Women Leaders from the North
The majority of pentecostals are women—by most estimates the proportion is three to two, and in some countries it is probably higher—and women have been the main bearers of the pentecostal message worldwide. Ramabai, Minnie Abrams, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Carrie Judd Montgomery were no token women, nor were they only outstanding individuals with exceptional talents. That they were indeed, but because they were women in male-dominated societies, their contributions to Pentecostalism were all the more remarkable. In this chapter I will make a deliberate attempt to illustrate both the importance of leading women pioneers and the issues faced by ordinary women participants in Pentecostalism. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to privilege hierarchical leadership roles in studies such as this, and consequently to obscure the very important leadership roles exercised by those women who are never accorded the privileged offices reserved for men. After a discussion of the role of women leaders and founders in pentecostal movements both in the global North and the South, the latter part of this chapter considers what is an even more profound and less ostentatious area of the liberation of women in Pentecostalism: their role in the pentecostal family.
From its beginnings, the widespread phenomenon of women with charismatic gifts throughout Pentecostalism resulted in a much higher proportion of women in ministry than in most other forms of Christianity. Leadership and participation were based on the fundamental pentecostal belief in the priesthood of all believers and the empowering and legitimizing experience of the Spirit that is available to all, irrespective of gender. Women were prominent because inspirational leadership was privileged over organizational leadership. Like men, women could exercise any spiritual gift, testify to their experiences, and witness through music, prophecy, song, and many other forms of participation in the services— and in most cases, they did so more than men did. The spiritual leadership of women in Pentecostalism accorded well with the prominence of women in many pre-Christian religious rituals in Africa and parts of Asia, contrasting again with the prevailing practice of older churches, which barred women from entering the ministry or even from taking any part in public worship. No observer of pentecostal activities will fail to notice that most of those involved are women, even though the leadership is often male. But in spite of all the practical involvement of women with personal charisma and authority in pentecostal churches, these churches were not yet ready to come to terms with the theological implications of women in ministry. There were loud, male, conservative voices in pentecostal denominations advocating restrictions.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an important period for changing social and religious expectations on the role of women. By the 1880s, evangelical training schools for missionary women were being founded in the West, women were accepted into Bible schools like those of D. L. Moody in Chicago, A. J. Gordon in Boston, and A. B. Simpson in New York, and pioneering women like Phoebe Palmer, Catherine Booth, Carrie Judd Montgomery, and Maria Woodworth-Etter were preaching in mass meetings. These women inspired the early pentecostals and some, like Montgomery and Woodworth-Etter, joined the fledgling movement, where they were free to exercise their healing ministry but did so in independent organizations that pentecostal denominations could choose to ignore if they were so inclined. The example of these pentecostal women and those who went as missionaries to Africa, Asia, and Latin America deeply influenced communities in which they served, and women leaders emerged all over the world, often subjected to patriarchy, but setting precedents for leadership that reverberated in the years to come. There were many examples, and only a few can be given here. Carrie Montgomery’s periodical Triumphs of Faith was a significant vehicle for giving expression to women from its beginning. The majority of articles published there were written by women. One in 1886, entitled “Should Women Prophesy?” gave a spirited defense of the rights of women in ministry.1
During the Charismatic movement in North America, Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-76) was the most prominent healing evangelist, but other American leaders included inner healing writer and Charismatic Agnes Sanford (1897-1982), Jesus People leader Linda Meissner, and more recently, prosperity preachers Marilyn Hickey (b.1931) and Joyce Meyer (b.1943). Jackie Pullinger (b.1944) began work among Hong Kong prostitutes, drug addicts, and gang members in 1966 and continues to rehabilitate and provide homes for 200 destitute people in her St. Stephen’s Society. Her solution for drug addiction is prayer and the power of the Spirit, and her center does not use medication. Heidi Baker (b.1959) is a prominent and influential contemporary missionary in Mozambique with an earned PhD. She is a preacher with an extensive social welfare and healing ministry she runs with her husband Rolland called Iris Ministries, who (among other things) has issued calls for Americans to reject “super- star” ministries.2
The remarkable and sudden surge in the number of missionary candidates offering themselves for overseas service from the 1890s onward was partly attributable to changing attitudes toward single women becoming missionaries in Western Protestant, and especially evangelical, circles. Most of these missionary candidates were women who came from societies where their role was rapidly changing from a purely domestic one to one in which women—at least middle-class women—could embark on certain professional careers. These women had volunteered for one of the few careers available in an ecclesiastical world that was still very much male dominated. Published figures indicate that by 1900, 45 percent of the Protestant “foreign missionary” force was already female. John Alexander Dowie, whose Zionist healing movement had so much influence on early Pentecostalism, was a strong supporter of women in ministry. In 1903 he replied to a letter from Alexander Boddy, who had asked Dowie why his leaders, men and women, dressed up like Anglican bishops. Dowie, for all his shortcomings, was a fervent believer in a Christian egalitarianism that made no distinction between sexes, races, or social groups. Dowie used the opportunity to defend the ministry of women. His women leaders wore the same “costumes” as the men because he believed that “God has not only called men but women to the ministry, and what would apply to the robing of a man would also apply to that of the woman.” He wrote that the Bible taught “neither male nor female, but that all are one in Christ Jesus.” Women were called to the office of prophetess and so “God is no respecter of persons, and I, therefore, feel that women whom God has called should be ordained.” Boddy’s own position on women’s ordination was unclear, but he was a minister in the church establishment that at the time did not ordain women, perhaps because of its relationship with the Catholic order of deacon, priest, and bishop. His wife Mary Boddy, however, was highly influential in early British Pentecostalism and came into the pentecostal experience before her husband did.3
However, “free church” and independent pentecostals had no such qualms. The Azusa Street periodical The Apostolic Faith had established the precedent that it was “contrary to the Scriptures that woman should not have her part in the salvation work to which God has called her.” The author, probably William Seymour, wrote that men had “no right to lay a straw in her way, but to be men of holiness, purity and virtue, to hold up the standard and encourage the woman in her work, and God will honor and bless us as never before.” After all, the foundation for this ministry of women was the Spirit: “It is the same Holy Spirit in the woman as in the man,” the author declared. In the Old Testament, women were only allowed into the “court of the women and not into the inner court” and the anointing oil (signifying the Holy Spirit) was only poured on male kings, priests, and prophets. But all this changed when “all those faithful women” were together in the upper room at Pentecost, when “God baptized them all in the same room and made no difference.” The result was that “all the women received the anointed oil of the Holy Ghost and were able to preach the same as the men.” The event of Spirit baptism first given at Pentecost had demolished all gender discrimination. However, there was an ominous qualification to this apparent freedom: “No woman that has the Spirit of Jesus wants to usurp authority over the man.” Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm for women ministers was later modified further by Seymour when the Mission’s constitution declared “Women may be ministers but not to baptize or ordain in this work.” In part, this may have been a reaction to the hurt Seymour suffered after the defection of his leading women Florence Crawford and Clara Lum and the end of his Apostolic Faith periodical in 1908. But it is a reflection of the ambiguity with which pentecostal men and women approached the issue, having been immersed in a strongly patriarchal form of Christianity that was difficult to challenge.4
Nevertheless, North American pentecostal history is full of women pioneers. The controversial Florence Crawford (1872-1936) and the African American preacher Lucy Farrow (1851-1911) were prominent leaders in the Azusa Street revival. Crawford was founder of the Apostolic Faith Church in Portland, Oregon; and Farrow was William Seymour’s mentor, possibly his pastor in Houston, Texas, and the most significant leader at the beginning of the revival in Los Angeles. There were several prominent American pentecostal healing evangelists who were women. The best known were Maria Woodworth-Etter, Carrie Judd Montgomery, and the enigmatic Aimee Semple McPherson. These pioneers were the trickle that became a flood in the later history of Pentecostalism.
