Fall 2019 · Vol. 48 No. 2 · pp. 191–194
Book Review
Women in Ministry Leadership: The Journey of the Mennonite Brethren, 1954–2010
Douglas J. Heidebrecht. Winnipeg, MB: Kindred, 2019. 326 pages.
In Women in Ministry Leadership, Doug Heidebrecht provides an institutional history of how the Mennonite Brethren (MB) Church in Canada and the United States has wrestled with this contentious topic. He writes, “No other issue has received this level of attention by the Mennonite Brethren during the second half of the 20th century” (1). With this book, {192} Heidebrecht charts the contours of the debate from 1954 to 2010.
He begins with two chapters introducing the MB denomination and shows how its position on women in pastoral leadership has shifted. These chapters include historical background from the 1870s, the 1957 decision to stop ordaining women for international missionary service, and the way women raised the issue in church periodicals in the 1960s and ’70s. In the following chapters, Heidebrecht charts the debates decade by decade, summarizing vast amounts of material: conference resolutions proposed and amended, study papers written, task forces established, board minutes and denominational periodicals published. He recounts how the discussion evolved and changed as it moved within congregations, conferences, and academic settings.
Heidebrecht’s main interest with this recounting is hermeneutical; he focuses on how the Bible was used to both advocate for and lobby against women in ministry. Within this framework, the theological topics of God’s revelation, truth, and the relationship between congregation and denominational structures surfaced repeatedly, year after year.
Women in Ministry Leadership is fascinating on many levels. Heidebrecht highlights repeating patterns and resonances, and his careful research provides a detailed picture of how questions about women’s involvement in ministry were framed differently in their respective contexts. Of particular note are his observations about the distinctions between conversations in the United States and Canada, although towards the end of the book he speaks only of the Canadian context, leaving the reader to wonder what was happening in the United States. Throughout this historical survey, we see how tenacious personalities shaped the trajectory of church decisions. I especially appreciated the way Heidebrecht connected MB thinking on women in leadership to the larger evangelical movement.
This book will be useful for helping newcomers to the denomination understand the MB church’s history with this controversial topic; it will also be enlightening for those who witnessed and participated in these debates. Churches need dedicated historians like Heidebrecht who can synthesize and analyze, holding up a mirror for a denomination’s self-reflection.
My hope was that the book would tell us about “women in ministry leadership,” as the title suggests, but I was disappointed to discover it has very little to say about the actual women who pioneered in pastoral leadership. The book is based on Heidebrecht’s dissertation, titled “Contextualizing Community Hermeneutics: Mennonite Brethren and Women in Church Leadership,” which would have been a more accurate title for this volume. Heidebrecht tells us early in the book the number of women ordained in the 1940s and ’50s (19), but information about women in ministry after that period is not highlighted (236, 261).
This is primarily a book about church deliberations, and since most {193} of the power structures in the MB church are patriarchal, men’s voices predominate. Heidebrecht wants to provide a “thick description” (6) using a wide variety of church records, which cannot adequately represent women’s experience because most records were written or edited by men. Heidebrecht does cite articles authored by women, along with columns and letters to the editor in church periodicals; however, almost all that material was vetted through male editors. Women who chose to speak out on this issue had to live with real-life consequences of sharing an unpopular opinion in a church that was hostile to women leaders. Men simply did not face the same consequences for sharing their opinions. Heidebrecht provides some tantalizing glimpses of women-based organizations where women may have been able to speak more freely, such as the periodical Sophia and the MB Women’s Network, but these are not examined extensively. Even photographs included in the book reflect this male-dominated perspective, with twice as many men pictured as women—beginning with the front cover.
Heidebrecht was a participant in these church debates during the later decades he is examining, and he records himself as encouraging people to be “honest and vulnerable” about this issue (255). Curiously, he never lets readers know his own view on the topic of women in ministry leadership. The closest we come to Heidebrecht’s opinion is a comment someone else made about a presentation he gave, saying that “fair discussion should include someone who is opposed to women in ministry leadership” (258). By not stating explicitly his point of view, Heidebrecht leaves the impression that the historian must be neutral and unbiased, reporting events dispassionately. Heidebrecht’s own observations are that social contexts shape our reading of the Bible, but they also shape our reading of history.
Heidebrecht does not step back from his research to wonder what is missing in the vast amount of material he surveyed. Therefore, I hope that this will be just the first of several books on women in ministry leadership commissioned by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Society. We need a companion volume, written by women, that tells the stories of faithful women ministers in the MB church, the challenges they faced and the theological insights they have gleaned. This would go some distance in addressing the problems that surface in this book, namely, that in the midst of these voluminous debates, there is no evidence of whether the conference encouraged women in ministry, no record of deliberations on how to equip women pastors to survive in a setting where parishioners and colleagues doubted their calls and minimized their gifts, no evident strategies displaying how to begin fostering leadership skills in girls. Nothing shows the power of God working in women pastors so much as the fact that there were women who ministered, in increasing numbers, {194} despite so little encouragement from denominational leadership.
Heidebrecht’s meticulous historical research is a gift to the church, and it was clearly a painstaking labor of love. It is a valuable book, tracking the tortuous road a denomination has taken to address the topic of women in pastoral leadership. Since this issue is still far from resolved in the MB church today, my prayer is that the insights from this book may guide the way forward.
