Silent Women

Silent Women

1 Corinthians 14:33b-35

            Paul doesn’t leave much room for misinterpretation here.  Women are to keep silent in church.  They are not to speak at all. Paul also says if women want to know anything they should “ask their husbands at home,” for it is “shameful for a woman to speak in church.”  This passage has been used by the patriarchal church for centuries to deny women the right to be ordained and to preach.  If a woman believes she has been called by God to a preaching ministry, all the “church fathers” have to do is point to Paul’s words in Corinthians to deny her the right.  How could she possibly be called by God when Paul says she is to keep silent? 

            To say that these words have caused trouble in the church is an understatement.  Paul said some wonderful things to the early churches, but many people believe this isn’t one of them.  How can the church deny women the right to preach if they feel God’s call to do so?  The only possible argument is to claim that God wouldn’t do such a thing, and that gets into dangerous territory.  Where does anyone get the right to say what God can or cannot do?

            This is the story of a remarkable woman who changed her husband’s mind about women speaking in church, and by doing so changed the history of the church.

            William Booth was a Methodist minister in England in the mid-nineteenth century.  Ordained in 1858, he was assigned to be an evangelist.  This was the work to which he felt called, and for three years he was allowed to do it.  At the church conference in 1861 (Methodists hold yearly conferences to reach decisions) his future was discussed at length. Was he to be allowed to continue his work, or would he be sent to a church as its pastor?  Apparently there was some dissatisfaction with his method of evangelism.  This may have had to do with the fact that he was reaching out to people the church didn’t approve of and trying to bring them into Methodist congregations.  It could also have been, at least in part, jealousy over his success.

            Whatever the reason, the vote went against him.  He looked to his wife Catherine, seated in the gallery for her reaction.  She did something unprecedented.  She stood and exclaimed, “No, Never!”  It was unheard of for anyone in the gallery to speak, let alone a woman; yet she did.  Booth bowed courteously to the chair, walked to the gallery stairs down which Catherine had come, embraced her, and with her by his side, left the conference and the Methodist Church.

            Catherine Booth’s history of speaking in church had begun approximately a year earlier.  On Pentecost Sunday, 1860, she sat in her husband’s church listening to him deliver the morning sermon.  She heard God’s voice calling her to speak.  She also heard the devil telling her that she’d make a fool of herself.  As she said later, the devil “overdid himself.”  She realized she had never been willing to be a fool for Christ.  Now was her chance.

            She approached the front of the church as Booth finished, and said, “I want to say a word.”  Astonished, he turned to the congregation and said, “My dear wife wishes to speak.”  And speak she did, telling the congregation that she had been disobeying God’s call for several months.  When she finished, Booth stood and announced, “My wife will preach this evening.”

            William Booth, with his wife’s help, went on to found The Salvation Army.  Catherine Booth is referred to as the Army’s Mother.  From the beginning of the denomination, women who felt God’s call to preach were ordained to do so.  Throughout the history of the Salvation Army women have answered God’s call to preaching ministry, my mother and two of my aunts included.

            I think Paul got this one wrong.