WOMEN PREACHERS
The publication of Called to Preach – Sermons by Salvationist Women continues a long legacy of preaching by Salvation Army women. Colonel Margaret hay, who in 2000 won The Times preacher of the year Award – the first woman to do so – writes for All the World about The Salvation Army’s history of women orators
fire
IT’S a ‘fire in the bones’ thing, the tradition of women preaching that Catherine Booth, co-Founder of the Salvation Army, began. The sparks began to fly when, in a letter to Dr David Thomas, a Congregational minister whose sermon had implied women’s inferiority to men, the 21-year-old Catherine wrote: ‘Permit me, my dear sir, to ask whether you have ever made the subject of women’s equality as a being, the matter of calm investigation and thought. If not, I would, with all deference suggest it as a subject well worth the exercise of your brain ...’ The flame flickered in a letter to her husband, William, on his 26th birthday: ‘If God has given her the ability why should not woman persuade the vacillating, instruct and counsel the penitent, and pour out her soul in prayer for the sinners?’ And the fire leapt high in her 1859 pamphlet ‘Female Ministry’, which defended the principle of women’s right to preach the gospel. Finally, principle and practice were joined when – in the north-eastern English town of Gateshead on Pentecost Sunday 1860 – Catherine preached with persuasive power on the text ‘Be filled with the Spirit’. The burning coal touched Catherine and William’s elder daughter Kate’s lips, too. Witness this striking girl at 17 speaking in 1876 alongside her father at the Christian Mission’s annual conference in Whitechapel, then campaigning to crowds throughout England. At 22 she was storming Paris for God, determined – despite her hesitant French – to use neither notes nor interpreter, and addressing her mocking, mimicking audiences as ‘citizens and comrades’. The blaze spread over the globe and across generations, firing the spirits of women like Adjutant Florence Birks, assistant officer at Timaru Corps in New Zealand’s far south. Her Bible message of 17 September 1927 on Jesus’ parable of the great feast, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, began by ‘briefly outlining world history so far as God’s dealings are 20 | ALL THE WORLD |
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