Female pastors continue to thrive despite being uncommon in the NEA area

Delta Digital News Service

Friday, Dec. 1, 2023

By Avery Jones | Editor

JONESBORO, Ark. – On June 14, the Southern Baptist Convention voted against allowing female pastors in churches associated with the convention during their annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, according to a press release from the Baptist Press. They have also voted to expel three churches that have female pastors from the convention.

While female spiritual leadership is becoming more and more prevalent in churches today across several denominations and sects, it’s still relatively uncommon in Northeast Arkansas. 

According to the Pew Research Center, only certain denominations allow women to be ordained, the most relevant for this area being Methodists, Church of Christ, Episcopals, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Southern Baptists generally do not allow female preachers.

While it’s still relatively uncommon, there are a few female pastors in the area. Reverend Kelly Giese is the head pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Newport. 

She’s been serving as a pastor for twenty-six years and at her current church for two years. She’s originally from Arkansas and currently living in Newport.

She was drawn to community service growing up. After she graduated from high school, she was very involved in vacation Bible school and Sunday school. 

She also started working with disabled children from a group home. She worked in education for twelve years and has a master’s degree in education. A friend of the people from the group home died, and she was asked to preach at the funeral.

“I got a hold of my pastor at the time, and I said, here’s what’s going on,” Giese stated. “And that person said, you can preach this service better than I can. You know this person…From there, I just started exploring ministry.”

She described her decision to pursue ministry as a “calling.” She followed one of the usual pathways to ordination.

Her church held a conference to verify that she had been called and voted to receive her. She was assigned a mentor and decided what path she was interested in. She went through a process to become licensed which made her a local pastor.

“There’s a lot of other avenues out of there. I just happened to choose to go to seminary and then work through towards ordination after that, but there’s other pathways,” Giese said.

She attended the Duke Divinity School in North Carolina which was founded by the Methodist Church. By that point, she said, it had become fairly common for women to go to seminary and become pastors.

“I graduated from high school in 1978, and I had never met a female pastor at that point,” she said. “From that time forward…it became much more common…All of the women who went before me helped me.”

“I graduated from high school in 1978, and I had never met a female pastor at that point,” she said. “From that time forward…it became much more common…All of the women who went before me helped me.”

– Reverend Kelly Giese, Head pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Newport. 

Her duties as a pastor vary from day to day. While she of course preaches and leads worship, she also has many other responsibilities. 

 She does a lot of community service, like visiting people in the hospital or nursing home, mentoring children, or helping with the food pantry. In the church, she helps with ordering curriculum for Sunday school, preparing for worship, and church maintenance as well as administration. 

“I can’t say that that’s my job, but it’s what’s needed by the congregation…” Giese said. “I’ve caught three birds, there was a possum in the toilet, and we caught a raccoon.”

Another pastor, Reverend Annie Jones, is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Newport. She’s been serving there since 2021. She’s been a priest since 2020 and is originally from Iowa.

Like Giese, she also experienced a “calling.” Before she was a priest, Jones was working as an elementary school teacher.

“Callings are very interesting and tricky things…I tried to ignore it, and that didn’t work out well for me,” Jones said.

She felt called to ministry since she was thirteen years old, but in college, she chose to go a different direction because, according to her, first-generation college students are generally expected to choose a “safe” path–a career that’s stable and provides a comfortable living. However, when Jones went on a trip to Eswatini, Africa (formerly Swaziland), she could no longer ignore the call.

In Eswatini, Jones was listening to several speakers, and one speaker was talking about callings. Jones felt like she couldn’t keep running from what she felt was the “internal voice of God” telling her to become a priest.

She had to do three years of seminary to become an Episcopal priest. She attended Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. She also did clinical pastoral education, or CPE, which is 400 hours of hands-on chaplaincy work. 

Most people do their CPE in hospital settings, but Jones had the opportunity to work with San Francisco Night Ministry where she walked the San Francisco streets from ten p.m. to two a.m. ministering to anyone who needed it.

Like Giese, Jones is expected to keep up with many duties as a priest. Jones said that because churches don’t usually have a large staff, pastors and priests are expected to be a jack of all trades.

It’s relatively common for women to be pastors in the Episcopal Church. According to Jones, they started ordaining women in the 1970s. In the diocese where she came from, the percentage of ordained women was well over fifty percent.

