I want to be honest with you about something before we begin. The question of women in ministry is not, for the Church of the Nazarene, an open question. It is a conviction that is woven into our founding documents, our polity, and our history. That does not mean it is a question you cannot wrestle with. It means that as you pursue ministry within this denomination, you need to understand not just what we believe, but why we believe it, and what it means for how you will lead.
This is not primarily an argument against opposing views. Our goal is to understand the Nazarene position from the inside, to see its theological roots, its historical shape, and its practical implications for ministry. The Nazarene conviction about women in ministry is a positive theological affirmation rooted in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the Wesleyan understanding of grace, and over a century of Spirit-led practice.
The Church of the Nazarene did not eventually come around to ordaining women. We began there. Phineas Bresee, one of our founding figures, was fond of saying, “Some of our best men are women.” The 1898 Constitution of the Los Angeles Church of the Nazarene stated plainly: “We recognize the equal right of both men and women to all offices of the Church of the Nazarene, including the ministry.”
That statement was not aspirational. It was descriptive. By the time the denomination formally organized at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1908, three of the four regional holiness groups that merged to form the Church of the Nazarene were already ordaining women. Women were not added to our polity after the fact. They helped write it.
In 1908, 13.8 percent of ordained elders and 15.1 percent of licensed ministers in the new denomination were women. In an era when most American denominations would not allow women to preach at all, the Church of the Nazarene was ordaining them to elder authority, the same orders as men.
This was not accidental. It was theological. The holiness movement understood the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in a particular way: the Spirit calls whom the Spirit calls. When women testified to a clear calling and demonstrated evident gifts for ministry, the question was not whether to permit them. The question was whether anyone had the authority to refuse them.
The biblical cornerstone was Joel’s prophecy, quoted by Peter at Pentecost: “In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). For the founders of the Church of the Nazarene, this was not a difficult passage. It was an invitation. If the Holy Spirit was moving in the last days as Scripture promised, then restricting women from ministry was not a matter of theological caution. It was disobedience.
Martha E. Curry served as a district superintendent in the early Church of the Nazarene, exercising ecclesiastical authority over male and female pastors. Olive Winchester earned her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, taught theology at a Nazarene college, and shaped the denomination’s theological education for a generation. These women did not preach under male authority. They were the authority.
It is important to be precise here, because there is a version of support for women in ministry that sounds affirming but falls short of the Nazarene position. That version says: women can preach, serve in pastoral roles, and hold the title of pastor, if a man retains ultimate authority. Women can do the work of ministry, but elders, overseers, those with final ecclesiastical authority, should be men.
That is not what the Church of the Nazarene teaches. In our polity, there is no two-tier system in which women hold one kind of authority and men another. When a woman is ordained as an elder in the Church of the Nazarene, she receives the same orders as a man. She can preach, baptize, administer the Lord’s Supper, plant churches, serve as lead pastor, and be elected district superintendent or general superintendent. Carla Sundberg currently serves as a General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, ordaining both men and women each year. That is not a concession to culture. That is our theology in practice.
The real test of whether we support women in ministry is not whether we invite them to preach. It is whether we are willing to be under their authority, to receive their oversight, to submit to their leadership. Many Nazarene churches practice a soft complementarianism that contradicts our theology. We ordain women to elder orders and then largely only consider them for associate roles or children’s ministry roles. We say we are egalitarian, but we practice something else.
How many women do you know who are gifted to lead, but have never been asked? How many future female pastors, preachers, and church leaders are sitting in your congregation right now, gifted and called, but uncertain whether they are welcome? Think about who in your ministry context might be waiting for someone to see their gift and call it forward.
Some people come to this material having already engaged arguments for complementarianism. The passages that create difficulty for egalitarians are real, and anyone who waves them away with a casual dismissal is not doing honest exegesis. 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34 are in the Bible, and they require an answer.
The Nazarene position, rooted in the broader Wesleyan-holiness tradition, takes those passages seriously while reading them in view of the whole witness of Scripture and the movement of the Spirit.
Many students come to this conversation carrying an assumption about Genesis 2:18 that the text does not actually support. When God says “I will make a helper suitable for him,” the English word helper often reads as subordinate assistant. That reading collapses when you look at the Hebrew.
The word translated helper is ezer. It appears 21 times in the Old Testament. In 16 of those appearances, it refers to God himself as Israel’s helper. When the Psalms call God our ezer, they are not saying God is our subordinate. They are saying God is our essential, powerful ally. The word carries connotations of strength and indispensability, not subservience. When God creates the woman as ezer in Genesis 2, he is creating someone with strength and capability essential to the mission.
