This compendium presents the view that the challenge of the gender gap is of a personal and institutional concern. It is a concern about how our Christian community enables and empowers women and men to experience authentic Christian discipleship and reflect the ‘Imago Dei’ in our private and public world.

The book makes the case that much ‘unlearning’ is required on the part of individuals and institutions for us to move beyond irrational assumptions that hinder and hamper the growth and ministry of our Christian witness.

It highlights the fact that addressing the challenges of the gender gap provides opportunities to repudiate practices which disproportionately empower men and cause many women and some men to languish rather than flourish in their Christian service.

Phyllis Thompson is a Pentecostal educator, an ordained New Testament Church of God minister and a published writer. She has served her denomination in a variety of leadership roles, including Associate Pastor at one of the local churches. Before her retirement she served her denomination in England and Wales as the National Education Director from 2007 to 2018. During this role she pioneered and coordinated several initiatives, such as the Oliver Lyseight Annual Lectures and publications. Women in Christian Ministry – Challenges of the Gender Gap in the 21^st Century is the final compilation of the trilogy in this series.

She has over 40 years’ experience in education, specifically Christian education and adult and development education, and in this capacity has developed, facilitated, and contributed to training programmes for learners in community, further and higher education and theological institutions in the UK, Europe, Africa, and the USA.

Phyllis is an active member of various local, national, and international ecumenical forums including the Northampton Theological Society, the European Pentecostal Theological Association, the Church of God Global Board of Education, and the Church of God Historical Commission. Through these forums, she contributes to conversations and actions for change in the interest of the marginalised within and beyond Christian institutions from the Christian perspective.

She has edited the books Challenges of Pentecostal Theology in the 21^st Century (SPCK 2020) and Challenges of Black Pentecostal Leadership in the 21^stCentury (SPCK 2013). She has also written a chapter in Skin Deep (Seymour Press 2021) and Faith of Our Fathers (Pathway Press 2009).

Customer Reviews

4.5

2 reviews

Dr Issachar Lewinson

The book, Women in Christian Ministry addresses gender disparities by urging readers to abandon outdated mindsets and discriminatory practices that hinder women from flourishing in their faith and service. One of its merits is the opportunity it provides for readers to think about the myriads of challenges of the gender gap in Christian ministry and the suggestions of various options or opportunities for getting positively engaged in the discourse for a better future. I would highly recommend it as a reference and learning resource to male and female church leaders, students as well as people of other faiths in the UK and in other parts of the globe who wish to become more effective in their endeavours to diminish the gender inequalities in our world.
Eustace Constance

Phyllis Thompson has not written a triumphant book. She has written a patient one. This is not a compendium built to win an argument. It is one built to name a wound, then insist, gently and repeatedly, that the healing has not yet finished. The book’s central claim is unfussy but hard to sit with: the gender gap in Christian ministry is not merely a theological puzzle to be solved from the pulpit. It is, as the author frames it, both a personal and an institutional matter, the kind of concern that costs real women, in real churches, real years. Gifts that were never used. A calling that was never confirmed. What distinguishes this collection from others addressing similar terrain is its refusal of two easy exits. It chooses neither to shrink the gender gap down to a slogan nor to hide behind “it’s complicated” as licence to do nothing further. Instead, contributor after contributor asks a harder, more useful question: What would have to change for women to flourish in ministry, rather than merely be permitted into it? The recurring answer is unglamorous and for that reason, credible: formation, apprenticeship, time in the pulpit, trust. The ordinary scaffolding that men have often found ready-made and that women have had to build for themselves, inch by inch. The conclusion resists the temptation to tidy the argument into a manifesto. It leaves the reader with questions rather than instructions, an approach some will find frustrating and which I found, on reflection, to be the book’s most honest choice. A manifesto asks for agreement. The compendium asks for something slower: ‘unlearning’. I do not agree with every position argued in these pages, nor was I asked to. What I can say, having read it in full is that it belongs in the hands of anyone leading a congregation, a denomination, or a discipleship programme in the twenty-first century. I concluded, after reading this book, that although we are further along than our grandmothers were. We are nowhere near as far along as we like to tell ourselves. Bishop Eustace Constance Senior Pastor, New Testament Church of God, Ilford