Probably the most famous of the American pentecostal woman involved in church leadership was the colorful and controversial Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), founder of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927, now known as the Foursquare Church. Born in a Canadian Salvation Army family, she became pentecostal in 1907 and was ordained by William Durham in Chicago with her evangelist husband Robert Semple in 1909. The Semples first accompanied Durham on his preaching tours and then went to Hong Kong as missionaries in 1910. When Semple died of malaria after two months in Hong Kong, his young widow returned to Los Angeles, married Harold McPherson in 1911, and began an ecumenical, interdenominational preaching and healing career of the “Foursquare Gospel,” another term for “full gospel” but a fourfold rather than fivefold one that omitted sanctification as a distinct experience. In mass meetings all over the country, she used bold and innovative methods including flamboyant advertising, showering handbills from an airplane, driving a “gospel auto” on which slogans were painted, using dramatic illustrations in her (partially acted) sermons, and becoming the first woman to preach on the radio. “Sister Aimee,” as she was known, was an enormously talented public speaker, writer, musician, and administrator—and a media star. She was ordained in the Assemblies of God in 1919, but left in 1922 over the question of ownership of church property. She and McPherson separated in 1918 and were divorced in 1921. In 1923 she opened a 5,300-seat building in Los Angeles called Angelus Temple, a building still in use. She opposed racism, fought against crime and poverty, encouraged women to enter the ministry, and began a crusade against drug trafficking. Her disappearance through kidnapping to Mexico in 1926 and her spectacular reappearance a month later was an event shrouded in controversy and great media publicity. Even her death in 1944 from an accidental overdose of prescription medication was controversial. She left behind a membership of 22,000 in more than 400 churches and 200 overseas mission stations, and a Bible college founded in 1923 that had trained 3,000 preachers. Aimee McPherson was the prototype of a new kind of American pentecostal leader; these individuals were able to use and adapt the prevailing popular culture of their day for their own purposes. McPherson’s Life Bible College had far more women than men, and she saw this as a vital part of her war against gender discrimination and male prejudice in Christianity. However, there was even some ambiguity about her views on women in ministry, for at Angelus Temple she allowed only male elders, one of whom would sit with her on the platform and preside with her in baptisms and communion.5
Aimee’s son, Rolf McPherson (1913-2009), took over as president of the denomination, a post he held until 1988. During his time in office the Foursquare Church became one of the fastest-growing pentecostal denominations in the world. Large congregations like Angelus Temple and the Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, led by Jack Hayford have continued their founder’s vision of changing with the times, especially in adapting to the challenge of the rapidly growing new Charismatic churches with their modem worship styles. The Foursquare Church joined the National Association of Evangelicals in 1952, and it has maintained its founder’s commitment to mission, helping the poor, disaster relief, and the ministry of women. Some 40 percent of the Foursquare ministers internationally are women, probably a higher proportion than in any other pentecostal denomination.6
Histories often credit the origins and development of pentecostal movements worldwide to men. The first histories of the movement exhibited not only what Wacker terms a “white racial bias,” but also a “persistent gender bias” in which the role of women leaders was ignored. Sometimes the wives of pentecostal leaders play a more important role than their husbands do, though their work is often unrecognized. Three examples among many are Marie Burgess Brown in New York, Ellen Hebden in Toronto, and Margaret Idahosa in Nigeria. But women have always played an important part in Pentecostalism, often in striking contrast to other denominations. Their role in the pentecostal transformation of world Christianity, however, has been ambiguous, unrecognized, and neglected, if not entirely overlooked. Women played significant roles in the beginnings of Pentecostalism. Seymour’s core leadership team was fully integrated with women and men being responsible for various aspects of the work—and more than half these leaders were women. Lucy Farrow was the person who initiated the conversion of William Seymour to Pentecostalism and arranged his transfer to Los Angeles, and she led the first party of Asuza Street missionaries to Liberia. Lucy Leatherman was similarly involved in the introduction of T. B. Barratt, pioneer of Pentecostalism in Europe, to Pentecostalism; and she and another woman prayed for his Spirit baptism. Minnie Abrams in India sent her booklet to Willis Hoover, which sparked the Chilean pentecostal movement. Antoinette Moomau was founder and leader for many years of the first pentecostal church in Shanghai, China. Mukti Mission founder Pandita Ramabai—arguably the most significant woman involved in early Pentecostalism—and the revival movement she led were almost completely ignored by historians because she did not start a Pentecostal denomination or believe in the American-originated doctrine of speaking in tongues as “initial evidence” of Spirit baptism, and perhaps also because her revival was not in the Western world. These are cases where the influence of women has far exceeded the impression left by the written histories.7
Lucy Leatherman, from Greencastle, Indiana, was a physician’s widow and the first pentecostal missionary in the Middle East. A former student at A. B. Simpson’s Missionary Training School in Nyack, New York, she had received Spirit baptism through the prayers of Lucy Farrow at Azusa Street, where she believed she had spoken Arabic and was called to evangelize Palestinian Arabs. Her testimony was published in The Apostolic Faith and evokes a mystical experience:
While seeking for the baptism with the Holy Ghost in Los Angeles, after Sister [Farrow] laid hands on me, I praised and praised God and saw my Savior in the heavens. And as I praised, I came closer and closer, and I was so small. By and by I swept into the wound in His side, and He was not only in me but I in Him, and there I found that rest that passeth all understanding, and He said to me, you are in the bosom of the Father. He said I was clothed upon and in the secret place of the Most High. But I said, Father, I want the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the heavens opened and I was overshadowed, and such power came upon me and went through me. He said, Praise Me, and when I did, angels came and ministered unto me. I was passive in His hands, and by the eye of faith I saw angel hands working on my vocal cords, and I realized they were loosing me. I began to praise Him in an unknown language.
