Issue 03 Preaching and the Holy SpiritBlog | The Late Greats Catherine Booth
The Late Greats Catherine Booth
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 09.06.15
‘God has given to woman a graceful form and attitude, winning manners, persuasive speech, and, above all, a finely-toned emotional nature, all of which appear to us eminent natural qualifications for public speaking. We admit that want of mental culture, the trammels of custom, the force of prejudice, and one-sided interpretations of Scripture, have hitherto almost excluded her from this sphere.’1
Catherine Booth’s argument about women’s preaching, honed in the 1850s, sounds dated to modern ears but at the time was countercultural. This was a period in which those evangelical denominations that had actively promoted the ministry of women as preachers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were consciously limiting the practice.2 Booth responded directly to that situation with the thesis that God called preachers not extraordinarily and in spite of their being women
