What did I learn from Mother’s Day growing up? That women belong in the pulpit – and in leadership elsewhere. Witness the lives and ministries of Reverend Anita Osgood Kenyon, Dr. Edith Blumhofer, and Reverend Wanda Carter.
Anita Osgood Kenyon
Growing up, I don’t ever remember hearing a man preach on Mother’s Day. If we had any Mother’s Day tradition, it was that Mom was in the pulpit. In our home church, the Reverend Anita Osgood Kenyon brought forth the Word. She was a favorite preacher and Bible teacher for many of us and not just on the second Sunday of May.
I remember she faced opposition to being in the pulpit – something about women were to be submissive to men – to which she would gently reply that her understanding was that Scriptures enjoined her to be submissive only to her husband, not to all men. I’m not sure that quieted the complaints, but having grown up in war-torn China, she was used to facing more highly testosterone-fueled threats with her gentle spirit.
Her words from the Lord were not just for the women in the congregation; they were for men and women alike. Besides the prepared teachings, she frequently had a message in interpretation or prophecy from her bench at the organ. And God used her to train and mentor many of the male cohort in her midst, including me. All four of her children, male and female alike, went into the ministry, in no small part because of her influence.
Her ministry ordination faced obstacles in the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that had, at least at some levels, been open to women in ministry right from its founding. But there were church officials in New Jersey that had gotten in the slow lane on recognizing women ministers – translation: they pulled over into a rest area on the Jersey Turnpike and parked it for a generation.
It wasn’t until 1981 that they finally opened the doors once again and ordained my mother at the annual New Jersey Council. Quite a caravan of supporters drove up from South Jersey to witness their pastor being prayed over by the elders.
The family heritage and the broader church world
Our daughter, Hope Gonzalez, followed her grandmother in the same path two years ago, one of four fifth-generation woman ministers in our family. Hope’s line goes all the way back to her great-great-grandmother, a lay Methodist evangelist in New York. We don’t know too much of Great Grandma Lockwood’s story, except that she received the Pentecostal experience around 1903 before the outpouring at Azusa Street and all our female ministry line followed her into the Pentecostal movement.
Grandma Lockwood’s daughter, Edith Belle, went as a single missionary to Asia. Local unrest required her to exit the field after two years, a leave that gave her opportunity to meet her husband, whereupon she and Howard Osgood went back together to China, where my mother was born.
The debate over the role of women in the broader church world has been long and arduous, a debate that continues to stir up much heat over whether women should be in ministry and ministry leadership, and whether marriages should be complementarian or egalitarian. For what it’s worth, I answer “yes” on the ministry questions and stand fully in the egalitarian camp, on what I believe are firm theological foundations.
I find the general historic openness (there are exceptions) to women in ministry in the Pentecostal and Holiness traditions a fine talking point when connecting with denominations who pride themselves on ordaining women but have only come lately to their openness. We have at least fifteen women ministers (both living and passed) in my family, I like to crow.
But it is more than just a conversation piece. I passionately believe the words of the prophet Joel and echoed by the Apostle Peter that God’s Spirit has been poured out on all peoples, and that women and men alike are called by God to proclaim the Good News.
I walk into a church and look to see whether women – and persons of color – are visible in ministry up front as well as on the website. I do the same when I see advertisements for ministry conferences and scan the photos of such gatherings. I have been mentored by women as well as men and have mentored both. I know that whom God has called, humankind must recognize.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life researching and writing on the subject. You can read what I’ve unearthed in the published version of my doctoral dissertation, Ethics in the Age of the Spirit: Race, Women, War, and the Assemblies of God. It’s thick, I admit, but the documentation is all there for you to parse through and evaluate for yourself.
Edith Blumhofer
One of my mentors in that research task was Dr. Edith Blumhofer (shown in picture). She was a Harvard educated historian who sometimes faced opposition from those who questioned her qualifications to be teaching based on gender or for her honesty about her documented observations on her community of faith. For so many of us, she was a hero perhaps precisely because of her integrity in research and writing. We are deeply indebted to her to this day.