In a few days, while on my way to church, I met a lady and two little children. She was talking to her children in a language that sounded like the words God had given me. I spoke a sentence to her, and she said, “What you say means God has given Himself to you.” She is from Beirut, Syria, and speaks Arabic. Eight years ago, in A.B. Simpson’s missionary school at Nyack, New York, I heard the Macedonian cry to go to Jerusalem, but it is to the Arabs. I am told there are more Arabs than Jews there, and God has been speaking to me and asks me if I would be willing to go with Him to the wild Arab of the desert. Anywhere with Jesus I will gladly go.8
This remarkable older woman, together with Maud Williams, who had received Spirit baptism in Toronto under the ministry of Ellen Hebden, met T. B. Barratt in New York and introduced him to the pentecostal experience. Leatherman ministered in four continents and at least ten countries, no mean feat for a woman in those days. She traveled from country to country in the Middle East, sending back reports to several pentecostal papers. She was among the first group of missionaries reported as having left Los Angeles for Jerusalem in August 1906. Leatherman was responsible for the first pentecostal congregation in Asyut, Egypt, the place later made famous by the orphanage of her younger contemporary Lillian Trasher. Leatherman organized a conference in Ramallah, Palestine, with about 300 attendees, where an Egyptian from Asyut, Ghali Hanna, received Spirit baptism and started Pentecostalism in Egypt. Leatherman undertook an arduous and lonely journey, sometimes by mule in mountainous regions through Syria and Galilee, and she held meetings in Beirut. She then left for Egypt to see Ghali’s work and reported a “great revival” in which “multitudes” had been “saved, sanctified and baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire.” A world traveler, Leatherman left Egypt in February 1909 and moved eastward through Arabia to India, visiting missions in the Pune area (including Mukti) and meeting up with Carrie and George Montgomery on their round-the-world tour. She moved via Hong Kong and Shanghai (where she visited two pentecostal missions) to Yokohama, Japan. Her ceaseless activity had taken its toll. She grew very ill and spent months in Japan resting. But from there she went to Manila in 1910, where she preached to American military personnel. The report in The Upper Room in Los Angeles described her as “this brave woman whom God has made a pioneer in the Gospel.” By 1911 she was on her way back to Palestine, and en route in Britain she preached in pentecostal conventions. Working in Beirut, Jerusalem, and returning to Asyut in 1913, Leatherman returned home for a short visit in 1916, having spent two dangerous years in the Middle East during the war. She soon traveled again, this time to South America as a missionary of the Church of God, which she had joined during her time in the United States. She ministered among fledgling pentecostal communities in Chile and Argentina until 1922, when she returned to the United States to be hospitalized at the end of her life, probably dying soon after her return.9
Lillian Trasher (1887-1961) founded an orphanage in Asyut, Egypt, in 1911. She arrived there as a young woman in 1910, devoted her life to this work, and seldom returned to her homeland. Because of her health she returned to the United States in 1955 for the first time in twenty-five years, only to spend the time raising funds for her orphanage. It was a measure of her commitment and stature that by 1917 all the expatriate pentecostal missionaries in Egypt had left after the outbreak of war—all, that is, except Trasher, who was then caring for some fifty orphans. She remained there through the Second World War and continued working with Egyptian orphans for over fifty years until her death in Egypt in 1961. One of the remarkable things about her work from the beginning was the recognition, esteem, and support she received from the Egyptian government and the financial support she received from Egyptian people, Muslims and Christians alike. They saw this work as theirs and readily helped Trasher put up buildings when needed. She is thought to have cared for over 8,000 Egyptian children during her lifetime, and at the end of her life there were 1,200 housed in the orphanage. The Lillian Trasher Memorial Orphanage now houses 650 and Lillian Trasher is buried in its grounds.10
Most records indicate that there were significantly more women involved in early American pentecostal missions than there were men. The influential Stone Church in Chicago under former Zionist elder William Hamner Piper was one of the greatest supporters of missions in the early American pentecostal movement. In 1919, for example, this church sent donations to thirty-two single women and twenty-six men. This did not include the missionary wives; if they were included, at least two thirds of the missionaries would have been women. Wacker also observes that half the traveling pentecostal evangelists were women. The training schools at that time had a majority of women, and the First World War had reduced the number of men applying even further— especially in Britain, where the men’s training school for the PMU had to close and its conscientious objectors were sent to labor camps. In the United States, too, one of the best-known and best-equipped schools, Rochester Bible Training School in New York State, had ten women and four men in the class of 1917-18, whereas two years later there were seventeen women and three men. Of course, one reason for this could be that the School was attached to Elim Tabernacle, a prominent independent pentecostal congregation led by the three Baker sisters.11
Many pentecostals were still reluctant to allow women to teach men, because their conservative church backgrounds encouraged a literal reading of Paul’s injunction that women must not be allowed to teach or have authority over men. The first person who received the pentecostal experience in Britain in January 1907, eight months before Pentecostalism was introduced by T. B. Barratt in Sunderland, was a woman: Catherine Price, who continued weekly pentecostal meetings in her home in Brixton, London. The principal of the women’s training school for the British PMU was the remarkably capable Eleanor Crisp (1856-1923), who remained in this post for the entire life of the institution, 1910-22. She was the only woman on the PMU’s ruling Council and a frequent speaker at pentecostal conferences in Britain.12
Women Leaders in the South
Women played an enormous role in early Pentecostalism as leaders and missionaries throughout the world, even though they faced enormous prejudice in their task, both socially and theologically. Pentecostal women leaders, like Pentecostalism itself, come in many hues and shades. Only a few women expressed their opinions on the ministry of women publicly in these years. It was still too sensitive a subject, and those women who were in ministry just got on with the job. They often led the way, founding and leading congregations, running mission bases, and taking responsibilities that put them on an equal footing with men. They were also soon to discover the ways in which women were even more oppressed in some countries than they were in the North, which affected converts and church attendees. Christianity had a distinct advantage when it was seen as the great equalizer, the religion that offered women freedom from harsh oppression—particularly in India where it was often contrasted with Hinduism and Islam. This contrast often appeared in the writings of Western women missionaries. One remarked that the Hindu women of India “were sunk in degradation from which only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can save them” and that the Muslim men similarly were “appalling” in their “oppression and degradation of women.” In particular, the practices of purdah (a lifelong seclusion that barred women from education or employment), child marriage, and the caste system came in for heavy criticism. Women missionaries spoke of the plight of the village women in Palestine with “bright intelligent faces,” who had been raised with the belief that they were “as truly beasts of burden as the donkeys” and that donkeys were “often better cared for.”13
