The Call to Preach

Chapter 1 defines the call to preach as containing two aspects, inward and outward, and identifies a gender gap or difference in how men and women can claim their call to preach. By identifying the central problem of gender inequality, this chapter establishes the fundamental concern of this book as a significant issue of patriarchy and ecclesiastical authority. Next, the chapter reviews relevant scholarship in homiletics and history of preaching to contextualize this issue. Drawing on social theorists, obstacles are identified and defined that have formed and maintained the dominant narrative limiting women preachers and their voice and agency. Utilizing feminist hermeneutics, this chapter argues that the historical women preachers of this work and their power of resistance still hold valuable lessons for people struggling to claim their call to preach today.

Claiming the Call to Preach

Claiming the Call to Preach traces the history of call through the nineteenth century, at a time when the question of women’s call to preach, although seemingly fixed by ecclesial authority and cultural convention, was being raised by courageous women in different settings, through different genres, and to different effect. This book recovers the neglected narrative of women’s call to preach through the historical accounts and rhetorical witness of four groundbreaking women preachers: Jarena Lee, Frances Willard, Louisa Woosley, and Florence Spearing Randolph. Scholarship has been written on women who have preached in history, but not on how they managed to claim their call to preach despite the restrictions of gender inequality. This project explores the question: how did women claim their call to preach? Through feminist hermeneutics, this book examines call narratives which used rhetorical strategies to articulate effective arguments for women’s call to the preaching ministry of the church. In response, these women received endorsement of their claims to pulpit places, engaged in sacred persuasive speech, and preached as ministers of the sacred office. This project examines women’s call to preach—the history and theology, rhetoric and practice, struggle and success, and the necessary work of interpretation and re-interpretation through call narratives. This book concludes with practical applications for contemporary homiletics, showing how historical tradition can be re-invented in order to give women—and anyone struggling with their call to preach—rhetorical tactics and narrative scripts in order to make effective claims to preach today.

History and Theology of Call

Chapter 2 examines the scriptural text through word definition and interpretation and traces the concept of call throughout, with attention to nuances of meaning. Next, this chapter explores the theological tradition of how call has been interpreted and articulated from the time of Jesus to the nineteenth century, in theological doctrines of call and vocation and in ecclesial practice and social convention. By identifying theological themes of call throughout Church history—from “sacrifice” in the Early Church to “monasticism” in the Middle Ages, from “priesthood of all believers” during the Protestant Reformation to “spiritual revelation” and “extraordinary call” of the Revival–Social Gospel era—this chapter traces the development of the institutionalized call from inclusive to more exclusive of women preachers. Then, in the rhetorical and homiletical witness of the church, this chapter uncovers how a prejudiced trope has restricted women’s call and place in the pulpit. And, finally, it reveals how women utilized rhetorical techniques and tactics in order to challenge convention and claim their call to preach.

Florence Spearing Randolph

Chapter 6 surveys the life and pastoral ministry of Florence Spearing Randolph. As a black female preacher, Randolph faced issues of gender and racial inequality throughout her life in southern and northern states as she sought to advocate for reform of the extreme class divisions of the Gilded Age. As a proponent of the Social Gospel movement and an ordained and installed minister, she joined scripture with cultural reform for impactful messages. Through an analysis of her sermons, including Antipathy to Women Preachers and Looking Backward and Forward, this chapter investigates her perspective on gender roles, women’s ordination, and race relations. This chapter considers her call narrative and her use of pulpit rhetoric in communicating her position as a minister within the black church, summoning women to answer their call to preach as ordained ministers and claim the power of the pulpit.

Enfleshing the Spirit through Avatar Performance: Objecthood as Resistance in Women Preachers—Rachel Baker, Jarena Lee, and Florence Spearing Randolph

In this article, I take up Uri McMillan’s work in Embodied Avatars to rethink the subject–object relationship in women’s preaching. In performance art, the subject (the artist) fashions herself into an object (the art). I stretch the performance art genre to include preachers Rachel Baker, Jarena Lee, and Florence Spearing Randolph, arguing that these women have strategically performed objecthood to navigate gendered and racialized constraints in Christian proclamation. Examining these three women preachers through the lens of performing objecthood opens up theological understandings of how the Spirit works in a world marked by social sin (sexism and racism). Contrary to theologians who describe submission to the Spirit as self-effacement, I show how submission to the Spirit can counter worldly authorities, while enabling women preachers to transform perceptions of gender and race in a liberative way.

Towards a New Homiletic

Feminism’s contribution to homiletics so far has arguably been restricted to exploring gender difference in preaching. In 2014, however, Jennifer Copeland identified a need not merely to ‘include women “in the company of preachers” but to craft a new register for the preaching event’. This article considers what that new register might be and how it might be taught in the academy. It defines preaching as ‘the art of engaging the people of God in their shared narrative by creatively and hospitably inviting them into an exploration of biblical text, by means of which, corporately and individually, they might encounter the divine’ and proposes that in both the Church and the Academy, women’s voices are suppressed by a rationalist hegemony. For the stories of women to be heard, a new homiletic is needed, in which would-be preachers first encounter themselves, then the Bible as themselves and finally their congregation in communality. Findings of researchers in practical preaching discover that women preachers are being influenced by feminist methodology, while the teaching of preaching is not. In order to achieve a hospitable preaching space, it is proposed that the Church and the Academy work together towards a new homiletic.

Syrian Women With A Mission: Preaching The Bible And Building The Protestant Church

As counterparts to the women writers of the Nahda, Syrian Biblewomen (women evangelists) pursued equally subversive activities as they preached spiritual revival in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian homes and in rural areas far beyond the elite Protestant circles of Beirut. This final chapter pieces together the elusive history of these women preachers who were members of the American mission’s Evangelical Churches but turned to the female-led British Syrian Mission to support their preaching vocations. This research considers how the Victorian era’s conception of “woman’s work for woman” manifested itself in Syria. The chapter introduces another layer of complexity in the Syrian missionary encounter, which brought together American Protestants, Syrians of all religious backgrounds, and members of other Western missionary societies.