When I met her, Dr. Blumhofer was on my board. I had become campus pastor at the University Christian Fellowship (Chi Alpha) at Southwest Missouri State University in 1984. She was an adjunct professor at the various Assemblies of God schools of higher education in Springfield, Missouri, having difficulty attaining tenure. She knew she was swimming upstream in a male-dominated world, but she also knew that the Pentecostal movement was born with the prophecies of Joel and Peter in its DNA.
She invited me to guest lecture on my research in her classes. And she became my ad hoc research mentor as we worked on separate projects in the Assemblies of God Archives (now the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center). Truth be told, she helped me find sources she was privier to than I. And she encouraged me to follow my heart in the unpopular research I was conducting.
Later she became a history professor at Wheaton College, a prolific writer, and director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. In her writings, she chronicled the amazing ministry roles that women have played over the past century and a half – women such as Evangelist Carrie Judd Montgomery, Missionary Alice E. Luce, Evangelist Zelma E. Argue, Reverend Aimee Semple McPherson (who founded the Foursquare denomination), and Pastor Marie Burgess Brown.
Wanda Carter
My own research led me to study the lives of many other women in ministry, including Reverend Wanda Carter, a church planter, pastor, and chaplain. I had known Pastor Carter when she was a graduate student in Missouri and later preached for her when she was pastoring in Phillipsburg, along the upper Delaware River in northwest New Jersey.
Rev. Carter’s roots were in the Church of God in Christ. Early on, she connected with the Assemblies of God, where she spent all her ministry career. For the most part, she led an active ministry of pastoring and hospital chaplaincy work quite away from the limelight.
But she was destined to add the role of advocate. She became a “defender for equality and justice, because she directly aligns her position to the will of God,” to quote the Reverend Zollie Smith, former executive director of Assemblies of God U.S. Missions. When the General Council, the national governing body of the Assemblies of God, approved an historic resolution in 1989 denouncing racism, Pastor Carter convinced the Council to adjust the language to call racism “sin”, language the denomination has continued to recognize as a signature statement, a prophetic call.
In an interview in 2020, the Reverend Doug Clay, General Superintendent of the U.S. Assemblies of God, asked her what she could say to him about making room for people of color to minister in the denomination. Pastor Carter’s response was “honesty” – honesty about “what has been going on and what is going on now. We can’t continue to deceive ourselves into thinking things that are not helpful. God created all of us in His image.” Attitudes of differentiating based on color must be rooted out. Hiding behind lies and falsehoods are anti-God. “We have to tell the truth,” she said.
As the Spirit led
The thing about women like Pastor Carter, Dr. Blumhofer, and my mother is that they knew that God had called them to their ministries. It was in their bones. And so, they lived knowing that, come what may, the Spirit was their guide, not the preferences of men. Each in her own way – Pastor Carter at church councils, Dr. Blumhofer in academic circles, my mother in the local church – challenged the culturally-encrusted proclivities of their day with what the Word and the Spirit had to say.
My mother and Dr. Blumhofer recently went to their eternal rewards (2017 and 2020, respectively); Pastor Carter is still active in prayer ministry as a retiree. But they and so many others like them have influenced a new generation of women in ministry who know that their work is not merely some kind of “woke” thing. Long before the current debates over women’s rights, women began to declare “Thus saith the Lord,” as the Spirit led, to all who would have ears to hear.
I am offering a bonus article – “There is Far More to Life than We Can See,” reflecting on the life and ministry vision of my mother, Anita Osgood Kenyon. The article is available to all current subscribers and to those who subscribe no later than May 31, 2024. You can sign up here for free.
For a link to the full video of Reverend Wanda Carter with Reverend Doug Clay and for citations on Dr. Edith Blumhofer, check out my resource page.
I miss Anita. She was exceptional. People come into our life for a reason. She mentored me when I needed advice. I can still see her smile!
I knew you were close, my mother and you. Thank you!