography is her visit to the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Nashville. She longed to go, and asked one of the elected delegates how much it would cost. He looked at her plain poke bonnet with half disgust and told her it would cost money, and if she had not plenty, there was no use going. Behind her she heard the others: “What does she want to go for?” “Woman preacher; they want to be ordained.” “I mean to fight that thing.”

She went anyway, by faith, and felt very much alone among the fine dresses and the suspicious looks. The thought of ordination, she wrote, had never once entered her mind, “for I had received my ordination from Him, Who said, ‘Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you.’” On an outing to Fisk University the leader of the famous Jubilee Singers spotted her plain bonnet in the crowd, brought her to the platform and asked her to sing. The Spirit fell on the people, the preachers wept and shouted, and several of them came to ask her to come and hold meetings on their circuits. The question of women’s ordination never came up in the Conference.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:27

Twenty years later she noted how things had changed, that most of her brethren now believed in the ordination of women and some had been ordained. She was glad. “But I am satisfied,” she wrote, “with the ordination that the Lord has given me.”

Let your men keep silence

She did not usually argue the question. “I never argue with anybody,” she said, “just say my say and go on.” But in Bangalore, when some Plymouth Brethren wrote to the papers and to her, bombarding her with texts against women preaching, she announced that she would speak on the subject. The church was packed. She read out as her text, Let your men keep silence in the church, pointing to the verse in the fourteenth chapter of First Corinthians where Paul, giving directions so that there should be no confusion, tells a speaker to keep silence if there is no interpreter, and has the prophets speak one at a time while the others listen. She does not record the rest of what she called her version of it — only that the meeting was excellent, and that afterwards the newspaper articles and the letters stopped.

In Liberia a minister who treasured Paul’s words about women asking their husbands at home was opposed to her taking any public part. She noted drily that as she had no husband at home to ask, she took her orders from the Master.

For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted. 1 CORINTHIANS 14:31

Weighing the question

Christians remain divided on this question, and a companion like this is not the place to settle it. Some churches read the apostle’s restrictions as permanent limits on the teaching office; others read them, as she did, as addressed to particular disorders, and point to Deborah, Huldah, Anna, Philip’s daughters and Priscilla, and to Pentecost’s promise to sons and daughters alike. Readers on every side should notice three things about her.

And the same man had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy. ACTS 21:9

First, she never sought office or power. She was indifferent to ordination for herself and never pushed herself forward; she often held back when others urged her to sing or speak, for fear of seeming to intrude. Her authority was that of a witness, and she knew it.

Second, she respected those who disagreed. She took the old elder’s blessing gratefully, worked happily under ministers who did not share her view, and never made the question a banner.

Third, the fruit was real. Bishop Thoburn, who worked alongside her for months, said he had learned more of real value as a preacher from her than from anyone else. Whatever one’s view of church order, it is hard to say that God was not in it.

For the younger women

The very last paragraph of her Autobiography is a prayer for women. She hoped that many of her own people would be led to fuller consecration, and that the Spirit would come upon some of the younger women “who have talent, and who have had better opportunities than I have ever had, and so must do better work for the Master,” so that when she had fallen in the battle they might take up the standard and carry it on.

The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it. PSALM 68:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Whatever your view of women preaching, ask yourself honestly whether it comes from Scripture or from habit. Read 1 Corinthians 14 and Acts 2:17–18 in full this week.

2. What has God called you to do that no church office would give you? Stop waiting for permission and begin.

3. If you hold authority in a church, think of someone, perhaps a woman, perhaps someone poor or unschooled, whose gift is plain and unused. Make room for them.

4. Practise her way with disagreement: say your say, bless those who differ, and go on.

5. Pray, as she did, for younger believers with better opportunities than you had, that they would do better work for the Master.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You chose me, I did not choose You. You have ordained me to go and bear fruit that remains.

Forgive me for waiting for a title before I obey, and for despising gifts You have given to people I did not expect.

Pour out Your Spirit on Your sons and daughters, on the young and the old, the schooled and the unschooled.

And raise up after us a generation who will carry the standard further, with holiness written on their hearts and lives. Amen.