A history that ignores women and minorities is a poor reflection of our Christian heritage
From Augustine to Aquinas, from John Calvin to John Wesley, from Pope John I to Pope John XXIII, church history is filled with famous men who have thought and done great things. But when one reads the major texts of church history in our modern context, an inevitable question arises: Where are the women, the people of color, the non-Westerners in the story?
To raise the question is to see the problem. Although the history of Christianity actually begins in Palestine—outside the confines of Western culture—and includes prominent women, such as Phoebe, Priscilla, and Lydia, the telling of it quickly turns to the church fathers and to the male leaders of the institutionalized church that developed in the West.
If one wants to chart the church by tallying theological and institutional crises, then this focus on prominent male leaders makes some sense. But is it really the most accurate representation of our Christian heritage? Might another perspective on church history more fully reflect the experience of the church and the work of the Holy Spirit?
The issue of who is included in the telling of history is not unique to the church. The academic community is in the midst of a multicultural revolution fanned by the flames of political correctness. With mixed results, scholars are challenging the traditional rendition of history and offering new versions—retelling stories from the points of view of women, the vanquished, minorities, or the poor.
It will be a pity if church historians once again merely follow the lead of secular historians—especially since many in the “PC” movement have anti-Western and even anti-Christian biases. But it is also a pity that historians of Christianity did not recognize long ago that a history that focuses on those with prestige and position is not the fullest reflection of our Christian heritage—in that it is out of step with how God works in the world.
Church historians would be wise to contemplate Jesus’ teaching on power. He charged his disciples that they were not to imitate the Gentiles in their lust for power. His standard was different: “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Matt. 20:26). A history of humble servants may not be as interesting to read as tales of the powerful and famous, but it is another matter to say which group better represents who really carries on the work of the church.
Paul elaborates on this reversal of expectations: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, … what is weak in the world to shame the strong, … what is low and despised in the world” (1 Cor. 1:27–28). This does not mean that we should ignore the “wise” and “strong” when we tell the story of the church, but it should tell us that we have missed something if these are all we hear about.
Indeed, the Bible itself serves as a model of inclusiveness. While, few Westerners are mentioned (with Cornelius and Pontius Pilate being notable exceptions), there is a healthy mix of leaders and followers, the strong and the weak, men and women. For example, characters such as Mary Magdalene and the woman of Sychar, both weak and despised by the world, play significant roles in God’s inspired narrative. And would we really understand the success of Paul’s mission if we did not hear of the “prominent women” in Thessalonica and Berea or of the jailer and Lydia in Philippi? If our histories merely follow the actions of strong and famous males, we will miss the story God is telling.
A Woman Reformer
Church historians often get mired in the rut of tradition. The individuals and events emphasized in one book are virtually the same as those emphasized in another. Consider the story of the Protestant Reformation. The names are carved in granite: Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Knox. But there were others marching in that Reformation parade, not the least of whom was Katherine Zell. Yet she is omitted from most texts, except for a passing reference in Philip Schaff’s eight-volume history. In this particular instance, the focus is on Ulrich Zwingli and fellow Reformers who, while traveling through Strasbourg, “lodged at the house of Matthew Zell” and “were hospitably entertained by his wife Katherine, who cooked their meals” and “waited at the table.” Schaff adds the comment that she “conversed with them so intelligently that they ranked her above many doctors,” but there ends the allusion to this remarkable Reformer.
Unlike Zwingli and most of the other Reformers, Katherine Zell was not a member of the clergy. But she was so involved in ministry that she was charged with “disturbing the peace,” and after the death of her husband, she was accused of seeking to take over the pulpit and become “Dr. Katrina.”
Her response was classic. She knew she could never be a member of the clergy, but she had another role model: “I am like the dear Mary Magdalene, who with no thought of being an apostle, came to tell the disciples that she had encountered the risen Lord.”
Zell was no less a Reformer than Zwingli. She preached the gospel in the streets of Strasbourg; she directed a massive refugee program; she wrote tracts; she edited a hymnbook. She took a stand for religious tolerance during a time when intolerance and bigotry ruled the day. She was outraged by the way her fellow Reformers treated those with whom they disagreed.
“Why do you rail at Schwenckfeld?” she demanded of a Lutheran leader. “You talk as if you would have him burned like the poor Servetus at Geneva.… You behave as if you had been brought up by savages in a jungle. The Anabaptists accept Christ in all the essentials as we do.”
Zell not only denounced religious persecution, but she intentionally reached out in a spirit of Christian unity. While other Reformers were fighting among themselves, she emphatically declared that “anyone who acknowledges Christ as the true son of God and the sole Savior of mankind is welcome at my board.” In her final act of selfless service, she got out of her sick bed and conducted a predawn funeral service for a woman whose Lutheran pastor refused his services because of the woman’s sympathies with Radical Reformers.