In China there were far more men attending Christian services than women. One missionary explained: “Here in China as in other heathen lands the women have hard work to do and consequently have not the same liberty as the men,” implying correctly that the men did not have the same level of hard work. Sometimes the liberation of women was couched in purely esoteric terms. PMU missionary Ethel Cook expressed how women were empowered in China because “some of the simple women are being taught by visions and dreams occasionally,” giving an example of a woman who “knew God had given her His Spirit—and she certainly had a real quickening touch of God upon her.” Missionary May Kelty found opposition to the ministry of women among Argentine men and commented wryly about how she wished they would “interpret all the Scriptures as literally as those concerning women speaking in the church.” Generally speaking, the women in Pentecostalism accepted that their authority was given them by the indiscriminate and equalizing power of the Spirit—and consequently they did not see the need to challenge cultural assumptions or even the traditional scriptural interpretations regarding their role.14
One of the most prominent women in the early development of Pentecostalism worldwide was, of course, Pandita Ramabai. As we have seen, although her considerable contribution to the cause of Indian women was well known, her influence on early Pentecostalism was almost unrecognized until recently. Her seeming acquiescence to the Indian caste system by focusing on “high caste” women in the early years of her mission has elicited criticism, but after her move to Kedgaon in 1896 she concentrated on helping lower-caste famine victims, and her later years were spent promoting “the gender-egalitarian impulse of Christianity and its compassion to sinners, especially the rehabilitation of ‘fallen women.’” She too counteracted virulent male prejudice, not only from fellow Indians. American evangelical leader and Keswick speaker A. T. Pierson criticized speaking in tongues during the revival at Mukti in 1907 as accompanied by “indecencies” and committed by “hysterical women.” Ramabai vigorously contested these comments, writing in her Mukti Prayer Bell newsletter that some of the young women in the Praying Bands were speaking in tongues, for which she “praised God for doing something new for us.” She wrote that she would not try to stop the work of the Spirit, was “not aware that anything like the present Holy Ghost revival, has ever visited India before the year 1905,” that “mountains have been made out of mole hills,” and the reports of hysteria were “greatly exaggerated.” Ramabai did not believe that the “tongue movement” was “of the devil, or is confined to a few hysterical women” (as Pierson had charged), but was convinced that those given the gift of tongues had been “greatly helped to lead better lives.” For his part, Pierson had concluded that the present-day manifestations of tongues, including what he had seen among Welsh delegates at the 1905 Keswick conference, were “Satanic disturbances” and “imitations by the Devil of true tongues speaking.” Ramabai had this perceptive comment about Western criticisms of the revival:
Why should not the Holy Spirit have liberty to work among Indian Christian people, as He has among Christians of other countries? And why should everything that does not reach the high standard of English and American civilization, be taken as coming from the devil?... I see that God is doing great things for us and among us... what has happened here, during this revival, is not an imitation of anybody. Had these people who have come under the power of the Holy Ghost been mere imitators, they would certainly have shown their inclination toward that way before the revival came.15
Behind these comments was not only Ramabai’s sympathy for the revival movement, but also her underlying nationalism, defense of women in ministry, and desire for an Indian church moved by the Spirit in an Indian way. As Meera Kosambi puts it, Ramabai “repeatedly attempted to indigenize Christianity and transform its alien cultural trappings into a more recognizable Indian garb.” In the same article Ramabai wrote about the gift of tongues, which she said was “certainly one of the signs of the baptism of the Holy Spirit” and for which there was “scriptural ground.” However, in common with some other early pentecostals, Ramabai found that “there is no scripture warrant to think that the speaking in tongues is the only and necessary sign of baptism of the Holy Spirit.” But she wrote that gifts of healing, tongues, prophecy, and other gifts were “not to be discarded” but should be sought after. She ended this ten-page exhortation by witnessing to the physical manifestations happening:
I have seen not only the most ignorant of our people coming under the power of revival, but the most refined and very highly educated English men and women, who have given their lives for God’s service in this country, coming under the power of God, so that, they loose [sic] all control over their bodies, and are shaken like reeds, stammering words in various unknown tongues as the Spirit teaches them to speak, and gradually get to a place, where they are in unbroken communion with God. I, for one, do not dare to put them down as a few ignorant and ‘hysterical women.’ I wish all of us could get this wonderful and divine hysteria.”16
Ramabai went on to declare her belief that “there is no effectual remedy of all the evils prevalent in this country, except in a Holy Ghost revival moving both Indian and foreign Christian people.” Quoting the words of Christ, “How much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him,” Ramabai concluded: “We have been asking our Heavenly Father to give us the Holy Spirit and not evil spirits. He has answered our prayer. We praise Him, we bless Him, we magnify His Holy Name, and we thank Him with all our heart.” Ramabai thereby defended the Indian pentecostal manifestations against the prevailing criticisms of Western evangelical leaders.17