Here in this region, the percentage is much lower. However, Jones says that it’s changing. 

Jones said that what she most loves about her job is the people.

“Being able to walk with people in the hardest and the happiest times, and being permitted to be in those spaces with them,” Jones stated. “And to help hold them and support them and pray with them and be an encouragement…we see the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in ways that many family members don’t actually even see of others, and that is a huge, huge responsibility, but also one of the amazing parts of the job.”

“Being able to walk with people in the hardest and the happiest times, and being permitted to be in those spaces with them,” …

– Rev. Annie Jones, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Newport

Captain Teri Smith is another local female pastor from the Salvation Army Church in Jonesboro. She’s part of a Protestant sect called the Salvationists, who have similar beliefs to Methodists.

She has been working with the Salvation Army since 2010 and has been an ordained minister since 2015. She was working as a youth pastor before she was ordained.

Smith and her husband, Captain Charles, decided to pursue ministry together. In the Salvation Army, both husband and wife have to become ordained together, not just one of them. Furthermore, if a single person is ordained, they can’t marry anyone unless the other person is also ordained or in the process of becoming ordained.

To become ordained, Smith attended the Salvation Army’s training center in Atlanta, Georgia, where she studied for two years. It’s similar to a seminary, but also teaches how to run a shelter and other practical aspects of working with the Salvation Army.

 As a minister, Smith is also considered one of the commanding officers of the Salvation Army’s Jonesboro region. She and her husband direct eight counties. Her duties depend on how many volunteers and employees they have at the moment.

Currently, Smith’s duties include administration, like human resources and finances, and she and her husband share the duties of preaching. She also oversees Safe From Harm, which is a child protective training program that all of the volunteers and teachers in their church have to undergo.

In addition, Smith is the director of the women’s and youth ministry program. She teaches the lessons most of the time. She also is a part of the disaster services unit; whenever and wherever there’s a disaster, Smith is deployed with a team of other officers to assist.

“There are a lot of arms. As commanding officers, we are charged to ensure that things will run smoothly and sometimes, that means we are the ones that have to head it up,” Smith said. “Other times, we hope to train someone, or help encourage others to be a part of that, and then we just oversee it, but if there is no one to fill in that duty, as I’ve had to do right now with our finances…I’m having to fill that duty.”

“There are a lot of arms. As commanding officers, we are charged to ensure that things will run smoothly and sometimes, that means we are the ones that have to head it up,” Smith said.

– Capt. Teri Smith, Salvation Army Church in Jonesboro

Additionally, as officers, Captains Teri and Charles Smith can be deployed or moved at any time. They’re currently living in Jonesboro, but if they get called to move to another region, they will have to leave. Teri is originally from Ohio.

Similar to other denominations, women ministers are very common in the Salvationist Church. In their doctrine, they believe that it’s better for married couples to be ministers together. The couple is supposed to act as a unit.

“There’s no difference between male or female in that,” Smith said. “If you feel called, that is something that the Salvation Army will pursue.”

In the 1800s, when the Salvation Army was first established, Catherine Booth, the wife of the founder, felt the call to ministry. She wrote many articles, pamphlets, and books advocating for female ministers.

However, Smith still faces much prejudice as a female minister. According to her, it’s still not widely accepted in many circles for women to be ministers. For example, it’s difficult for her to be part of ministerial alliances where there are many ministers that don’t believe women should be ministers.

“My job isn’t to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” Smith said. “If that’s where I feel God has called me, then no matter if people agree or disagree, I don’t need that affirmation…”

Smith said many people believe that women shouldn’t be pastors because theological beliefs and certain interpretations of the Bible. However, Smith believes that because there were some women in the Bible who were in positions of authority, women are permitted to be ministers.

Additionally, some people even refuse to acknowledge her authority as a commanding officer of the Salvation Army. In her experience, sometimes people will ask for the captain, and when she says that she’s a captain, they’ll ask for “the man.”

However, at the end of the day, Smith said that “our heart is to be able to help people.” Because of the nature of her work, sometimes when people come to them, it’s because they’re having the worst day of their lives. What she truly wants is to help people, and the hardest things are the occasions when she’s unable to help.

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Note: Feature photo is of Rev. Annie Jones.