More Stories about Women, Please

More Stories about Women, Please February 23, 2017

Screen Shot 2017-02-18 at 11.14.30 AMMore sermons need more stories about women. The one who controls the story controls the glory, and that includes both which women we draw attention to in the Bible — Huldah, Esther, Miriam, Deborah, Mary, Junia, Priscilla, and more — and the ones we point to in the history of the church.

While there are only some rich, thick biographies about some women in the history of the church, like Phoebe Palmer or Harriet Beecher Stowe, there are other collections about women in the church that provide shorter biographies. Our focus today is on women in the history of the church and not women in the Bible. (But I have to mention Lynn Cohick’s exceptional study about women in earliest Christianity: Women in the World of the Earliest Christians.

Now to women in the history of the church.

Every pastor needs to read the stories about women in the church and every preacher needs to tell stories about women — as many stories about women as about men. At the least they need to bring more stories about women into their sermons.

There are a number of these collection sources, but I suggest starting with these four books, and at the end I ask you for your recommendations:

Ruth Tucker, Extraordinary Women of Christian History: What We Can Learn from Their Struggles and Triumphs.

I also recommend:

Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845

Laceye C. Warner, Saving Women: Retrieving Evangelistic Theology and Practice

Kirsi Stjerna, Women of the Reformation

Now, over to you, What are your recommendations?


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