OVERCOMING the Obstacles to Women in Ministry

Obstacle # 6: The challenge of my call to be a senior pastor.

As we started the church in 1990, we announced I would be the senior pastor and my husband would assist me. Some leaders talked behind my back and said it would never work. Others laughed and thought I was crazy.

Amazingly, I found some of the most vocal objectors to women being pastors are women. Just recently a lady approached me at a conference I was attending and asked forgiveness for judging me. Her opinion was that women could not pastor because they were too emotional. While sitting in a workshop taught by J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine and author of the book 10 Lies the Church Tells Women (Charisma House), God told her she was in error and must ask for forgiveness. I was shocked she felt that way, as she had never shown any negative behavior toward me.

Several months after I embarked in this senior pastor adventure, a man came in my office to say he loved the church, but he could not sit under a woman pastor. I asked him what he feared, and he became very unsettled. I felt the problem was not me as the female, but rather his acceptance of his being a man. Could I rob his manhood by being a woman in leadership over him? This was my question to him. Ultimately he decided to stay, and today that man is one of my main church leaders.

A few church members made comments about the need for a man to fill the pulpit. I heard things such as, "Bill has such a pastor's heart." I wondered what kind of heart they thought I had!

There was continual pressure to give up my position. Words have power over us, and eventually I began to entertain the suggestions. I just wanted to do God's best. I had started the church, but I began thinking maybe someone else should continue it. I actually began to believe a man could do this better and quietly implemented a search for a replacement, little by little convincing myself God wanted a man leading our congregation.

During this time of deluded thinking, an evangelist came to our church to minister. At one service the power of God was strong and people began to prostrate themselves on the floor. Feeling the leading of the Holy Spirit, I laid down directly behind our pulpit and immediately God spoke to me: "You have not treasured the pulpit I have given you. Who are you to give it to someone else?"

Instantly I realized gender was not an issue with God. Never again would I take lightly the divine purpose He had for my life.