Abstract
The issue of religious authority is one of the main reasons why women have been allowed to participate in Pentecostal churches, and why they have been limited. Women are granted access to ministering authority, but not governing authority. Charles Barfoot and Gerald Sheppard have noted the presence of these two types of authority to be operative within Pentecostalism and have associated them with Max Weber’s typology of prophet and priest. However, in their attempt to describe the history of Pentecostal women in ministry with these categories, Barfoot and Sheppard present the paradigm as one of displacement rather than coexistence. The result is a problematic and misleading account of Pentecostal women in ministry. However, the issue is not Weber’s categories, but how they employ them. The purpose of this article is to utilize the distinction between prophet and priest to differentiate between two types of ecclesial functions and their concomitant religious authority, rather than to differentiate between two periods of Pentecostalism. A brief history of Pentecostal women in ministry is presented, wherein examples are offered of how women in the Church of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Assemblies of God, and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel operated in the prophetic realms with a ministering authority, but were largely prohibited from the priestly realms and its ruling authority. As these examples demonstrate, the history of Pentecostal women in ministry is told best when the simultaneous existence of the prophetic and priestly functions are recognized, and ministering authority and ruling authority are connected to these two functions.
Highlights
The issue of authority is one of the main reasons why women have been allowed to participate in Pentecostal churches, and why they have been limited
Understanding authority as legitimated power, Pentecostal women gain access to a realm of religious authority because of their experience of Spirit baptism. Because of their experience of Spirit baptism Pentecostal women are granted an authority to minister in certain ways since the evidence of the Spirit in their lives legitimates their function in these areas
According to some Pentecostals, Spirit baptism does not impute to women the religious authority to hold ruling offices
Summary
―We know of no Movement where women of ability and filled with the Holy Ghost, have been much more highly honored or given much more freedom than among us‖ [1]. While Weber’s categories of prophet and priest are helpful in distinguishing between two types of ministerial functions and their concomitant claims to authority, Barfoot and Sheppard’s utilization of them to distinguish two different eras of Pentecostalism is problematic That is, in their attempt to describe the history of Pentecostal women in ministry with these categories, Barfoot and Sheppard present the paradigm as one of displacement rather than coexistence. Their presentation of ―Prophetic Pentecostalism‖ is too optimistic with respect to the ―equality‖ that women had during the early formation of Pentecostalism Their focus on one female minister (Aimee Semple McPherson) and one Pentecostal denomination (Assemblies of God) to substantiate their claims of two periods of Pentecostalism is too limited of an approach and does not take into consideration historical differences among other Pentecostal denominations. In order to relay more accurately the history of Pentecostal women in ministry I will focus below on the two types of religious authority operating within Pentecostalism—which can be associated with the prophetic and the priestly—and demonstrate that both were present from the very inception of the movement
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