Why do we need Katherine Zell in our church history texts? Did she influence the church to the degree that Zwingli or other leading male Reformers did? Many historians would argue that she did not. They focus on the theological debates among the leading clerics of the day, and from that perspective her role was minimal. But her ministry of servanthood—as Jesus defined servanthood—is worthy of recognition, and her stand against religious intolerance ought to serve as a model for Christians today.
Church history, like all history, has a powerful effect on our everyday lives. Christian women (and men) need strong female role models—women who overcame obstacles and ministered despite barriers. Stories of lives like Katherine Zell’s empower and encourage us to do great things for God.
Forgotten American Saints
The same is true for minorities. It is vitally important for African Americans, native Americans, and other racial and ethnic groups to know their historical links to Christianity.
The standard list of great nineteenth-century American revivalists and preachers, for example, invariably leaves off men and women of color. Charles G. Finney is extolled in numerous biographies, while John Jasper, his contemporary, is overlooked. Yet, Jasper’s ministry matched Finney’s in many respects. Both were dramatically converted as adults and then went on to enjoy public ministries that lasted more than a half-century. Both were widely recognized as powerful preachers who drew enthusiastic crowds, while at the same time being criticized for their lack of conventional learning and refinement. But that is where their similarities ended. Jasper was black, and Finney was white.
Jasper, born into a slave family of 24 children, was bound by the chains of his master for the first 25 years of his ministry. He labored long hours in a Richmond tobacco factory and preached on the side. Slave funerals offered him a forum for his fiery oratory, and he soon became known as Virginia’s most sought-after funeral preacher.
Discovering A Friend
Something clicked. I had introduced Rik Stevenson to Charles Tindley and witnessed a deep friendship blossom. Their lives paralleled each other’s in many ways. Both were African Americans, had links to Philadelphia, and had prospered amidst harsh environments.
Rik was a student of mine while I was teaching a summer course at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. The term project was to discover a role model from the past and to bring that individual to life through a presentation. Rik asked if I had any suggestions. He had studied church history in his undergraduate education, but the course did not cover any African Americans. My own knowledge of African American church history was limited, but I suggested a few inspiring individuals, including Charles A. Tindley.
At the age of 17, Tindley could read only one word, cat; at his death, he had an 8,000-volume library and could read Greek and Hebrew. Tindley was born a slave on a Virginia plantation, and even after the Civil War his life of “slave” labor continued as he worked long days in the fields. But after dark, his time was his own. Spare money was spent on books, which he read by candlelight. Education became his god—until he was soundly converted at a Methodist revival meeting. Sensing a call to the ministry, Tindley enrolled in a ministerial course, finishing second highest in his class. In the years that followed, his ministry expanded from a tiny storefront church to a flourishing, seven-thousand-member congregation in Philadelphia. His hymns—especially “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There” and “Nothing Between”—were ones that I had sung from childhood.
To Rik, Tindley quickly became a friend and role model. Rik was thrilled to discover that Tindley Temple was in his old neighborhood in Philadelphia, and that he had walked by it many times as a child.
A death in the family took Rik back to Philadelphia before the summer term was over. There he had the opportunity to sit in Tindley’s study and stand in his pulpit. It was in that sanctuary as he sensed the presence of this great man, Rik testifies, “I found a jewel in my life.”
Both men grew up facing incredible racial, economic, and educational obstacles. Both overcame those obstacles. Rik might have remained a slave to the drug-infested streets of Philadelphia. Discovering Tindley “made me feel like I was somebody,” says Rik. “His commitment to excellence has given me the burden and desire not to let anything on this Earth stop me from being all that God would have me to be.”
By Ruth Tucker
Following the Civil War, he expanded his itinerant ministry and also built a parish in Richmond that grew from nine members to over two thousand. He was a great humanitarian and a defender of the Bible, but his story has been lost in obscurity.
Amanda Smith was another great nineteenth-century evangelist who has been lost to the church. She preached powerful gospel messages in America and abroad—her popularity all the more remarkable for the time since she was black and female.
Native Americans have experienced a similar fate in church-history texts. They are typically portrayed as either fierce enemies, pitiful victims, or reluctant converts—rarely as individuals who effectively reached out with the gospel in their own right. Samson Occum, however, was one such man.
