Women preach here. Women lead here. Women pastor here. Not as an exception, an experiment, or a concession — but as a conviction rooted in Scripture, carried by our Methodist story, and confirmed every time a woman opens the Word and the room leans in.

Reviewed by the Beaverton First UMC editorial team · Fact-checked July 2026

Some churches treat women in the pulpit as a question to manage. We want to be plain about where Beaverton First stands: we fully support women as pastors, preachers, teachers, and leaders at every level of the church’s life. The United Methodist Church has ordained women with full clergy rights since 1956 — seventy years this year — and women now serve at every level of the denomination — a woman led the churchwide Council of Bishops from 2024 to 2026.¹² This is not a policy we tolerate. It is a conviction we celebrate. Here is why.

Because the Bible keeps handing women the microphone

Read the whole story and a pattern emerges. When Israel needed judgment and deliverance, Deborah — “a prophet” — was leading the nation, and generals would not go to battle without her.³ When the rediscovered book of the Law needed authenticating, the king’s officials — walking past male prophets to do it — took it to the prophet Huldah.⁴ When God announced what the age of the Spirit would look like, the promise was explicit: “Your sons and daughters will prophesy… on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit.”⁵ Peter stood up at Pentecost and declared that promise fulfilled.⁵

And at the hinge of history itself: the first person commissioned to announce the resurrection — the news on which the whole church stands — was a woman. “Go… to my brothers and tell them,” the risen Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, making her, as the old teachers put it, the apostle to the apostles.⁶ The first Christian sermon ever preached was three words long, and a woman preached it: “I have seen the Lord.”⁶

The first Christian sermon was three words long, and a woman preached it: “I have seen the Lord.”

The early church ran on women’s leadership. Paul entrusts his letter to the Romans — arguably the most influential document in Christian history — to Phoebe, “a deacon of the church,” to carry and deliver.⁷ In the same chapter he greets Junia, “outstanding among the apostles.”⁷ Priscilla, named ahead of her husband more often than not, takes the brilliant preacher Apollos aside and teaches him theology.⁸ And over it all stands Paul’s great leveling sentence: in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”⁹

What about the verses that say otherwise?

We will not pretend they are not there. A line in 1 Timothy and another in 1 Corinthians tell women to be silent, and some traditions build their whole practice on those two verses. We read them the way Methodists read everything — Scripture first, with the church’s tradition, our God-given reason, and honest experience alongside¹ — and notice that the same Paul who wrote those lines also gave women instructions for how to pray and prophesy aloud, in worship,¹⁰ and filled his greetings with women co-workers, deacons, and apostles by name.⁷ Paul cannot be forbidding everywhere what he celebrates elsewhere; the restrictions read like answers to local problems in particular congregations, not a permanent gag order on half the church.¹ A faith that welcomes hard questions can hold that tension honestly — and land where the deep current of Scripture runs.

Because this is our family story

Methodism exists, in no small part, because women built it — Susanna Wesley’s packed kitchen congregation, Mary Bosanquet’s “extraordinary call,” Barbara Heck kindling the first American societies. When John Wesley was confronted with women whose preaching bore unmistakable fruit, he did the Methodist thing: he looked at the evidence of grace and made room.¹¹ The African Methodist preacher Jarena Lee put the whole argument in one sentence back in 1836: “If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? Seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?”¹¹

Our own denomination took too long to catch up — women like Anna Howard Shaw were refused and un-licensed before finding their way to ordination — but when it did, it did not look back: full clergy rights in 1956, the first woman bishop in 1980, and today women leading congregations and conferences — including, from 2024 to 2026, the Council of Bishops itself.²¹²

Because the world needs this now, maybe more than ever

This is not, for us, an abstract doctrine that stays on a shelf. Look around: communities are lonelier, angrier, and more worn down than they have been in a long time, and the neighbors who hold so much of daily life together — the caregivers, the teachers, the ones checking on the elderly widow down the street — are so often women whose wisdom never gets a platform. A church that silences women’s voices is not just being unfair; it is unilaterally disarming. It walks into the world’s hardest problems having benched half its wisdom, half its compassion, and half its called and gifted leaders.

We think the moment asks for the opposite. We want girls growing up at Beaverton First to know — not be told, but see — that God may call them to anything. We want boys growing up here to find nothing strange about receiving the Word of God from a woman, because there is nothing strange about it. And we want our neighbors in Beaverton, whatever they believe, to know there is a church in town where the full range of God’s gifts is welcome in the pulpit and everywhere else. Grace has never checked credentials at the door⁹ — and a church shaped by that grace should not either.

Questions people ask

Does The United Methodist Church ordain women?

Yes — fully, at every level, since 1956, because the church believes God calls both women and men to ordained ministry.¹²

Doesn’t the Bible say women should be silent in church?

Two passages say something like that, and we take them seriously — as instructions to particular congregations with particular problems. The same apostle assumes women pray and prophesy aloud in worship and names women deacons and apostles, and the Bible’s larger arc, from Deborah to Mary Magdalene to Pentecost, keeps placing God’s word in women’s mouths.¹¹⁰

Do women preach at Beaverton First?

Yes — women preach, teach, and lead here as a normal and treasured part of our life together. Come and hear for yourself.

If you have ever been told there was no place for your gifts — or you would simply like to worship somewhere that believes there is — you are warmly welcome to join us on a Sunday.