A Brief History of Women in the Church
Over the last two millennia, women have displayed unyielding devotion to Jesus and the spread of the gospel, even as church politics, cultural pressure, and patriarchy threatened their ministries. The following timeline traces the evolution of women’s roles from the burgeoning opportunities of the early church to the structured debates of the modern era.
The Early Church: Leadership Reined In
Women began their ministries in the early church with what seemed like a wealth of opportunities. In addition to the women mentioned throughout the epistles, there is evidence of women serving as deacons, priests and even bishops. However, this initial momentum slowed as Roman social norms permeated the church. To align with societal expectations and consolidate authority against heresy, leadership roles in house churches and public ministry became increasingly restricted to men. Further aligning with Roman customs, early church fathers began to structure the church with male-only leadership roles. Church historian Alan Kreider relays that by the fourth century, women’s “evangelistic verve and compassionate caregiving, so much a part of the life of the earlier Christians, had been stifled.”[1]
Still, many women served the church as deaconesses. Names listed in historical records and even grave inscriptions provide evidence of women’s continued service in this role.[2] Eventually a series of synods and councils ordered churches to forbid this ministry and the role of deaconess eventually phased out. Women retreated further to the margins of ministry, taking on roles as ascetics and desert mothers called “ammas.”[3]
Confusingly, many church fathers and prominent men of the early centuries revered women for their faithfulness. Church leaders Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa praised esteemed women like Blandina, Junia, Paula, and Olympias.[4] However, the influence of the Greco-Roman society prevailed under philosophers like Aristotle, who perceived women as “weak intellects” who were “rationally and morally unfit to lead.”[5] He even referred to women as “deformed males.”[6] Church father Augustine viewed women as having “no inherent dignity apart from a man.”[7] Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas revived these low views of women as part of the church’s theology of gender.[8]
There was, however, one role in the early church where women could not escape public attention for their faith: martyrdom. While men aspired to roles as priests and bishops, martyrs—both female and male—paid the ultimate sacrifice for allegiance to Jesus. The Church still celebrates three of these martyrs—Blandina, Perpetua and Felicitas—today.[9]
Medieval to Reformation: Virgins to Mothers
From the early church period through the Medieval and Reformation periods, the perception of women in ministry assumed further mixed views. A woman was considered either pious or evil. Her place was in a convent or in a home. Her highest role was that of a virgin or a mother. Under the assumption that women were less capable of controlling sexual desires, medieval society paradoxically revered the celibate life of a nun as spiritually superior to motherhood.[10] These nuns drew attention for their spiritual authority and knowledge of scriptures, often to the disdain of monks and priests.[11]
During the Reformation, Martin Luther was “convinced that monasteries were part of what was wrong with the church,” leading him to find husbands for a convent of nuns, including one who became his wife.[12] This ushered in a new place for women to honor God: in the home.[13]
Amidst the confusion of where a woman could and should serve, heroines of the faith emerged. Writers and spiritual counselors Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich devoted their lives to being anchoresses in small cells attached to the church.[14] Margery Kempe, after years of childbearing, committed to a chaste life of pilgrimage for God.[15] Catherine of Siena, later named a Doctor of the Church alongside Hildegard, was an early advocate for church reform while transforming many lives through her teachings.[16] Three more writers stand out as spokeswoman for women’s participation in theology, study of scripture and teaching: Argula von Grumbach, Katharina Zell, and Anne Hutchinson.[17]
1700 to 2000 in America: Evangelical Feminist Rising
A new day and opportunity for women to publicly minister arrived with the First Great Awakening across England and America in the early 1700s.[18] John Wesley and the Methodists set a new, yet short-lived, precedent for female preachers including Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher and Sarah Mallet, along with Wesley’s mother Susanna Wesley.[19] The Second Great Awakening followed suit with a rise and fall of women’s leadership opportunities.[20] The suppression of women in churches was particularly poignant in the South, as men related female subordination to the subordination of slaves.[21]
Abolition became a catalyst for women to begin to rally for their own rights. One prominent suffrage advocate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 for gender equality and later wrote The Woman’s Bible. Revolutionary for her time, preacher Aimee Semple McPherson founded the first megachurch, Angelus Temple.[22] In 1921, medical doctor and scholar Katherine Bushnell wrote God’s Word to Women, as she was “convinced that the Bible spoke a liberating word to women.”[23] Slowly, mainline churches—beginning with the Wesleyan Methodists and the Salvation Army in the 1860s—moved toward women’s ordination.[24]
The 1960s ushered in a cultural shift toward recognizing women's leadership capabilities.[25] Advocates like Patricia Grundy began to vocalize the marginalization of women in the church and questioned scriptures used to justify this lower status.[26] Author Pamela Cochran describes the beginning of evangelical feminism as “among a group of well-educated, upper-middle-class women (and a few men) who believed that women suffered injustices and discrimination…and the Bible offered a viable solution.”[27]
This initial group split over time into a more progressive view and a more traditional view.[28] Biblical traditionalists, holding to a high view of biblical authority and the use of historical context, eventually formed what is known today as Christians for Biblical Equality.[29] They interpreted restrictions on women in the church and female subordination as “not biblically but culturally conditioned.”[30]
Offering an opposing agenda, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, under the direction of leading evangelicals Wayne Grudem and John Piper, published the Danvers Statement in 1989, attesting that “God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership.”[31] This essentially set two sides to the women in ministry debate for churches to choose from: complementarianism and egalitarianism. After two centuries of church leaders deciding where and if women can serve God, evangelical men established the framework through which a woman can or cannot lead in her church.
Still today each side muddies the perceptions of the other. Complementarians accuse egalitarians of holding a low view of scripture by allowing women to lead.[32] Egalitarians see complementarians upholding the subordination of women as a way to perpetuate the patriarchal traditions that Jesus came to abolish.[33]
Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 226. ↩︎
Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women (New York: Paulist Press, 2022), 106-7. ↩︎
Leanne M Dzubinski and Anneke H. Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church: Their Opportunities and Obstacles Throughout Christian History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 32. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 18; N. T. Wright and Michael Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature and Theology of the First Christians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2019), 525; Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, 122. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 46. ↩︎
Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy (Cape Town, South Africa: The Spiritual Bakery Publications, 2022), 30. ↩︎
Williams, How God Sees Women, 30. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 32. ↩︎
Ibid., 85; Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021), 93. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 107. ↩︎
Ibid., 53. ↩︎
Ibid., 55. ↩︎
Ruth Tucker, Extraordinary Women of Christian History: What We Can Learn From Their Struggles and Triumphs (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016), 36; Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 96. ↩︎
Tucker, Extraordinary Women of Christian History, 46. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 99. ↩︎
Williams, How God Sees Women, 37. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 128. ↩︎
Ibid., 129. ↩︎
Ibid., 148. ↩︎
Ibid., 140. ↩︎
Ibid., 163. ↩︎
Lucy Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Text (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 13. ↩︎
Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 134. ↩︎
Williams, How God Sees Women, 28. ↩︎
Tara Beth Leach, Emboldened: A Vision for Empowering Women in Ministry (Westmont, IL: IVP Books, 2017), 20. ↩︎
Pamela Cochran, Evangelical Feminism: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 8. ↩︎
Cochran, Evangelical Feminism, 188. ↩︎
Ibid., 150. ↩︎
Ibid., 142. ↩︎
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 166. ↩︎
Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, 217. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