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:
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)