Spiritual, moral, and societal leadership was no longer confined to ordained and hierarchically appointed clergy, nor even restricted by caste convention and Hindu conservatism, but was in the hands of the most ordinary of Christians empowered by the Spirit, indeed those of Pierson’s “ignorant women.” These women were now leading public prayer, mission, and social reform. Ramabai herself was an Indian woman who resisted both patriarchal oppression in India and Western domination in Christianity. Or as Abrams put it, Ramabai “demonstrated] to her countrymen that women have powers and capabilities which they have not permitted them to cultivate.” The Mukti pentecostal revival was preeminently a revival among women and led by women. Ramabai both influenced and attracted other women into active Christian ministry, not only her own countrywomen but also foreigners like the independent Methodist missionary Minnie Abrams, who had a profound impact on early Pentecostalism with her booklet The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906). This was the first theological defense of the pentecostal doctrine of Spirit baptism; it sparked the pentecostal revival led by her friends the Hoovers in Chile. Abrams was a champion of women’s ministry in the pentecostal movement. In 1910, during leave in the United States two years before her death, she reported on the Laymen’s Missionary Convention that she had attended in St Paul, where she was told that “the evangelization of the world was a man’s job.” She wrote that although she was “only one little woman,” “many a woman has undertaken a man’s job in connection with her own and carried it through to success.” She thought that even if “the evangelization of the world is a man’s job, you cannot do it without the women.” In recruiting women for her pioneering new mission in India, she wanted those who had “been a success at home... educated and cultured women,” but above all “women full of love and the Holy Spirit... women willing to settle down and plod, and hammer away until the rock breaks... who do not know what it is to be defeated in that which they undertake.” Unlike the PMU, which, following CIM policy, wanted all their applicants (especially the women) to be under thirty in order to withstand better the rigors of language learning and missionary work, Abrams had quite the opposite opinion, preferring them to be “at least thirty years of age for this pioneer work.”18
There were other notable older women among early pentecostal missionaries. Lucy Farrow was already in her mid-fifties when she introduced William Seymour to the pentecostal doctrine of Charles Parham and arranged his move to Los Angeles. Annie Murray, who was in charge of a mission home in Bombay from 1910 until her death two years later, was an older blind woman who would never have been accepted by any of the established mission societies because of her age and disability. Many early indigenous pentecostal leaders were women. They could not fail to have been impressed by the examples set by the Western women missionaries who worked among them and by indigenous pioneers like Ramabai. Ramabai’s organization produced scores of female Indian missionaries who traveled the length and breadth of India. The pentecostal revival in Mukti in 1905 was an Indian movement among Indian women, with the participation and observation of a small number of expatriate missionaries. This remained the main source of Indians working in pentecostal missions for at least a decade, and by 1910 there were 125 young women training in the Mukti Bible school to become full-time Christian workers. Western pentecostal periodicals particularly noted the enormous contribution made to Christian mission by the three Indian Brahmin women: Ramabai, Soonderbai Powar, and Shorat Chuckerbutty. One declared that “the best work done in India to-day” was “upon purity principles of faith and prayer, and no leaders there are more mightily anointed than many of the native women,” who were “women of peerless purity and power, the Deborahs of the darkened Empire.” Each of these women was a “Spirit anointed prophetess of purity and faith principles” who had exposed herself to dangers on behalf of the “oppressed and perishing.” These Indian women were outspoken in their demands for equality in an unjust society, and of course, they had had the shining example of Pandita Ramabai who had led the way.19
Soonderbai Powar was one of the most critically outspoken on the subject of the oppression of women in India. She wrote that Indian women were never free but were forced to be obedient to men throughout their lives, first to their fathers, then to their husbands, and finally to their sons. Their obedience was forced and was not “drawn by tender love and chivalrous attentions.” She blamed this bondage squarely upon Hinduism, which she stated was “a religion that has drawn out all that is selfish in man and made him see as his god nothing but his own ugly self; that has made woman nothing but a soulless animal to be used for the pleasure of man.” At a convention in Rochester, New York, in 1918 one of Ramabai’s American assistants spoke of the contribution such Indian women had made to Pentecostalism. She pointed out that they were “so filled with the Spirit and so taught of God” that expatriate missionaries (such as Alice Luce) had “received Pentecost through their gracious ministry” and had “been willing to learn the deeper truths of God through their words and holy examples.” Luce (1873-1955), a CMS missionary in India since 1896, had received her Spirit baptism in 1910 through the hands of Shorat Chuckerbutty, a Bengali Brahmin Christian who ran an orphanage and school in Allahabad, where a pentecostal revival was taking place and daily services were held in which many were reported converted and baptized in the Spirit. Both Luce and Agnes Hill, then general secretary of the YWCA in India, had visited Chuckerbutty’s center “and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit through the prayers of an Indian woman, glory to God for the great sisterhood there is!” reported Hill a few years later. Luce was later to move to the United States and join the AG, where she became a missionary and Bible college principal among Hispanics in San Diego from 1926 until her death.20
The Hong Kong Chinese evangelist Kong Duen Yee (1923-66), born in Beijing and an actress in over seventy Chinese films, was a controversial leader. Better known by her stage name Mui Yee, she lived only seven years after she became a pentecostal in 1959, when she was reportedly healed. She gave up acting and established the Christian Charismatic Evangelistic Team, which in 1963 became the New Testament Church in Hong Kong. In Singapore, the former Brethren elder Goh Ewe Kheng had become pentecostal in Kong’s meetings. His Church of Singapore became a respected and large Charismatic church in the city, with Goh becoming chair of the Evangelical Fellowship of Singapore in the mid-1990s. Kong led many revival meetings in churches in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore and was heavily critical of other churches, especially those that did not accept her teaching of Spirit baptism accompanied by speaking in tongues. She called on people to leave their churches and form independent churches in association with the New Testament Church, which she said was the only true church. After her death from tongue cancer in 1966, her daughter
Ruth Cheung took on the leadership of the church until she renounced the extremes of its teachings and moved to California. The new leader of the organization from 1976 was Elijah Hong, a former AG member who joined Kong in Taiwan in 1965 and propagated even more radical millenarian teachings from his Mount Zion New Testament Church. The church continues in this part of Asia and in the Chinese diaspora but is marginalized by other Chinese churches. In Taiwan, Hong is considered by the church to be the prophet Elijah, “God’s Chosen Prophet of All Nations”; members believe they are “spiritual Israelites”; and that a mountain in southern Taiwan is Mount Zion, the new Jerusalem on which Jesus will alight at his second coming. The New Testament Church still considers Kong its founder, and Mount Zion is actually home to 300 people who operate a large organic farm and to which church followers make pilgrimages from other parts of the world.21
