by William Yoo
My family recently relocated to a new city. We packed up our belongings and bid farewell to the house we had lived in for nearly a decade. As we walked past each room, we shared fond memories of special meals together and pointed out where our children took their first steps. Embracing our neighbors for the last time, we thanked them for their friendship and promised to keep in touch. Moving is difficult because it is an unsettling process in which we must let go of what is familiar to face an uncertain future. Today’s PC(USA) is not moving like my family did, but the denomination continues to experience the tensions and pains that accompany the hard but necessary process of change and transformation. Church leaders must navigate through a labyrinth of complicated political, social and theological issues that belies easy solutions.
As we move forward, my inclination as a church historian is to look into the past and learn from the experiences of those who have gone before us in the faith. In the biblical past, God’s answer to Moses’ cry for help in the ancient Near Eastern wilderness illumines lessons and reminders for how we might engage present and future challenges. In Numbers 11, Moses confesses he cannot shoulder the heavy burdens of leadership alone. In a moment of honest frustration, Moses declares that death would be better than his current situation. God therefore provides a new paradigm in which 70 elders — filled with the Spirit — will partner with Moses to lead. But two others outside of the 70, Eldad and Medad, also receive God’s Spirit and surprise the group with their ability to prophesy. Although some of the leaders ask Moses to silence these unexpected prophets, Moses welcomes their contributions alongside the other appointed elders.
Presbyterians in the American past have a mixed history of practicing the collaborative church leadership displayed in Numbers. Presbyterians have especially struggled with the reception of prophetic voices from faithful women and men outside the dominant culture. In the eighteenth century, Samson Occom, a Native American from the Mohegan tribe, converted to Christianity during the Great Awakening revivals and sought ordination in the Long Island Presbytery to become a missionary among Indian communities. Despite his intelligence and piety — Occom preached fluently in Mohegan and English and was literate in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and French — presbytery board members deliberated over and delayed Occom’s ordination on account of his cultural and racial differences. Only after Samuel Davies, a respected minister from Virginia (who would become the fourth president of Princeton University), and two other pastors stressed the significance of Occom’s ability to minister across two cultures — European and Native American — did the presbytery agree to ordain the talented Mohegan preacher in 1759. Occom would go on to establish Native American churches, publish a prolific number of sermons and hymns and proclaim the gospel across North America and Europe to people of all races. But the discrimination against Occom persisted. Some white church leaders simply refused to share their ecclesial authority with an American Indian. In 1769, Occom went before the Long Island Presbytery to counter (and be cleared of) spurious public drunkenness charges.
A little over a century later, a young teenage woman from Kentucky encountered the Spirit of God and converted at a Baptist revival meeting in 1874. Louisa Woosley immediately aspired to become a preacher even though she was taught that the pulpit was divinely reserved for males. Her intense study of the Bible confirmed her belief in 1883 that “God, being no respecter of persons,” desired to use women as preachers no less than men. But Woosley did not actually preach until four years later. When the minister of her small Cumberland Presbyterian Church failed to show up on a Sunday morning, the elders selected a reluctant Woosley to lead the service. The session’s affirmation inspired Woosley to deliver her first sermon that day and she never stopped preaching. She proclaimed over 500 sermons in the next two years and wrote an influential book in defense of women preaching. The Nolin Presbytery made her the first ordained Presbyterian woman in 1889. But many Presbyterian leaders refused to accept her as a full-fledged partner in ministry because of her gender. In 1890, the Kentucky Synod ordered Woosley’s presbytery to remove her name from its roster of ministers.
Occom and Woosley are rightfully recognized today as important pioneers in the Presbyterian tradition, but their contested pathways to church leadership should cause us to pause and ask if our denomination has truly learned from past mistakes. I teach at a Presbyterian seminary that is increasingly becoming more ethnically, racially and theologically diverse as we welcome students from different countries and denominations that hold contrasting views on a host of issues ranging from human sexuality to the role of the Holy Spirit in worship. As we transition into the next phase of our institutional growth, we seek to meet these changes and challenges with deep appreciation for our past as well as genuine openness to hearing from all of our students. The conversations are sometimes uncomfortable, but they are always instructive.
In his commentary on Numbers, Dennis T. Olson commends the character of Moses’ leadership for the way he readily received both the institutionally appointed 70 elders and Eldad and Medad without pitting one group against the other. Tradition and innovation do not have to be enemies. Just because God is doing something “new” does not mean everything “old” must be discarded. Occom and Woosley transcended cultural and racial barriers to become unlikely, yet powerful, leaders with the crucial support of established church authorities, especially at the advent of their journeys. Are those of us in the centers of power today doing all that we can to actively identify and empower our newest members? The biblical past and our Presbyterian history teach us that the church is best served by a collaborative leadership that constantly integrates different members across diversities of age, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation and social class.
WILLIAM YOO is assistant professor of American religious and cultural history at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.