Genesis 3:16 “To the woman he said… Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
The hierarchy many traditions read back into Genesis 2 is not there. It enters the story in Genesis 3, as a consequence of the Fall. That is not God’s original design. That is what sin does to the relationship. If the husband ruling over his wife was a consequence of sin, then the redemptive trajectory of Scripture points us away from that hierarchy and back toward the Genesis 2 partnership.
Paul himself affirms that women pray and prophesy in the gathered assembly (1 Corinthians 11:5). Prophecy in the New Testament was not a private, subordinate act. It was an authoritative proclamation to the church. Phoebe is called a diakonos and a prostatis of the church at Cenchreae (Romans 16:1-2), a word carrying the meaning of patron, leader, one who stands before others in authority. Junia is described as outstanding among the apostles in Romans 16:7, a designation that places a woman among the foundational leadership of the early church.
The Wesleyan-holiness tradition has always understood entire sanctification and the outpouring of the Spirit as inaugurating something new. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28). That declaration is not a statement about the erasure of identity. It is a statement about the erasure of hierarchy in the body of Christ. The Spirit poured out on all flesh is precisely the Spirit breaking down the boundaries that structured the old age.
If you are still processing where you stand on these questions, that is legitimate. These are difficult texts. What matters is that you engage them honestly, with humility, and with openness to what the Spirit may be saying. What is not compatible with Nazarene credentialing is arriving at a settled position that women should not exercise the same ecclesiastical authority as men, because that position places you in contradiction with our polity and our practice.
The gap between what we say and what we do on women in ministry is often created one local church at a time. Congregations that would affirm women in ministry in the abstract still only consider men for lead pastor roles when vacancies arise. Women with evident gifts are placed in children’s ministry or associate roles where they serve under men, not because the denomination requires it, but because the congregation is more comfortable with it.
As a pastor, you will shape that culture. The questions you ask in a pastoral search, the roles you create, the people you invite to preach and teach and lead, the way you talk about ministry from the pulpit, all of it forms the expectations of your congregation.
Maye McReynolds did not wait for a door to open. She quit her job with the railroad and began going door to door among Spanish-speaking communities in Los Angeles in 1903 with no institutional support, because she believed God had called her there. Her church eventually recognized the calling and supported her. She was ordained as pastor of the First Nazarene Mexican Church of Los Angeles. The move toward ministry required someone who saw what God had placed in her and created space for it to grow.
There is something powerful about being the person who says: I see what God has given you, and I want to create space for you to use it.
The deepest question this topic raises is not whether women can preach or lead. The real question is whether you can receive authority from a woman. Can you be under a female district superintendent? Can you receive correction from a female senior pastor? Can you sit under a woman’s teaching with openness to being led?
If the answer to any of those is no, that is a significant issue for ministry within the Church of the Nazarene. Our polity does not create categories where women lead in some areas and men in others. We have one order of elders, and women hold it on the same terms as men.
Before your district interview, take time to answer this question honestly: Can you fully support and participate in the Church of the Nazarene’s structure and polity as it functions, including receiving oversight from women in authority, not just tolerating women in ministry? That question is worth answering before someone else asks it.
One of the most important things to understand about the Church of the Nazarene’s history on this topic is that our official position has never wavered. From 1898 to today, the denomination has consistently affirmed the equal right of women to all offices of the church, including ordination to elder orders.
And yet the numbers tell a different story. In 1908, nearly 14 percent of ordained elders were women. That percentage increased through the early decades of the denomination. Then, beginning in the late 1930s and 1940s, it declined. Not because of a policy change. Because of cultural pressure, the rise of fundamentalist ideology, and the quiet assumption that while women could be ordained in theory, the real pastoral roles should go to men.
Negative affirmation describes a pattern in which a denomination officially maintains a position that allows for the ordination of women but provides little support for women in ministry. The position exists on paper. The culture does not reflect it. Women are told they can be pastors, yet are rarely considered for lead pastor roles when vacancies arise.
Closing that gap is not the work of denominational policy. It is the work of pastors who take the theology seriously enough to let it shape their practice, one congregation at a time.
The Nazarene position on women in ministry is not primarily a reaction against other views. It is a positive theological conviction: the Holy Spirit calls women and men alike to the full range of ministry, and the church’s job is to recognize, affirm, and support those calls without creating hierarchies the Spirit did not create.
We have over a century of evidence that this position is right. We have women who planted churches, ordained ministers, superintended districts, and shaped our denomination’s theology and practice. Their ministries were not subordinate footnotes to a male story. They are part of the story itself.
Your job as a pastor is to make sure that story continues in the congregation you lead.