There are more recent examples of pentecostal women who have defied the odds in male-dominated societies. South Korea has two eminent ones, both originally from North Korea. After she fled with her family to South Korea, Jashil Choi (1915-89) attended the Assemblies of God Bible school in Seoul and started a small congregation in her house. This became the tent church of which her future son-in-law David Yonggi Cho became pastor in 1958. By the 1980s, it was the largest congregation in the world. Choi is not often recognized as the force behind Yonggi Cho’s early success, but Cho himself refers to her as “my spiritual mother, and my greatest benefactor.” In 1973 Choi also founded the well-known prayer center near the demilitarized zone, associated with Yoido Full Gospel Church and now including her name in its title, Osan-ri Choi Jashil Memorial Fasting Prayer Mountain. Her daughter and the wife of Yonggi Cho, Sunghae Kim, who has a doctorate in music, for several years has been the president of Hansei University in Gunpo, the denomination’s university. Another influential pentecostal leader is the founder, in 1970, of the Foursquare Church in Korea, Seen Ok Ahn (b.1924). She may not have had quite the worldwide impact of Choi and Yonggi Cho, but nonetheless she has established a chain of congregations, a theological college, a prison ministry, and six independent Christian schools with 8,000 students and a staff of 400 in her home city of Daejeon.22
A prominent African independent church with many thousands of members is the St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, founded by Mokotudi Christina Nku (1894-1988), a former member of the Dutch Reformed Church. As a young woman she began to have revelations, including, during a serious illness, a vision of heaven in which she believed God told her that she would not die. These mystical visions and her subsequent healing legitimated her calling as a religious leader in a male-dominated society. Women had always played prominent roles as religious leaders and healers in African societies. Further visions established Christina Nku’s reputation, and later she had a vision of the large church with twelve doors that she would build. She met Elias Nkitseng of the Apostolic Faith Mission in 1918 and she and her husband Lazarus Nku were baptized in 1924. They did not remain in the AFM long, as its president P. L. le Roux apparently objected to “some of her more elaborate displays of prophetic rapture.”23
Nku established the St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission in 1933, becoming well known as a healer and attracting thousands into her church. The twelve-door church known as the Temple, which she built in 1952 in Evaton, southwest of Johannesburg, was the largest independent church building in the Gauteng urban area. Although the “Apostolic” name of the church implied continuity with the pentecostal movement, her healing rituals brought increasing distance between her and the white-led pentecostal denominations. In particular was the use of blessed water, as she prayed over water in thousands of bottles and buckets, which was distributed to the faithful for healing. Nku is a somewhat ambiguous example of female leadership. In the growth and development of St. John she was assisted by her husband, who became a bishop, and by Elias Nkitseng. But Nkitseng died in 1948 and Lazarus Nku was killed in a railway accident in 1949. Nku began to rely increasingly on her son Johannes, whom she made a bishop and eventually gave the senior male position of archbishop. Male leadership, even if token, was more acceptable to male-dominated African society and the church accommodated itself to this prevalent opinion. During her leadership Christina Nku, who was better known as MaNku (“Mother Nku”), established schools for children and self-development programs for youth and adults in her church. This directly benefited the community in the years of apartheid and functioned as a response to a system that oppressed the poor African majority.
With her advancing age, MaNku’s grip on the church began to wane and Johannes Nku and Petros John Masango (1908-84) were opposing candidates for archbishop in 1970. When Masango won the election, MaNku announced that Masango would only occupy the office until the following year when she would appoint another archbishop. She followed this announcement by expelling Masango and declaring that she would not take orders from any bishop, who had “no authority in this church in my lifetime,” and no new constitution would be valid without her written approval. Masango announced that a conference would be held in his home in Swaziland and not, as usual, at the Temple in Evaton. He and Johannes Nku also differed sharply on the issue of polygamy, which the latter supported. Johannes Nku resigned from the church and went into business, eliciting sharp criticism from his mother. The differences between MaNku and Masango became so sharp that they resulted in protracted litigation in the Supreme Court, with the final ruling in 1971 declaring Masango lawfully elected archbishop. Masango broke all ties with the Nku family in 1972 and established himself as “founder” of the church, the one from the east prophesied by MaNku, with his own special place for baptisms dedicated at Katlehong in eastern Gauteng in 1983. Despite this rift, Masango was a capable leader and by the mid-1970s the main faction of St. John had some 50,000 members. Masango remained archbishop until his death in 1984, by which time the church estimated its membership to be over 100,000 throughout South Africa. After Masango’s death there was another bitter and prolonged struggle for control of the church between several factions, and Jacob Maragu became archbishop of the main faction in 1997. When Maragu died in 2005 he was succeeded by his wife. By 1997 the church MaNku had founded existed in three major factions and several minor ones, and in 2006 attempts were made toward the reunification of five of the thirty-nine factions, facilitated by the South African Council of Churches. One of the major factions is led by MaNku’s grandson. Her autocratic leadership notwithstanding, Christina Nku was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable women the South African pente- costal movement has produced.24
Possibly the two most prominent contemporary African pentecostal women are firmly within the “Word of Faith” prosperity camp. Archbishop Margaret Idahosa (b.1943) took over the Church of God Mission International in Benin City, Nigeria, after her husband Benson Idahosa’s death in 1998. She leads a congregation in a building with a capacity of 5,000, holds several services weekly, and runs a private university, a group of Christian schools and hospitals, and an influential international ministry to encourage women in Christian leadership. In Nairobi, Kenya, Bishop Margaret Wanjiru (b. 1961), born in poverty, is a remarkable leader who was a street hawker and cleaner before she started her own business. She confesses to having been a witch before her conversion in 1990 and she was for many years a single parent. In 1993 she founded Jesus Alive
Ministries, which is now a megachurch in Nairobi that claims 20,000 members and promises its followers prosperity, success, and deliverance from all evil powers. She was one of the first African pentecostal women to enter politics, becoming a member of parliament for the constituency in which her church is located in 2007. She was appointed Assistant Minister for Housing in 2008, but lost her seat in an election in August 2011, but was back as Assistant Minister soon after. Kenyans were fascinated by the soap opera over her first marriage that played out on the national media in 2007-08, resulting in a court injunction against her pending marriage to a South African pastor. The drama ended with the even more dramatic death of the man who claimed to be her first husband and the father of her children. This event would engender enormous respect for Wanjiru as a victim who had overcome a deliberate attempt at character assassination. As the pentecostals would put it, she had defeated the devil.25
The Gender Paradox in Pentecostal Families
