Editor’s note: Free Methodist delegates at the 1974 General Conference unanimously approved a resolution “giving women equal status with men in the ministry of the church.” Bishop Elmer Parsons subsequently ordained Pennsylvania Pastor Jean Parry as the denomination’s first female elder on July 19, 1974. As this year marks 50 years of women’s ordination as elders in the Free Methodist Church USA, Advocates for Free Methodist Women in Leadership (AWL) accepted the invitation to share reflections on this historic anniversary.
Rev. Dr. Jill Richardson:
In 2009, we vacationed in Nova Scotia, arriving there via ferry across the Bay of Fundy. Fundy is famous for its massive tides, holding the world record of 53.6 feet. Boats lie the depth of entire apartment complexes below their piers, awaiting the water so that fishing crews can board and go out — mercy on the people who finds themselves stuck on the beach under those cliffs when the tide heads in. One evening, we ate dinner overlooking a marina of fishing boats far below. They all lifted in unison with the water, a colorful aquatic ballet rising to bow before our applause. Never have I better understood the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
In our work at Advocates for FM Women in Leadership (AWL), we find that truth at the core of our goals and dreams. We all have a choice to live in fear of the tide not being enough or to believe in its abundance. What will we do with that choice?
We also know how important it is to chart both the statistics regarding women leaders in the FMC and their experiences. Both are necessary for a full picture. Stats tell one story, and ministry lived on the ground can paint an expanded reality. How far have we come since 1974 when the first woman, Jean Parry, was ordained as a Free Methodist elder?
At General Conference 2023, we celebrated a statistic — 50 percent of conference ministerial candidates (CMCs) are women! Yes, let’s rejoice! Finally, our pastoral team has the potential to reflect the actual population. Half of the people in the world are women, remember. That’s the way our staffing should look too in all areas.
There are other numbers, however, that we need to place beside it. First, according to Rev. K.M. Eccles, database manager for the Free Methodist Church USA’s World Ministries Center, “For all lead pastor appointments made to local churches in 2024, there is a 17.3% chance that the appointment would go to a woman, up from 15.1% in 2022.” It’s good that we are gathering this kind of data! However, from the research of Dr. Christy Mesaros-Winckles, we also know that in 1997 — 23 years after our first ordination — 16 percent of senior pastors were women.
Now, a 2% increase in two years (2022–24) is good news, and we can be grateful. At the same time, we have to put these numbers together. One, 50% of our CMCs are women, and two, this 2024 figure of 17.3 percent isn’t far off from the 1997 number of 16 percent. In other words, the advancement of women into senior clergy positions has been plateaued for nearly 30 years. We went from 0 to 16 in the first 23 years of ordaining women and haven’t moved the dial since — almost no progress while the available pool of women has increased to half of the people in the pipeline to ordination. What shall we realistically tell these eager, called women about their future in the FMCUSA?
In our experience, several reasons for this discrepancy between Free Methodist expressed values and hard facts have been offered.
● “The church wasn’t ready for a woman.”
● “We couldn’t find a qualified woman.”
● “Men who are providing for a family need the job more.”
● “They had someone else in mind.”
● “She didn’t have enough confidence/leadership qualities/gentleness/assertiveness/compassion/toughness/experience …” You get it.
These “reasons” are easily refuted. More than arguing individual cases, however, we need to recognize the difference between the Bay of Fundy and a piece of pie. When we have a scarcity mindset — a belief that there is only so much to go around, be it money, positions, or skills — we find reasons to consolidate resources with those who already have them. We become conservative instead of liberal in the classical sense — hoarding reserves rather than generously distributing them. When we subconsciously fear replacement or obsolescence, we refuse to take part in the great tide lifting everyone. We treat ministry like pie, doling out miserly slices to people we already know who, not coincidentally, look and think like we do. We wouldn’t even consider handing half of our own piece to someone else.
The truth, demonstrated again and again, is that the saying is true — the same tide does lift everyone — when we are willing to let it surge in with all its Holy Spirit power. When we let go of the fear that there aren’t enough opportunities, information, or income to go around, we might find that God unleashes ministry potential beyond our imagination in places we hadn’t considered.
The problem with equity for women in ministry isn’t lack of resources — it’s lack of imagination.
The numbers tell us something else, too. They confirm that the lack of representation for women in lead positions isn’t caused by individual churches or board members. When nothing changes in 30 years, you have an organization-wide problem. It’s an issue of entrenched mindsets and culture, not a few one-off outliers. The numbers would tell a very different story if that was the case.
As Dr. Mesaros-Winckles continues, “Culture develops when a group accepts an idea and uses it to shape organizational values. Those values shape the lives and relationships of group members.” Lives are discipled toward valuing women equally when our culture reflects that value in its experience and its statistics, not just its ideas.
Women are blessed to have many, many allies in leadership in the FMCUSA. Yet caring about our issues isn’t going to solve them. If a patient came to my husband in great pain and my husband told him, “You have a tumor that has to be removed. I’m really sympathetic. I’m right there with you feeling that this is terrible,” the patient would rightly ask if the good doctor was going to do anything about it. If he had no plan to take action to save the patient’s life, my husband would be a dreadful physician.
