The Untold Stories of Women in Church Leadership: Bearing Witness to God’s Work 

Bishop Rose Hudson Wilkin describes feeling a call to ordained ministry as a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in Jamaica. The Anglican church in that time and place didn’t ordain women, and so when she asked her bishop why women couldn’t be priests, he told her, “Rose, we are Anglicans. We don’t do that.” Rose didn’t walk away from that conversation feeling like she hit a dead end. Instead, she describes greeting this “no” with a smile. “You might not do this,” she thought to herself. “And the church might not do this. But I know that God does.” Rose went on to be among the first women ordained in the Church of England as a priest and then to become the first Black woman bishop. 

I got to read her memoir, The Girl from Montego Bay, for my Future Christian podcast. It’s part of an ongoing conversation that we are having on the pod around female leadership in our church. Earlier this summer, I interviewed Margo Guernsey, producer and director of The Philadelphia Eleven—a documentary on the first ordination of women in the Episcopal Church in 1974. In August, my co-host, Loren Richmond Jr., facilitated a round table episode with me and several other well-known Niagara priests on our current experience of serving in leadership in our church as women. 

These are important conversations that I want us to have. I want our churches to hear these stories. I want people to watch The Philadelphia Eleven and talk about the bravery and vision it took these women and their supporters to chart this new course. I want Bishop Rose’s faithfulness in being able to trust God to lay a path that church authorities could not yet see to be a story that is well-known in faith circles. 

I want this for a few reasons. I grew up in a church where women have been ordained longer than I have been alive. I grew up in a time and place that assured me that things like access to education, the ability to vote, and limitless options on what I could do with my life were guaranteed. I am grateful for this. It’s because of women like Bishop Rose and the Philadelphia Eleven, and the trailblazers in the Anglican Church of Canada. It’s because of my mother and grandmother and women who don’t have documentaries made about them, but who bore witness to the fullness of what women could do and be. I want to be more intentional about this gratitude. I want to be less ignorant about just how precarious these precious rights really are and how recently in our history women’s opportunities have actually been. In contrast to me, my daughter is growing up in a world where she regularly receives the message that her freedoms are contested. She hears the loud voices, always at the ready to take away what we have, arguing that the advancement of women has been the diminishment of men. 

Here’s the other reason why I want these stories to be front and centre in our communities. I want a more realistic and holistic picture of our church of who God works through and how God nudges the people of faith along. The idea that it has ever just been men shaping this church is fiction. At every point in the history of the church, women are found midwifing the power and newness of God and shaping the church, even if their positions have been relegated to the sidelines and their stories have been largely undocumented. Just because we haven’t been good at noticing doesn’t mean they aren’t there. 

Bishop Rose describes at various points in her memoir the burden of trying to be the sole representative at the front of any given church of what female leadership or Black leadership looks like. Because she is seen as the “only one,” she has lived with the tremendous responsibility of making sure that the experience people have of her is one which opens them, rather than closes them, to the others that will follow the path that she and the Holy Spirit have blazed. 

I respect and understand her conscientiousness. Even after fifty years of ordaining women in our church, I am often the first experience people will have of women in the pulpit or at the altar. Our bishop carries the mantle of being the first female bishop of this diocese and no doubt lives with the responsibility of being the one and only standard by which others will judge the validity of women as a whole in the church’s highest offices. 

It’s an unfair weight to carry. If God isn’t done with us yet, it’s because God’s MO is in working with material that is rife with flaws. As my daughter regularly points out, it is never suggested that maybe a man who trips up invalidates the whole project of male leadership, but the spectre of “oh, we tried that and didn’t work” hangs over our heads continually. I want these women’s stories told in our churches because every story that we tell widens our imagination of what is possible for all of us, how limitless God’s work really is, and also how committed God is to working not with perfect people, but with us. All of us.