Read The Confident Woman: Start Today Living Boldly and Without Fear for Free Online

church, and one Sunday as we were leaving the building after the service, the pastor stopped Dave and me. He looked at Dave and said, “Brother, you should be teaching that meeting in your home, not your wife!” Dave and I wanted to be obedient to the authority we were under, so the next few weeks Dave tried to teach and I tried to be quiet. Neither one of us were happy, nor were the people who were attending the study. The pastor had his rules, but the problem was that God had called me to teach, and He had not called Dave in that way. Dave has other wonderful, valuable gifts and is a very important part of our ministry, but he will be the first to tell you that he is not called to teach. Surely if God had not wanted me to teach, He would not have gifted me to do it—and given me a desire to do it. As far as I can discern from Scripture, God is not in the business of frustrating and confusing people.
    The pastor I mentioned came from a religious background in which women were not ordained, nor allowed to hold any public office in the church. They were not permitted to teach, preach, or pastor. The thing that is odd is that in most churches where women are not allowed to perform these functions, they are allowed to be missionaries in foreign lands. I cannot figure out how a woman can be a successful missionary and never teach. It is impossible to lead people to Christ without preaching the gospel to them. We may refer to it as “witnessing,” but the principal is the same as far as I’m concerned. Of course, I am quite sure that a critic would say it is all right for women to speak about Christ, unless it is in the church, but is the church a building or a living organism consisting of people all over the world who are followers of Jesus Christ? Surely the church is more than brick and mortar with stained glass windows and an organ.
    While attending this same church, I also gathered a group of women together and motivated them to go with me once a week to pass out gospel tracts. We put the literature on car windshields and handed them to people in shopping malls and on street corners. In a few weeks, we had distributed ten thousand gospel tracts, for no other reason than we wanted to serve God. I was called before the elders and corrected publicly for distributing this material without the elders’ permission.
    Those who criticized me did not want to help me get the tracts out, but they did want to stop me. I am sorry to have to say this, but I believe their disapproval was nothing more than male ego. They saw a woman doing what they should have been doing, so they found fault with me in order to soothe their own guilty consciences.

Women in Ministry: A God-Ordained Tradition
     
    Whether we look at Miriam, Deborah, Esther, and Ruth in the Old Testament—or Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, or Priscilla in the New Testament, we easily see that God has always used women in ministry. When He needed someone to save the Jews from the destruction that wicked Haman had planned for them, He called upon Esther (Esther 4:14b). If God is against using women, why didn’t He call a man for this job? Esther sacrificed her plans as a young woman and allowed herself to be taken into the king’s harem in order to be in a position to speak on behalf of God’s people when the time came to do so. Because of her obedience, God gave her favor with the king, and she exposed a plot to kill all of the Jews. She saved her nation and became a queen who held a high position of leadership in the land and cared for the poor.
----
If God did not want to use women in ministry, why did He include them in the most important events in Jesus’ life?
----
    Deborah was a prophetess and a judge. As a prophetess, she was a spokesperson for God. As a judge she made decisions on God’s behalf (Judges 4:5).
    Mary Magdalene and some other women were the first to visit the tomb on Resurrection Sunday (John 20:1). They found the tomb empty, but an