Like John Jasper, Occum’s name is not listed in the index of American church-history texts, including Sydney Ahlstrom’s highly acclaimed, two-volume A Religious History of the American People. But like Jasper, Occum was a powerful preacher and evangelist whose ministry spanned more than four decades. A Mohegan Indian, Occum was converted, with his mother, in 1740, during the Great Awakening in New England. He studied theology at a little Indian school that later became Dartmouth College, and in the years that followed, he became an influential missionary evangelist and tribal leader in New England and New York. In the 1760s, he traveled to England to preach and present the needs of his people. Later he published a native American hymnal. His life is a powerful example of one who overcame countless obstacles to serve God effectively. He should not be forgotten.
On Fire For God In Japan
Not only are women and minorities often missed by church historians, but so are non-Western Christians. The history of the church is typically viewed as a trail that leads from the early church on through the medieval Roman Catholic church to the Reformation and beyond. The setting is Western Europe—expanded to North America in modern times.
Some might argue that church historians have only followed the well-worn trail of Western civilization. But Christianity has always been far more than a Western religion. As early as the fifth century, a segment of the Eastern church (the Nestorians) was expanding into Asia, and by the thirteenth century, this vast Christian movement had penetrated China. Yet history books usually devote only a paragraph to this church’s growth and influence.
Non-Western Christians are often overlooked in modern church-history texts also. Kanzo Uchimura is a case in point. After his conversion in 1878, he and some other Japanese college students planted a church with funds from a Methodist missionary. But when the missionary learned that the church would be independent rather than Methodist, he demanded they repay the money.
This incident turned Uchimura into an ardent critic of Western missionaries and their fragmented and feuding denominations. Eventually becoming the leader of the No Church movement in Japan, he was accused of trying to foster a Japanese Christianity. He responded by insisting that his brand of Christianity was no more culturally defined than the Church of England or Cumberland Presbyterianism: “If it is not wrong to apply the name of a district in the state of Kentucky to Christianity, why is it wrong for me to apply the name of my country to the same?”
Uchimura never founded a church, but he reached other Japanese with the gospel as no other Christian had ever done. He taught thousands in his Bible classes, and he wrote volumes of Bible-study guides.
His philosophy was simple: “The truly Christian temple has God’s earth for a floor, and his sky for the ceiling; its altar is in the heart of the believer; its law is God’s Word, and his Holy Spirit is its only pastor.” Uchimura’s message to the Christian church is as piercing today as it was two generations ago.
Similar messages burned in the hearts of John Sung of China, Pandita Ramabai of India, Ko Tha Byu of Burma, and Apolo Kivublaya of Uganda. But their thick accents and strange languages rarely reach our ears.
Rearranging Our Icons
Church history must be told anew—not to satisfy certain interest groups, but to capture the whole picture of the church and to listen to voices that have traditionally not been heard.
When we dig deeper into our heritage, we discover a far more diverse landscape than we might have imagined, and the historical stereotypes begin to fade. We suddenly realize that we can no longer excuse Calvin and others for the burning of Servetus on the grounds that they lived before the Enlightenment and that “everybody was doing it.” Everybody was not doing it, as Katherine Zell’s story proves.
In some instances, whole movements have been forgotten, as in the case of the Women’s Missionary movement. Here was a mighty army of millions of American women determined to turn the world upside-down. They sent thousands of single women abroad as emissaries of Christ. Yet this incredible crusade is not mentioned in church-history texts—or even in most missions-history texts. These women functioned differently in many ways from their male counterparts, and for this reason alone it is important to study the movement and glean from it both its positive and its negative lessons for modern-day missionaries.
In other instances, one finds that history books have been revised to reflect more accurately the impact of individuals or movements, but these changes have not filtered down to the average person in the pew. The Pentecostals are an example. Once deemed little more than “holy-roller” misfits, they are today at the forefront of the world Christian movement. But the origin of this vast Christian network is not widely known. William J. Seymour was the man of the hour—a preacher from Texas who arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1906. Within weeks he had turned an abandoned ramshackle Methodist church on Azusa Street into a Holy Ghost revival center, and the shouts were heard around the world. While many lay people have heard about the Azusa Street revival, and maybe even of William Seymour, few know that this key individual was black.
Most church historians do not object to permitting William Seymour, or Samson Occum or Katherine Zell, to join the parade of the white, male heroes of history. So, solving the problem sounds easy. We continue to highlight the “giants” of the faith and simply add another hundred pages to fit in all the rest. But it is not that simple. We need to re-examine the lens we use to view church history. Like the writers of Scripture, we need to focus on the significance of women, minorities, and those of various cultures. Only by using this more inclusive lens will we have any hope of seeing the full spectacle of what God is accomplishing on earth through his church—and any hope of seeing him, and each other, more clearly.
