Presented February 15, 2024 TO WOMANPREACH. copyright protected
From its genesis, the AME Church has been impacted by great leadership. For many years we were introduced to the four horsemen and did not know the fullness of the life of Rev. Jarena Lee. Her impact on the AME Church is consistent with the spirit, prophetic witness, and the servant spirit of our historic legacy. She was a preacher par excellence, held major evangelistic success, started schools, traveled in and outside the country and gave rise to people connected to God.
Her ministry provides a road map for the call for the true work for ministers, blending the work of the church and community and persistent in manifesting the call of God on us. As a result of service and witness, we see a more inclusive Church with leadership representing the kingdom of God. It compels the Church to ensure that all facets of the Church are represented in the institution and with the people we serve.
BLACK WOMEN IN GENERAL
While Mrs. Jarena Lee has some specific influences on Black Women in general and specifically Black Women in ministry, there are some very similar characteristics. One of the greatest contributing factor that encourages success is having persons see a reflection of themselves in leaders. It is a great motivation to know that people have accomplished much, lived through great challenges, and demonstrated the possibilities for achievement and ascendency as those in similar positions. Knowing and seeing the images of President Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Bishop Vashti McKenzie, Bishop Carolyn Tyler Guidry, Bishop Sarah Frances Taylor Davis, Bishop Barbara Harris and Bishop Leontine Kelly are examples of this modeling, as are Rev. Mary Watson Steward, Dr. Martha Keyes, Dr. and Jacqueline Grant Collier.
To know even when we didn’t know of Jarena Lee that this fierceness woman stood the test of sexism, protested the denial of her gifts, did not leave the institution, and completed her God- given assignment and rights, lets us know that even in the chaos of misogyny, mistreatment, and denial, the attainment of women in leadership is a reality.
I met Jarena Lee in my second year of seminary in 1975 and my preadmittance to the Indiana Board of Examiners. It was 15 years after women were given full ordination in the AME Church in 1960. Although I had no knowledge of women’s ordination or the impact of it on me, I was fascinated that she existed and was an AME.
Christian Theological Seminary offered a course on women in early Methodism and the Holiness Movement. I didn’t take the course but perused the reading assignments. There I found the autobiography of Mrs. Jarena Lee. I had not heard of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Zilpha Elaw, or Amanda Berry Smith. I learned, through reading these assigned books, of Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet and other women John Wesley licensed and ordained. I was glad and angry at the same time that as much AME history I thought I knew, my own Board of Examiners did not have Mrs. Jarena Lee on the reading list.
Reading her story and so many others, I felt a peace, that I was not strange, deranged, trying to fit in a man’s world, had man-hating issues, or because my father and brothers were preachers. I was not an abnormal—God really did call women to preach. I entered seminary the first semester in the Masters of Christian Education program, but by the second semester I changed my major to the Master of Divinity, which caused friction in my marriage and in the Church. The decision was made in part to readings of historical women in ministry. These personalities caused me to breathe and celebrate Mrs. Jarena Lee.
USED BUT NOT AFFIRMED
Her story is impacting. For ten years Allen denied her the licensing because he said the Methodist doctrine did believe in women preachers. In some ways Rev. Lee was relieved when she was initially denied. We know that feeling, but when the call and the anointing is there, there is no rest. Unfortunately, Bishop Allen was hoodwinked and bamboozled, for John Wesley did license women but after Wesley died, and his peculiar Methodism split, many of the leaders refused to continue licensing and ordaining women. So, Allen only knew what he knew.
We know the story of the brother who couldn’t deliver the sermon and Jarena Lee stepped up and preached the brother’s text. Allen affirmed her, used her gifts, cared for her children, let her stay in his house, supported her financially but never licensed or ordained her. She preached in many states and in Canada but was never licensed or ordained.
Lee affirmed our stories. I am the seventh child of Rev. Dr. Herman William Henning and Mother Mattie Elizabeth Miller Henning. My father was the youngest son of Henry and Eliza. I was well in my ministry years when I learned that my grandfather who died before I was born was a local preacher in Arkansas and built a church near Pecan Point. No one told me.
My father had a brother who was a minister. No one told me.
My father had two sisters who were still living as I developed. Rev. Wencie was a pastor in the Sabbath Day movement, leaving the AME Church, as she struggled with acceptance in ministry by the family and by the church. She also struggled in the Sabbath faith. She planted two churches, published books, composed music and held evangelistic missions in New York and other places. I didn’t know her ministry impact until she was in her 80s and moved to Indianapolis for a few years. Used but not affirmed.
Mother Blanche Caddell was a lay leader, missionary, YPD director, steward, and organizer. She also planted churches, was a fierce fighter for justice, and equality. Tri-Union AME Church in St. Louis is a foundational anchor for its establishment when Faith AME, one of the churches she started, was merged with two smaller churches.
On my mother’s side, there was one boy and four girls, and Grand Mommas raised some strong, unashamed, independent women. One owned her own business, one was an academic genius, one was an educator and musician, playing for one of the Patterson’s pastors of the COGIC Church. My mother was an educator, musician, leader of women and children, with creativity extraordinaire. These women taught me the rites of passages for women and to be my authentic self.
