Three American Women in Ministry

Abstract

Despite the marginalization of their voices and the trivialization of their importance, women have always been involved in the Church’s ministry, and many of them have represented creative new ways of living out the gospel in their own time and their own context. In the history of the church, one can point to Mary Magdalene as the “apostle to the apostles,” the many unnamed women of the first centuries who were among the church’s most effective evangelizers, Hilda of Whitby, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich in the Middle Ages, Catherine of Siena in the Renaissance, and Marie de l’Incarnation, Louise de Marillac and Elizabeth Seton in the modern period. To this list of faithful and innovative women in the church’s history, we offer here reflections on the lives of three contemporary American women, all of whom have contributed fresh understandings of ministry, not only to the mission of the local church in the United States, but also to the mission of the church throughout the world.