Editor’s Note: This is Part III of the series “Priscilla and the Explosion of Women Church Planters Today,” based on Terran Williams’s keynote address at CBE’s 2024 Tell Her Story conference. You can read Part I here, Part II here, or listen to the address in full here.
I would like to begin Part III by sharing two stories from Cape Town, South Africa: my corner of the world. I have a friend who is involved in reconciliation work, which means churches revisit wounds of the past and try to bring reconciliation to what may be centuries-old wounds. This friend was called to get involved in an interdenominational reconciliation between the Dutch Reformed Church and the Moravian Church in Cape Town.
When the early European settlers came to South Africa, they set up the Dutch Reformed Church, which basically dominated the landscape. Then, in 1737, the German Moravian church sent a missionary called Georg Smith, who set up another church, where he taught and converted people. In 1744, after he had baptized five adults, the Dutch Reformed Church leaders became threatened, and they used their political powers to evict him from Cape Town. It was a heartbreaking situation to this beautiful community that had taken off—their leader was suddenly gone. So, in the modern day, when my friend stepped in, the Dutch Reform Church was extending apology, and the Moravian church was extending forgiveness and reconciliation.
What is fascinating is, as my friend got involved in this case, the Moravian church said, we’ve done some wounding to ourselves, and we would like your help with these two wounds. The first one is a gender wound with a fascinating irony. If you do a cursory study on the history of the Moravian church in South Africa, you know that Georg Smith was deported from the Cape (the cause of the rift between the Moravian Church and the Dutch Reformed Church), but in the 1790s, three more German Moravian missionaries arrived in Cape Town and reestablished Georg Smith’s work—heroes come to save the day! But here’s the problem: These history reports neglect the story of one of George Smith’s early converts, Magdalena.
Magdalena and Martha
Georg Smith not only converted Magdalena; he gave her a New Testament, taught her how to read, and discipled her. When Georg Smith was deported, Magdalena took over teaching and leading this community. When the three missionaries arrived decades later, Magdalena was now an old woman who was leading and had managed to hold this community together. So that is the gender reconciliation that needed to take place: Why was the story of this woman deleted from the history books of this denomination?
But Magdalena’s story leads to the third wound that my friend needed to help with. As you study what happened when Georg Smith left, you’ll find that in fact he hadn’t only trained up one woman—he’d trained up two women who continued his pastoral and teaching role with these believers in Cape Town.
The second woman, named Martha, was an indigenous Khoikhoi woman. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a stratification of races in Cape Town—White, mixed-race or Griqua (which Magdalena was), then Khoikhoi right at the bottom. The wounding in the Moravian Church had basically been to erase from its memory not only women, but when a woman was mentioned, erasing the woman of the lowest status in that racist hierarchy—Martha, a Khoikhoi woman. So there needed to be some interracial healing in this denomination as well.
Katerina Van Blerk
Let me tell you about another woman in the Western Cape who has been forgotten by church history. In fact, she is so forgotten that I only found out about her last week—and I am from that area!
In most in the world where there is a vibrant presence of Christianity, there usually are some revivals in the history, an outbreak of faith and outpouring of the spirit, alongside vibrant gospel sharing that leads to the conversion of many people. In the Western Cape, there was a revival that broke out in the 1860s and ended up being a multiracial revival.
It began with farm workers and then spread to farms across the Western Cape. And in fact, the Cape Revival from the 1860s is known as “Andrew Murray’s revival” in the Western Cape, and we feel the effects of the revival to this day. Andrew Murray (1828–1917) was the local pastor, who has written some of the most famous devotionals in the world, such as Abide in Christ (1864). It therefore makes sense to think that Murray spearheaded this revival, and it’s true that he came into leadership in this revival.
But last week I discovered how the revival started. As it turns out, there’s one particular farm where the farm workers had been enslaved up until the 1830s. Because they were enslaved, they were made to go to church. Well, once the British arrived in the Western Cape and put an end to the keeping of slaves, they still remained farm workers, though no longer enslaved. They had some more liberties and ultimately stopped coming to church. The farm owner, Opa Naude (also called Grandad Naude) still wanted these farm workers to come to church, but he thought that High Dutch was the only language worthy of God and insisted on its use in church. This, although Grandad Naude struggled to speak High Dutch himself! The largely uneducated farm workers couldn’t understand it, which did not encourage them to want to attend church. They didn’t have to go, so they didn’t.
At sixteen years old, Grandad Naude’s granddaughter, Katerina van Blerk, visited the farm and noticed that these farm workers were not going to church. They’d basically given up on their faith, and she carried such a burden about this that she took to praying intensely for a week. She was fasting and praying that God would get hold of the farm workers on this farm. She also had a bit of influence over her granddad, so she took over the church meetings. Katerina really believed that God was going to get ahold of them and began to meet with them on Monday nights. She used a bit of advertising, walking around and telling the farm workers, “Please come on Monday night, because I’m going to tell you a story.” When they arrived, she shared the story of Jonah.
