[Sister Alvear]

In recent history, the founder of the Pilgrim Holiness Church, Seth Rees claimed that "no Church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women." (Hardisty, Nancy, Lucille Sides Dayton, and Donald W. Dayton, Women in the Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Tradition, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, 226-34, NY, Simen & Schuster, 1979).

Barbara J. MacHaffee states that women are truly instruments in the hands of God as they preach. She writes, "so far as Quaker women and their societies were concerned, they were simply instruments of God’s will when exercising a preaching ministry. (Barbara J. MacHafee, Her Story: Women In Christian Tradition, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1986, pg. 110).

Books could be written on women who preached in the early church. Women such as Maximilla and Prisca, who were two women preachers of the Montanist. Olympians, a deaconess of Constantinople and friend of Jon Chyposton. Sabeneana, aunt of Chysposton was also a woman preacher. Mary Greek in Sciption which mentions deaconesses belonging to Asia Minor: Nunes, Stateges Prebu and Matrona, at Axylos; Masa, Aurelia Faustina, and Paula at Loadicea; Combusta, Elaphea - deaconesses of the Encratik sect of Nevenne;
Timothea, at Koryos in Alicia; and Arte, in Aphrodesia in Caria