In reading this account, does any reasonable person suppose that Jesus’ mother and the other Marys were not there? Or the great company of women who had ministered to Him?
But we are not left in doubt. Turn to Acts 1:12-14: “Then returned they unto Jerusalem…and when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John….These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren” (emphasis added).
The account goes on: “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place….And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (2:1-4, emphasis added).
Then Peter said: “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy…and on My servants and on My handmaidens I will pour out in those days of My Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (vv. 16-18, emphasis added). Paul proves that prophesying may be considered preaching when he says, “But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification and exhortation, and comfort” (1 Cor. 14:3).
The time has come when men in high places within the church of Christ who seek to shut women out of the pastorate cannot do so with impunity. Today they are taking on themselves a responsibility in the presence of which they ought to tremble.
To an earnest, intelligent and devout element among their brethren they seem to be absolutely frustrating the grace of God. They cannot fail to see how many ministers neither draw men to the gospel feast nor go out into the highways and hedges seeking them. They cannot fail to see that, although the novelty of women’s speaking has worn off, the people rally to hear them as to hear no others, save the most celebrated men of the pulpit and platform; and that it is especially true that the common people hear them gladly.
The plea urged by some theologians that woman is born to one vocation, and one alone, is negatived by her magnificent success as a teacher, a philanthropist, and a physician, by which means she takes the part of foster-mother to myriads of children orphaned or worse than motherless. Their fear that incompetent women may become pastors and preachers should be put to flight by the survival of the church in spite of centuries of the grossest incompetency of men set apart by the laying-on of hands. Their anxiety lest too many women should crowd in is met by the method of choosing a pastor, in which both clergy and people must unite to attest the fitness and acceptability of every candidate.
Some men say it will disrupt the home. They might as well talk of driving back the tides of the sea. The mother-heart will never change.
Woman enters the arena of literature, art, business; becomes a teacher, a physician, a philanthropist; but she is a woman first of all, and cannot deny herself. In all these great vocations she has still been “true to the kindred points of heaven and home”; and everybody knows that, beyond almost any other, the minister is one who lives at home. The firesides of the people are his weekday sanctuary, the pulpit is near his own door, and its publicity is so guarded by the people’s reverence and sympathy as to make it of all others the place least inharmonious with woman’s character and work.
When will blind eyes be opened to see the immeasurable losses the church sustains by not claiming for her altars these loyal, earnest-hearted daughters, who, rather than fighting the system, are going into other lines of work or taking their commission from the evangelistic department of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union? Or are they willing that women should go to the lowly and forgotten, but not to the affluent and powerful? Are they willing that women should baptize and administer the sacrament in India, but not at the elegant altars of Christendom?
The National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union has departments of evangelistic work, of Bible readings, of gospel work for railroad employees, soldiers, sailors and lumbermen; of prison, jail and police-station work. Each of these departments is managed by a woman called a national superintendent, who has an assistant in nearly every state and territory, and she, in turn, in every local union.
These make an aggregate of several thousands of women who are regularly studying and expounding God’s Word to the multitude and who are engaged in church evangelism. Nearly all this “great host” who now “publish the glad tidings” are quite beyond the watch-care of the church, not because they wish to be so, but because she who has warmed them into life and nurtured them into activity is afraid of her own gentle, earnest-hearted daughters.
The spectacle is both anomalous and pitiful. It ought not to continue. Let the church call in these banished ones and correlate their sanctified activities with her own mighty work, giving them the same official recognition it gives to men, and they will gladly take their places under her supervision.
The time is hastening, the world grows smaller; we can compass it a thousand-fold more readily than could any previous generation.We are able to go around the globe more quickly and comfortably than in any previous age.
Women can do this just as easily as men. Then, let us send them forth full-panoplied; let us sound in their ears the command to take authority, given by the church’s highest tribunal, that untrammelled and free they may lift up the standard of Christ’s cross on every shore, and fulfill the wonderful and blessed prophecy in Psalm 68:11: “The Lord giveth the word. The women that publish the tidings are a great host” (ASV).
Frances Willard (1839-1898) was a well-known lecturer, writer and educator. She became president of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1879.
Janet Perez Eckles 
Shawn Akers 
Abby Trivett 