Andrew Murray influenced Katerina’s telling of the story—he was her pastor! So, she told Jonah’s story like it was a sermon she had heard from Murray. As she was preaching, she came to the part where the ship’s captain asks Jonah, “Why are you sleeping? Why don’t you call on your God?” and suddenly there was a loud rumbling noise. It sounded like there was a train approaching. Katerina stopped, and everybody started looking out the windows, asking, “What’s going on?” In the room, the rumbling got louder and louder. Suddenly, the room started to shake. And then, in an instant, upon the many farm workers who were gathered, there was such a powerful outpouring of the Spirit that they took to weeping for hours and days on end.
And this begins the revival. The weeping soon gives way to joy; conviction gives a way to assurance of salvation; and the Cape Revival is underway thanks to a teenage girl who took over an outreach meeting and taught the Scriptures as best as she could. If ever there’s an example of a woman whose preaching came under the power of the Spirit, I’d put to you Katharina von Blerk as one of those beautiful examples.
The Spirit of God Is Moving
Let me pull all these threads together by returning to my original questions from Part I: Can a woman teach and preach and plant a church and care for those that she gathers? Can she disciple converts, gather them into a community, and play a pastor-teacher role? The modern stories from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa show it happens today. It happened in Cape Town, South Africa. I propose that it happened through Priscilla in New Testament times. In sum, yes! A woman can teach and preach and plant a church and care for those that she gathers—and should, as the Lord calls her.
I want to make a plea, especially to the American church that is at the forefront of sending missionaries. As a person in Africa, I’m so grateful to the global passion that many American churches have, investing workers and money to evangelize the world. We receive all of your work, but I also implore complementarians to be less dogmatic in your interpretations of verses such as 1 Timothy 2:12. I think that you’ve misinterpreted that passage. I think a more careful study of 1 Timothy 2 suggests that Paul is addressing a very local situation, and a careful study of the word authentēo indicates Paul would never have used that word when he had other words that were perfectly good to go that he did use for pastoral leadership. As difficult as it is to translate 1 Timothy 2, I think that we need to just acknowledge that it’s a difficult passage to translate, and that there’s plenty of indicators that a local situation is being addressed.
We especially should not look at women today through a mistranslation or interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12 or any verse, but through the Great Commission, in which Jesus was emphatic that the whole church participate, not just the apostles. Jesus says, “I will be with you till the end,” referring to us. Every believer is commissioned to go and make disciples—not only evangelizing them but also discipling them and teaching them to obey everything.
None of the women leading and making disciples across the globe are competing with me. Katerina van Blerk was not competing with Andrew Murray. Magdalena and Martha were not competing with the male missionaries (or each other). Each of these women have (or had) the Spirit of God on them, just as many of their brothers do. A passion for the Great Commission comes upon them—a passion for planting churches and caring for their converts.
It’s the Spirit of God rather than a passion for feminism that is behind this trend. I think about the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, when the theological question of what to do with Gentile converts was posed. This really was a question of how to interpret the Scriptures, because many early believers interpreted the Scriptures as insisting that these Gentile believers needed to effectively become Jews. They could have even referred to the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 5, where he says he’s not come to abolish the law of Moses, and Matthew 10, where he tells the disciples not to go proclaim him to the Gentiles. And then again, in Matthew 15, where he says the focus of his work is on Israel. And yet these Gentiles—what to do with them? Well, in their attempt to try reach a theologically correct interpretation of the various Scriptures on the matter, the council in Acts 15 admitted as evidence what the Spirit of God was doing. Peter shared his story, as did Paul and Barnabas, of how the Spirit of God was coming upon gathered Gentiles. And without any commitment to the law of Moses, they were coming into the full liberty of the presence of the Spirit.
In light of this, I want to propose that, although there are conflicting interpretations of what to do with verses such as 1 Timothy 2:12, we should admit into this conversation what the Spirit of God is doing around the world. And I want to again make a plea to complementarian friends with influence in their local churches around the world—be very careful that you don’t damage the advance of the Great Commission being fulfilled in our generation. In 1980, there were only a billion people that didn’t have access to the gospel. That number has doubled to 2.1 billion (as of 2024). We so desperately need both men and women who have gifts of evangelism, gifts of teaching, gifts of pastoring, gifts of leadership. We need everybody with these gifts to deploy them.
I rejoice as a brother in Christ that it’s not just me who gets to plant churches and teach churches and gather communities around the gospel, but my sisters are right there in the front lines with me. I bless your work.
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