At 15 years old, at a connectional YPD meeting in Pittsburgh, I challenged the speaker who said that to get married, girls needed to learn how to please their men. It was awful, and I would not relent as the speaker tried to shame me until he just ended it, because I would not back down. His name was James C. Wade who became a General Officer. Years later we became good friends and supported each other in ministry.
A woman whose name I didn’t know until 10 years later, said to me how confident I was and how I was strong…then added, I was called to preach. I laughed inwardly and dismissed her. Ten years later after I answered the call, and had to preach four sermons before receiving the license to preach, she was present when I was presented to the Indiana Annual Conference. When my name was called, Mrs. Lillian Majors, YPD Director shouted and cried out, “thank you God, I lived to see it.” Admittingly, a woman shouted, “I knew it.” It was Mrs. Lillian Majors who spoke those words in 1965.
I pastored three churches: two of them gaining? significant growth and ministries, one already? had growth and ministries, and for two of them, I was the first woman pastor. The other was at a conservative, older, deeply AME traditionalist church and I was the first woman in the Connection to pastor a church with 900-plus members on roll. It was my first church where the leaders railed against a preacher who is a woman.
I was the first Presiding Elder in the Fourth Episcopal District and the first in that church to have a father who had been a presiding elder. When I was elected a Bishop, I was the first sibling of an elected Bishop.
PRINCIPLES FROM THE LIFE OF JARENA LEE
- Do not limit your gifts or allow anyone to define you. She was a wife and mother, and one who exemplified not limiting your gifts or allowing anyone to define you. Mrs. Lee was a preacher, evangelist, educator, writer, and one who started mission houses and schools.
We must not let others use our gifts and not fully respect us or our gifts enough to us licenses and ordination. We must stop writing sermons for others—particularly senior pastors—and not be financially rewarded, acknowledgement, or a recommended for assignment to a church. We must stop being the assistant pastor unless that is clearly our call or assignment, knowing that we might not be considered for that church or any others when the pastor leaves or dies.
At the 2024 Payne Graduation Ceremony, Dr. Michael Joseph Brown, President of Payne Theological Seminary said that the church calls you us to maintain the past, but God calls us to move the institution forward, but yet we allow others to limit what God has called us to do and impact. God is calling us to be prophets and we allow ourselves to only be keepers of the tradition.
- Mrs. Lee was free to use all her gifts. She may have been able to do so because there was no expectation of her ministry. No license or ordination that spoke words over her. She simply followed the call of God. Even in our licensure, we must follow God. Do not let patriarchy or resources dislodge us. Rev Lee was denied carriages, but she kept traveling, denied the publishing of her book, and published it anyway; was told she was not called by God and her historic response,
“O how careful ought we to be, lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? seeing the Savior died for the woman as well as for the man.
“If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one? as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear. Did not Mary first preach the risen Savior, and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity?”
She had limitations on health, but she kept traveling. She had lack of money but started schools and missions. She lost her own children except for two in childbirth, but kept living. There were women in that day who joined a patriarchal approach that women could not preach but we do not see any put downs.
- She protected her legacy and affirmed her own journey. Her story was important, and she maintained it. She kept a journal and wrote a book then wrote a second one. When the AME Church Book Concerns initially refused to publish it, she paid for it herself and the up dated version. She did what God called her to do.
Tell your story, affirm your story, share it with future generations so it may affirm, and empower others. Much of what we know about Mrs. Jarena Lee came from her own writings. She didn’t call herself remarkable, but her life witness does.
- You are not alone. We do not see her fighting with women. In fact, she supported other women, she traveled and cooperated with other abolitionist, supported the journey of women out of Mother Bethel and Sojourner Truth. We must know our ancestorial women and contemporary women : Prathia Hall, Mary Watson Steward, Jacqueline Grant, Barbara Harris, Martha Jane Keys, Julia Foote, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Pauli Murray first African American woman priest, Lillian Frier Webb, Carrie Hooper, Cecelia Williams Bryant, Terresa Snorten, Bonnie Hines, Bishop Patricia Davenport, Lutheran, Susan Johnson Cook, Teresa Fry Brown, Rev. Denise Anderson, Presbyterian, Renita Weems, Teresa Owens, and Traci Blackmon , Carolyn Knight, Jackie McCullough, Ann Lightner Fuller, and Dr. Gina Stewart
We are not alone. Celebrate the witness of Sarah Ann Copeland Hughes. In 1885, Bishop Turner called Copeland Hughes and ordained her as a deacon, saying, he had “done something that had not been done in 1,500 years—that was the ordination of a woman to the office of deacon in the church.” The glory was short-lived. The following year, at the 1887 North Carolina Conference, a motion was introduced to strike her name from the list of deacons. At the 1888 AME General Conference in Indianapolis, Copeland Hughes ordination was de-ratified.
In 2016, at the 50th Quadrennial Session of the AME General Conference, Mrs. Jarena Lee was posthumously ordained an itineral Elder, It was also the year of my election. Because of the Rev. Jarena Lee, and the many women who were never ordained, licensed, given appointments and whose names we do not know, we have the strength to know we can go forth and unleash.
Jarena did it all and pushed back. She was bold and unrelenting in her call. She handled the pushbacks and kept preaching. Thank God her story was not lost and we a woman of excellence as an example for male and female.
Unleash The Genius In You 