The same is true for men in leadership who consider themselves allies to women in ministry. Here is the hard truth — if you’re not actively working to help, you’re not an ally. Men, especially men with power, that’s the one thing I wish you’d understand. If a problem is part of the system, it’s not going away with good intentions and doing no harm yourself. Sometimes, we have to do some soul searching about the status quo, because when we benefit from it, we’re invested in retaining it. Invested people have to work to get out of the current that carries them naturally toward the results we’ve always gotten from the input we’ve always given. If there is no tangible, intentional work done, we will lose many of those eager, smart, called women who want to minister but will not find a place in our system.
Even when you consider yourself an ally, you may be a person who thinks in terms of pie pieces rather than a Bay of Fundy.
Can you imagine one of those small fishing boats we saw that afternoon trying to keep all the water to itself? Clutching its lines around it in fear that there wouldn’t be enough water for it to reach its dock if it shared with all the other boats? The powerful tides of Fundy could never be denied. They are created by a Mighty God to lift everywhere, swelling everyone upward where they can all enjoy its abundance in community. Fearing there will not be enough water is like fearing there will not be enough sunlight in the sky. It’s as silly as fearing that sharing equally with women (and BIPOC) will decrease any one person’s opportunity in God’s kingdom.
Fifty years after the ordination of Jean Parry, we still have work to do. We’ve come forward — now let’s rise upward.
Rev. Dr. Denise Abston:
As I look back on my call to preach and pastor in 1995, I ponder why it took nine years for me to be ordained. It seemed that every jot and tittle had to be reviewed multiple times. It wasn’t because I didn’t have an advocate who asked me, “What do you think about the ordained ministry? About becoming an elder?” Was it because I was the first woman to be ordained in over 100+ years in the Mid-America Conference of the Free Methodist Church?
I was ordained on May 1, 2004, by Bishop Leslie L. Krober.
A male friend of mine asked me, “Why are you still on your soapbox for women in ministry?” I believe, even today, the church has some particular [albeit a bias] criteria that is hard for women to meet or overcome.
As I reflect on my journey toward ordination, I went on a quest to find out if John Wesley ever endorsed women to preach or lead. In a paper that I wrote for Rev. Dr. Amy Oden (the niece of Rev. Dr. Thomas Oden) titled “The Extraordinary Call,” John Wesley’s good friend and correspondent Mary Bosanquet reasoned that there may be some women who have an extraordinary call to preach. In 1771, she wrote a letter to John Wesley wherein she stated six objections and answered the same. Her letter typified the writing style of Wesley of asking questions and then responding to the questions.
He responded to her on June 13, 1771: “I think the strength of the cause rests there, on your having an Extraordinary Call. So I am persuaded, as every one of our Lay Preachers: otherwise I could not countenance this preaching at all. It is plain to me that the whole Word of God termed Methodism is an extraordinary dispensation of His Providence. Therefore I do not wonder if several things occur therein which do not fall under ordinary rules of discipline” (p 143 in John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism, Paul Wesley Chilcote, 1991).
Sarah Crosby, a woman who worked closely with Mary Bosanquet, became well-known, and her services were in high demand. She would commonly hold as many as four meetings a day and address as many as 500 people who came to hear her. She traveled with Wesley and then set out herself to preach over a three-week period. On one particular occasion while having dinner, she met John Pawson, who was one of three preachers from Leeds. He told her that she was welcome to preach at his preaching house in Leeds if she wanted. “Sarah Crosby’s reputation as a remarkable preacher soon preceded her wherever she went and her indefatigable public labors led Taft to exclaim ‘this apostolic woman was an itinerant, yea, a field preacher’” (Chilcote, 152–155).
In 1787, Wesley wrote a letter to the Manchester Conference regarding Sarah Mallett. He told the conference, “We give the right hand of fellowship to Sarah Mallet, and have no objection to her being a preacher in our connexion, so long as she preaches Methodist doctrines, and attends to our discipline” (“Women as Preachers: Evangelical Precedents,” Donald W. Dayton and Lucille Sider, Christianity Today 19:4-7, May 23, 1975).
Knowing that Wesley approved of women preachers who have an extraordinary call on their lives, can we follow his example? Surely, we consider men’s calls in the same way — as extraordinary? Let us check our own biases and choose to rise with the tide of the Holy Spirit.
About the Authors
Rev. Dr. Jill Richardson pastors Real Hope Community Church in suburban Chicago. Her doctorate is in “Church Leadership in a Changing Context,” with a focus on the next generation and preaching. She has written or contributed to eight books, and her articles have appeared in leading national magazines and websites. Her tagline is “Reframed: Picturing Faith with the Next Generation,” and her passion is to work with the next generation to create a healthy church for the 21st century. She’s also a writer, speaker, and (fairly) intrepid traveler. You can find her work or contact her at jillmrichardson.com.
Rev. Dr. Denise Abston brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the Central Region Conference as conference administrator. She was the first female ordained in the more than 100-year history of what was the Mid-America Conference and served as lead pastor for four churches in Oklahoma as well as in many assistant roles. A member of both the conference MEG/MAC and the Board of Administration, she has also served as the assistant to the superintendent for several years. She received her Doctor of Christian Counseling degree from Omega Bible Institute and Seminary as well as a Master of Arts in Leadership in Ministry degree from Greenville University.