Woman’s Right to Preach

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

Catherine Booth wrote in defence of women’s preaching before she had ever preached. The pamphlet appeared in 1859, when she was thirty, with a title that left no doubt about its argument: Female Ministry; or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel. It was provoked by a minister in the north of England who had attacked the American evangelist Phoebe Palmer for addressing public meetings, and it was later revised and reprinted many times. It is short, closely argued and still worth reading. It is not in the Ochorus library, but its convictions run all through her sermons that are, and this chapter draws on both.

The objection from nature

She began with the argument that women are naturally unfitted for public speaking. This, she said, was simply custom masquerading as nature. Women had never been given the education or the opportunity; it was hardly surprising that few had shown the ability. Nothing in a woman’s mind or voice unfitted her to tell others what God had done. It was the church, not nature, that had shut the door.

The Scriptures

Her main argument was from the Bible, and she took it passage by passage. She pointed first to the women of the Old Testament who spoke for God: Miriam, Deborah the judge, Huldah the prophetess whom the king’s own officers consulted. Then to the New: Anna in the temple, speaking of Christ to all who looked for redemption; the women who were last at the cross and first at the tomb; Mary Magdalene sent by the risen Lord Himself to tell the apostles.

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her. JOHN 20:18

Then to Pentecost, which she regarded as decisive. Peter explained what the crowd was seeing by quoting Joel, and Joel’s prophecy explicitly includes daughters and handmaidens. If the Spirit was poured out on women to prophesy, she asked, by what authority does the church forbid them?

And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. ACTS 2:18

She noted Philip’s four daughters, who prophesied; Phebe, whom Paul commended as a servant of the church; Priscilla, his helper in Christ Jesus; and the women who, he said, laboured with him in the gospel.

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

Let your women keep silence

The great difficulty was Paul’s instruction that women should keep silence in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34), and that he suffered not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man (1 Timothy 2:12). She did not avoid these texts. Her answer to the first was that Paul, only three chapters earlier, had given directions about how a woman should dress when she prays or prophesies in public — which he could hardly have done if she was never to speak. The silence of chapter fourteen, she argued, must therefore refer to something else: to the disorderly questioning and chatter that were disrupting the Corinthian meetings, not to prophesying under the Spirit.

But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head. 1 CORINTHIANS 11:5

The passage in Timothy she read as forbidding a woman to domineer or usurp authority, not forbidding her to proclaim the gospel. And she summed up her reading of the whole matter with the text that the Army would make its charter.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. GALATIANS 3:28

In Adaptation of Measures she put it plainly: so far as the privileges, duties and obligations of Christ’s kingdom are concerned, there is neither nationality nor sex.

The fruit

Her last argument was the one she felt most deeply. God had evidently blessed the preaching of women. Souls were being converted under Phoebe Palmer, and later under Catherine herself and hundreds of Army women after her. She could not believe that the Spirit would seal with His blessing a ministry His word forbade. The Word and the Spirit, she held, cannot contradict each other.

The Holy Ghost, she told one congregation, would make them “all prophets and prophetesses, according to your measure.” And in The Training of Children she urged mothers to teach their daughters that each was “an independent, responsible being, whom God will call to as severe a reckoning for the use or abuse of her talents as that of her brother man.” That was the heart of it. God would hold women accountable for their gifts. The church had no right to bury them.

Her own fear

It is worth remembering that this argument was not easy for her. She knew exactly what it would cost. The devil’s first temptation to her, she said in How to Work for God with Success, was that if she began to preach people would call her “an impudent woman,” and she felt it would almost be better to go to hell than to have that said. She battled with it for a long time. Her answer, when it came, was a surrender: “Lord, I don’t care what they call me — I give myself to Thee to win souls.”

Weighing it

Her pamphlet changed minds, including her husband’s, and the movement she helped build gave women a place in preaching and leadership that almost no other church of the time allowed. Much of the modern church, across many traditions, has followed where she led.

The reader should know, however, that faithful Christians still read these passages differently. Many who gladly affirm that women may pray, prophesy, witness and teach in many settings believe that Scripture reserves the office of elder or pastor to men, and they reach that view from the same texts, with the same reverence for Scripture, that she brought to them. This book will not settle the disagreement. What can be said is that her central convictions are hard to deny: that the Spirit has been poured out on daughters as well as sons, that women have been given gifts for which God will hold them accountable, and that the church has too often silenced voices God meant to use. On any reading, she was right to refuse to be one of them.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 together, as she did, and ask what each passage assumes about women speaking.

2. If you are a woman, ask what gifts God has given you and whether you have buried any of them out of fear of what people would say.

3. If you are a man, ask whether you have discouraged a woman from using a gift God plainly gave her.

4. Whatever your conviction on church office, identify one way your church could make more room for the gifts of its women.

5. Pray her prayer of surrender: that you will not care what they call you, if only you may win souls.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, You poured out Your Spirit on sons and daughters, and You still call whom You will.

Forgive us where we have silenced those You meant to speak, and where we have been silent when You called us.

Give us grace to read Your Word humbly, to disagree charitably, and to honour every gift You have given.

I do not care what they call me, Lord. I give myself to You to win souls. Amen.