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The article was long, this is the
part I was referring to. Or part of it at any rate....
"Where women had female role models,
they were more apt to pursue ministry. For instance, in the International Church
of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by Aimee McPherson, fully two thirds of the
ministers were women, but after her death, the place of women in leadership has
had a steady decline. By the late seventies, the percentage had dropped to
42%,(31) and it fell to 38% (and still declining) in
1993.(32) This is still relatively high. The Assemblies of
God was able on some level to staunch the loss of women in their ranks, actually
posting slight increases in the 1990s. In 2000, 16.4% of Assemblies of God
ministers were women.(33)
In the development of the Oneness Pentecostal movement, women played key roles. A fairly extensive list of women who were important in the formation of the apostolic movement in the twentieth century is offered in Thetus Tenney�s �The Ministry of Women in the Oneness Movement.�(34) Like Trinitarian Pentecostals, Oneness Pentecostals were not monolithic in their approach to women who minister. The United Pentecostal Church, formed in 1945, went further than some other oneness and Trinitarian organizations, recognizing the right of a woman to be ordained. In 1945, when the UPC formed out from the two organizations, the P.C.I. and P.A. of J.C, a full 29.7% of the ministers in the PCI were women and 15.6% of the ministers in the P.A. of J. C. were women a combined percentage of 21.6%.(35) But, for whatever reason, there was a steady decline in the licensure of women�so much so that UPCI records demonstrated that in 1987, in the United States and Canada, only 6.3% of the ministers were women.(36) In the sixteen years since that statistic, the climate has hardly been more open to women in ministry; indeed, the percentage of women ministers has been cut by one half.(37) In 2003, out of a total 8,825 ministers, only 306 are female. That equals to 3.46%. Yet there is, to me, an even more startling statistic. The median age of these ministers is sixty-seven years of age.(38) Certainly there are more than this number of women who actively minister in our organization, but they do not hold ministerial credentials. Yet, women teach, write, counsel, and speak publicly to both men and women (without a preacher�s license). If you asked these same women if they were ministers, they would likely recoil, for it does not seem culturally safe to make such a claim. Indeed, it must be that although officially allowable, it can sometimes be difficult for women to be licensed in our organization, and the cultural cost is often so great that they do not make the attempt. " Greg Hopper
"Why is it that our children can't
read a Bible in school, but they can
in
prison?" |
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