Several studies show that Pentecostalism gives women significant advantages, particularly bestowing moral autonomy in the family and challenging notions of masculinity and patriarchal hegemony. This is what sociologist Bernice Martin has termed the “Pentecostal gender paradox.” We have seen how, on the one hand, women are often denied hierarchical positions of leadership in pentecostal churches. But on the other hand, women lead the way in gifts of the Spirit, and in the words of Martin:
In societies characterized by a tradition of male dominance [women] have been enabled to institute a family discipline, sanctioned and effectively policed by the church community, which puts the collective needs of the household unit above the freedom and pleasures of men and which has called an end to the long-tolerated double standard of sexual morality.26
There have been many emotionally charged debates in pentecostal denominations on the question of women’s rights to leadership, almost always based on what male functionaries consider the incontrovertible biblical support for exclusively male leadership. The last international conference in Sunderland, England, in 1914 spent much time debating the topic of “Woman’s place in the Church,” and by today’s standards their discussion would be considered archaic and reactionary. All the published opinions were those of men, except for that of Wilhelmina Polman, the wife of the Dutch pentecostal leader, whose stated position was as conservative as was any of the men’s. Even today, many women married to conservative pentecostal men toe the party line and submit themselves to their husbands “as unto the Lord.”27
Across the Atlantic, E. N. Bell, first chairman of the American AG, a former Baptist pastor and a bachelor, wrote about the role of women missionaries on the eve of the formation of the AG in 1914. He believed women were “recognized in the New Testament only as ‘helpers in the gospel,’ as Paul puts it.” He stated that women missionaries should not itinerate alone but find permanent work in a station “under the proper oversight of some good brother whom God has placed in charge of the work.” Although he reluctantly admitted that “God has blessed” the work of women who had opened up stations of their own and that he had “never objected to this,” he found “no scriptural precept or example for such independent leadership by women.” The early AG continued this reactionary trend. Its first General Council in 1914 adopted a resolution on “Rights and Offices of Women” to recommend that “we recognize their God-given rights to be ordained, not as elders, but as Evangelists and Missionaries, after being approved according to the Scriptures.” These positions were regarded as subservient in the denomination. However, women delegates—and there were a handful present—were not allowed to vote on this or on any other resolution. Women were permitted to become assistant pastors in 1920, but this was simply a response by the male AG Council to a need for pastors to leave their wives in charge of congregations when they itinerated. Grant Wacker traces “the tortured story of women’s credentialing as ministers in the infant Assemblies of God,” where restrictions on women’s authority in this and other American pentecostal denominations increased during the years following the First World War. Only beginning in 1935 could women become pastors and, even then, only with significant restrictions.28
Such restrictions did not reflect the reality of the prominent role played by women pastors, founders of churches, and missionaries in early Pentecostalism. There were actually very few restrictions on women as missionaries, because somehow the patriarchs in their wisdom had decided that this was a position less threatening, perhaps because it was less authoritative within their organizations. The geographical distance of the women missionaries from the church headquarters may have made it more acceptable—but after all, these women also had received the gift of the empowering Holy Spirit, the only qualification for being sent. Consequently, the practice of pentecostal missions and the stated position of the supporting churches did not always harmonize. But this was a time when women were still not fully enfranchised, higher educational opportunities were still denied them, and a general patriarchal attitude prevailed globally. Although the degree of gender discrimination has improved since then, pentecostal denominations in the West still struggle with these unresolved issues and are characterized by “a hierarchical male clergy and a high degree of institutionalism.” Some organizations have yet to rethink decisions and actions limiting this most important ministry of women, who form the large majority of the church worldwide.29
Yonggi Cho in Korea appointed women as leaders in his thousands of home groups; throughout the world, women assume leadership and pastoral roles in such groups where the bulk of church development and nurture occurs. Pentecostal churches also have strong women’s organizations that run in parallel with the structures dominated by men and where women’s influence and authority often equal or exceed that of men. Pentecostalism would not have grown as it did without their ministry and support. Nonetheless, even in those churches where only male leadership is allowed, to conclude that these churches are home to dominant men and subordinate women is a gross oversimplification. Pentecostalism, with its recognition of the empowering gifts of the Spirit available to all—and often, to women far more than to men—means that women actually have many ways to exert influence and authority in the churches. However, this neither excuses nor justifies patriarchal notions, attitudes, and actions of pentecostal leaders. Religious ideology since time immemorial has been used to reinforce and mystify male patriarchy and female subordination, and Pentecostalism is no exception.30
Gender issues in the study of Pentecostalism have recently received more attention, especially from social scientists. Social anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco has led the way in this area with her 1995 study of evangelical women in Colombia. At first glance, many pentecostal churches reinforce traditional male dominance in the family and the church. Miller and Yamamori discovered only one congregation led by a woman in several years of field research; and Crumbley discovered severe restrictions on women in leadership in the three Nigerian Aladura churches she studied. Brusco described her first experience of a pentecostal service, a Hispanic congregation in New York where the women “ran almost the entire service from the floor” while “four men dressed in business suits sat on the stage.” This is not an unusual scenario, and men are often given “up front” places of prominence in pentecostal congregations even though much of the activity is conducted by the women. Women are singled out for disciplinary action in congregations by male leaders often for the most trivial of reasons—a study in Brazil recorded that 90 percent of disciplinary cases were of women members. However, this is only one side of the story, for as Brusco observes, to understand the worldwide appeal of Pentecostalism to women it is also important to understand its “aggressive focus on the family, on marital and parental roles and responsibilities, that results in a discernible shift in the domestic life of converts.” Women convert to Pentecostalism for the same reasons that men do: healing, spiritual nourishment, and community acceptance; but to this must be added the significant attraction of being “somebody” in a society where you are “nobody,” and the benefits of “effectively addressing the problems resulting from machismo, especially that of the male abdication of family responsibility.”31
