This past Monday, May 4, the United Methodist Church celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the granting of full clergy rights for women. It was during the 1956 General Conference in Minneapolis. It so happens that my grandfather, Henry Clay Graybeal, was there as a lay delegate from the Holston Conference and he witnessed this historic day in the church’s history.

You could say this day was a long time coming. It goes at least as far back as John Wesley’s authorizing Sarah Mallet to preach as a lay preacher as long as “she proclaimed the doctrines and adhered to the disciplines that all Methodist preachers were expected to accept.” Perhaps Wesley was influenced by his own mother Susanna, who led popular Bible studies in the rectory while her husband, the Rev. Samuel Wesley, was away.

But perhaps it goes all the way back to the risen Jesus himself, who commissioned Mary Magdalene to go and tell the other disciples that he had risen (John 20:17). In fact, all four Gospels relate that the very first people to proclaim the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, upon which our faith itself is grounded, were women.

My home church in Marion, Virginia, was served by a number of women in pastoral roles while I was growing up there. This church, Signal Crest, has also been blessed by the ministry of the following five women as associate pastors:

               Rev. Cynthia Pennington (1996-1998)

               Rev. Barbara Clark Acuff (1998-2002)

               Rev. Natalie Smart (2002-2007)

               Rev. Annette Flynn (2009-2012)

               Rev. Elizabeth Sullivan (2012-2018)

Another woman, Rev. Laura Shearer, who served as this church’s Director of Religious Education in the late 1990s, experienced a call into ordained ministry, went to seminary, and went on to serve as an ordained elder in the Holston Conference until her retirement.

Let us rejoice and give thanks for all the women we have known whom God has called into the ministry of sharing the good news of Jesus and for all the gifts they have shared with us and with so many others. Let us also continue to look for new generations of disciples, both women and men, who have the gifts and may have the calling of God into the ministry of the church. Who knows but it may be our warm and gentle voice of encouragement of them that helps to reinforce that still, small voice of God in their heart that may be calling them, even them, to serve as an ordained minister of the gospel of Christ.