Women As Local Preachers
In early British Methodism, a number of women served as Local Preachers (the heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede is represented as one). Methodism itself was subject to schism giving rise, in England, to several Methodist churches including the Primitive Methodists and the Bible Christians as well as the mainstream Wesleyan Methodist Church. The separated denominations went much further than the Wesleyans in making use of women as Local Preachers and as ordained ministers. In Wesleyan Methodism from 1803, women were restricted to addressing women-only meetings - a ban that was not lifted until 1910. Many women, such as Sarah Mallet, however, ignored this ban. From 1918 on, Wesleyan Methodism recruited and deployed women Local Preachers on exactly the same basis as men.
Methodist reunion in England did not take place until 1933 at which time the ordination of women in the separated denominations ceased until 1971. But Methodism has always acknowledged and valued the ministry of women, a Wesleyan influence going back to Susanna Wesley herself.
Read more about this topic: Methodist Local Preacher
Famous quotes containing the words women, local and/or preachers:
“I have always found women difficult. I don’t really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.”
—Barbara Cartland (b. 1901)
“His farm was “grounds,” and not a farm at all;
His house among the local sheds and shanties
Rose like a factor’s at a trading station.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his black wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)