CHRISTIANNOTICE.COM.- During Women’s Month, and especially on International Women’s Day, numerous tributes are paid to those who play various roles in society.
Here we list female preachers and evangelists, who, contrary to what many think, are not a new phenomenon.
Women throughout history have been faithful to their pastoral callings, against all odds. Meet ten women pastors, evangelists and preachers who left a legacy in Christianity, reports CBE International.
1. Janet Lee (1783-1864)
In 1819, Lee became the first African-American woman allowed to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was also the first African-American woman to publish an autobiography in the United States.
Eight years after Lee heard that God was calling her to preach, she was finally able to convince her pastor to leave her behind the pulpit. She pleaded with him, “If the man can preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, since he also died for her? Isn’t he a whole Savior, instead of half one?
Lee became an itinerant preacher, moving from place to place on foot. She faced a lot of opposition due to her race and gender. In one year she traveled more than two thousand miles and preached 178 sermons.
2. Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) (1797-1883)
Baumfree was born into slavery in New York. She was repeatedly sold and suffered beatings and separation from her children. After her emancipation, she became a devout Christian and co-founded the Kingston Methodist Church.
In 1843, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth to signify her call from God to travel and preach, telling her friends, “The Spirit calls me and I must go.”
Truth spoke prophetically about the abolition of slavery. She and she is included in Smithsonian magazine’s list of the “100 Greatest Americans of All Time” and she is also remembered annually in the Episcopal Church and Lutheran Church calendars of saints.
3. Phoebe Palmer (1807-1875)
Born into a devout Methodist family in New York, Palmer felt conflicted about her peaceful relationship with God. She longed for something more.
After losing two small children and believing that it was a punishment for not dedicating himself fully to God, he came to “see that the mistake of my religious life was the desire for signs and wonders.
Like Naaman, he wanted something big, he didn’t want to trust unswervingly in the still small voice of the Spirit speaking through the naked Word.” She learned that by laying her life on the altar, she was completely sure of her salvation.
He began organizing and preaching in camps, where approximately 25,000 people converted to Christianity. His “altar covenant” theology influenced the founding of the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army, the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. His book, The Way of Holiness, had fifty-two editions in 1867.
4. Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825-1921)
Blackwell was a precocious girl who lived in Rochester, New York, and began preaching in her Congregational church at the age of nine.
She was a school teacher for four years, saving money to enroll in Oberlin College, founded by Charles Finney and one of the first American colleges to train women in theology. Still, her theology degree was denied her for several years due to discrimination against women in ministry.
Blackwell was a prolific writer and charismatic preacher. She ended up becoming the first woman to be ordained by a major American Protestant denomination in 1853. She continued to preach until 1915.
5. Amanda Berry Smith (1837-1915)
Amanda Smith was born in Maryland, the daughter of a slave who managed to buy her family’s freedom. The Berry family moved to Pennsylvania, where it became a station on the Underground Railroad.
After converting to Christianity, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1869, she received her call to preach and, throughout her career, she became a popular speaker in churches and camps from Maine to Tennessee.
Smith was much loved for her beautiful voice and inspirational sermons. She became the first international black evangelist in 1878, working in England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and various African countries for twelve years.
6. Mary Woodworth-Etter (1844-1924)
At age thirteen, Woodworth-Etter converted to Christianity. She “heard the voice of Jesus calling me to go out into the highways and hedges and gather the lost sheep.” Her denomination barred her from public ministry, so she found support at a local Quaker meeting.
In 1885, he began to preach and pray for the sick. His healing meetings attracted so many people that he ended up buying a tent with a capacity of 8,000 people.
She was instrumental in founding the Assembly of God Church in 1914, and in 1918 founded what is now Lakeview Church in Indianapolis.
7. Lucy Farrow (1851-1911)
Farrow was born into slavery in Virginia and was the niece of prominent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 1905, she was pastor of a holiness church in Houston, Texas, when Charles Parnham of Bethel Bible College hired her as a housekeeper for her children. Farnham left her church in the care of a friend named William Seymour.
In 1906, Seymour asked Farrow to go to Los Angeles to teach glossalia to the people with whom he prayed for revival. His arrival sparked what became known as the Azusa Street Revival.
His touch filled people with the Holy Spirit, and his ministry demonstrated healing and the power of prayer. From Azusa Street, his ministry spread across the southern United States and into Liberia and West Africa.
8. Louise Woosley (1862-1952)
At the age of twelve, Woosley “was impressed to work in the Lord’s vineyard, for the harvest was plentiful and the laborers few.” When she got married, she hoped that her husband would become a preacher, but he was not willing to do so.
His own vocation grew stronger and stronger. She read the Bible from her, marking each place where a woman is mentioned. At the end of her study, she was “convinced of the fact that God, being no respecter of persons, had not neglected women, but had a great work for them.”
In the absence of a pastor one Sunday, Woosley preached his first sermon. After that, his call became unstoppable. She was ordained in 1889 by Nolin Presbytery, becoming the first woman ordained as a minister in any Presbyterian denomination and the first woman ordained in any Reformed tradition in the United States.
9. Agnes White Diffee (1886-1970)
At sixteen, Diffee became the youngest evangelist in the country. Despite being an effective evangelist, she once said, “I tried to be excused from answering the call to ministry because I was a woman. I wouldn’t have minded if she was a man, but being called a ‘woman preacher’ was more than she could bear.”
In 1919, she was ordained senior pastor of a Nazarene church in Amity, Arkansas, and went on to pastor the First Nazarene in Little Rock. In twenty years, her congregation has grown from fewer than 300 to more than 1,000.
Diffee was a pastor for thirty-five years and once said, “I ask young women to pay attention to heaven to hear God’s call to preach the Gospel.”
10. Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944)
McPherson was already a widow at age nineteen while serving as a missionary in China. She came back to America and remarried, and she was a mother of two at 23 when she was dying of appendicitis and she heard God ask her, “Are you leaving now?” She understood that she could choose the ministry or eternity. She began her ministry as a traveling evangelist.
McPherson and his mother eventually settled in Los Angeles to establish a permanent ministry. McPherson’s church, Angelus Temple, drew 40 million visitors in its first seven years.
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