Brusco’s research in Colombia demonstrates the dominant feature of machismo in Latin American societies, defined as “arrogance and sexual aggression in male-to-female relationships” and “the alienation of men from the household,” resulting in a polarization between male and female roles, rendering women invisible. In these and many other societies, women justifiably see their men as the main source of family income but do not have any control over that income, and so are often forced to find alternative means. The dissolution of the family is seen as the worst possible tragedy leading to financial ruin. Machismo is not only detrimental to women; several studies show that it is also detrimental to upward social mobility for men because it encourages a profligate and dangerous lifestyle. Machismo is not confined to Latin America, however; it is found in varying degrees in all societies worldwide and wherever women are subservient to men. Conversion to Pentecostalism does bestow a sense of dignity and value on women, but this is not the only benefit. Brusco shows that pentecostal women take their role as mothers and wives seriously and that this has had the effect of supporting a dominant and positive female position as moral leaders in the family and of reattaching men who had detached themselves from family responsibilities. This she terms the “domestication of men,” because women are usually the first to convert to Pentecostalism and often bring the male members of their families with them afterward. The result is as follows:
The ascetism required of evangelicals brings about changes in the behavior of male converts, particularly in relation to the machismo complex in Latin America. Drinking, smoking, and extramarital sexual relations are forbidden. By redirecting into the household the resources spent on these things, such changes have the effect of raising the standard of living of women and children who are in varying degrees dependent on the income of these men.32
This has the effect of reforming gender roles in such a way as to enhance female status. Martin describes this as men being “returned to the home,” and argues that there is an “implicit deal” in which greater sexual equality is tolerated by the pentecostal church leaders “as long as women are not seen to be publicly exercising formal authority over men.” She suggests that it suits both women and men for this gender paradox to remain unresolved and that women gain more from the paradox than men do. Women are universally regarded as the morally superior partners in a marriage and consider it their job to constantly reform their husbands. Once converted, the men are subjected to teachings about their lifestyle, their family responsibilities, and conjugal fidelity. One study of two pentecostal churches in the greater Durban area of South Africa showed how Pentecostalism challenged male notions of masculinity and male understanding of the husband as “head of the home.” The men in these churches exercised leadership in the family and church only by permission of the women, and on becoming pentecostals they began to see that Christ’s example should be followed by men serving their wives and children. Mark Cartledge found from research into “godly love” in the Church of God (Cleveland) that “the mother is the key player” in the pentecostal family, particularly with regard to “socializing ‘born again’ experiences” and ensuring “the Pentecostal identity of the family.” The men looked to their wives for spiritual leadership and guidance, whereas the women usually look to family members other than their husbands. This placed marriage at the center of “Pentecostal socialization.” Through its emphasis on conversion and holiness, Pentecostalism often creates a different type of man, a domesticated man, and thus obliquely offers a sociopolitical critique resulting in the empowerment, liberation, and equality of women. Well, almost.33
Of course there are limitations to the extent of this liberation, for hegemonic masculinity is still a feature of many societies. Pentecostalism seldom directly challenges patriarchy or the power structures that render women unequal, and sometimes it deliberately legitimizes these structures. The discourse of pentecostal women is often radically different when they are in the presence of men. Yet, it is often the women to whom the men look for spiritual guidance, the women who lead in prayer and gifts of the Spirit in church gatherings, and ultimately it is the women to whom their husbands look for spirituality. Often the women are the first to convert to Pentecostalism and their husbands are sometimes either passive followers or do not join the church at all. The result is that women take the lead in the spiritual direction of the home in many pentecostal families. A study of women’s participation in a pentecostal church in La Paz, Bolivia, argues that a contradiction between the teachings and ideals of the church and the reality of their family life has never been completely resolved. While Pentecostalism legitimizes male authority, it also modifies harmful behavior toward women. This unresolved paradox suits both the men and the women in the commonly accepted ideological characterization of male and female roles.34
Several studies of Latin American Pentecostalism have demonstrated how husbands’ behavior changed after conversion and how this improved women’s lives in the family. One study points out that women’s emancipation in Pentecostalism is predominantly practical. Women bring their husbands to faith to try to alter habits like smoking and drinking, and after conversion their sexual aggression and arrogance toward women has to change in order to suit a pentecostal lifestyle. This study argues that family life and a husband’s responsibility to his wife and children are essential in pentecostal communities. Other studies suggest that Latin American Pentecostalism might best be viewed as a women’s movement, for it provides a survival mechanism for many women and a potent force for change in the face of severe gender inequalities, transforming both male and female roles. Men no longer make autonomous decisions, for as Brusco points out, although the husband may continue to be regarded as the head of the family, “his relative aspirations have changed to coincide with that of his wife.” Brazilian women researchers have cautioned against a Western feminist interpretation positing contradictory male and female roles in Pentecostalism, because pentecostals see adherence to strict moral codes not as oppression but as “proof of the liberation of the individual.”35
This chapter has focused on the role of women in Pentecostalism and how they have a significance often denied them in the larger culture. While women do not always have easy access to hierarchical leadership roles in pentecostal churches (with a few notable exceptions), their role as leaders of, participants in, and controllers of the pentecostal congregation and especially of the pentecostal family is of enormous importance. This feature in a Christian movement that is predominantly female goes a long way toward explaining its proliferation during the twentieth century. Outward leadership of women is the consequence, not the cause, of the liberation of women in Pentecostalism, and to focus on the absence of the hierarchical leadership of women is to miss what is really going on. To be sure, this is paradoxical and, on the face of it, women are not liberated from the larger embedded structures of patriarchy in church and society. But because liberation often takes place through the reordering of relative participation in the most intimate sphere and in the basic building block of the larger society—the family—the liberation of women in pentecostal churches is all the more profound and transforming. But there is still some way to go.