Women pastors of the Assemblies of God

The Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world, is in most ways a very conservative denomination. Other than Pentecostalism, they are very similar to Baptist churches. They believe such things as the inerrancy of scripture and Believers Baptism by immersion. But, one stark difference is that they ordain women to be pastors. They’ve done this from their beginning, roughly a century ago, while liberal mainline denominations would still not ordain women.

The Assemblies of God makes a significant amount of effort to get women pastors and women into denominational leadership. In the past, they’ve preserved some leadership positions just for women. Last year, they unanimously elected a woman to a top executive position of the denomination. This lady has no theological education and her experience as a pastor was a small church with fewer than 50 people attending, in a rented room. Another example of their effort to put women into the office of pastor is that it’s normal practice for their churches to bill the wives of pastors as pastors themselves. Pick a random church and look at their website and see.

Yet, female pastors, women leading churches, are rare as hen’s teeth in their denomination. I’ve visited scores of Assembly of God churches and have never seen a female pastor (or assistant pastor) in any of them. Any Assemblies of God church whose website I’ve ever visited also only has male pastors, with the exception of the very, very few churches I already knew had female pastors (e.g. the lady mentioned above, and she’s been replaced at her old church with another lady, which shows they are only willing to hire women).

The point is that women aren't seeking to be pastors. The SBC’s ban on women pastors has essentially zero impact, other than the noise made by people who object to biblical doctrine because of feminist values.

In liberal denominations, like the apostate PCUSA, you can find lots of female pastors. These denominations are full of ungodly people who hate biblical teaching across the board, and some of them hate men. So, let’s skip those.

 

An Appeal To The Assemblies Of God Church: Will You Hire More Female Pastors?

The author of that article has written a graduate thesis on getting women into church leadership. If you have to force it, maybe it shouldn't be?