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Women Breaking Through to Top Roles in Black Churches

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The Rev. Gina Stewart, left, senior pastor of Christ Missionary Baptist Church, comforts Hatshepsut Bandele during a church service Dec. 5, 2021, in Memphis, Tenn. “Whenever a woman is placed in a role that is traditionally male, there’s always some negativity that surrounds it,” Stewart said, but in her first 90 days as president, she has received congratulatory calls from some male denominational leaders and support from her male predecessors, without encountering “any major resistance.” (AP Photo/Karen Pulfer Focht)

(RNS/AP) — When an opening for bishop arose in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 2010, Teresa Jefferson-Snorton looked around to see if any women were offering to be candidates.

None were.

She knew that since its founding 140 years earlier by Black Methodists emerging from slavery, the denomination had never elected a woman bishop.

“I was like, oh my goodness, this can’t be,” she recalled. “If no one steps forward, it gives the church a pass.”

Jefferson-Snorton, who had spent decades as a pastor, chaplain and theological educator, undertook several months of intensive prayer before discerning she was “feeling a call to this” from God. Then she put her name forward.

“To an extent, it was a political statement,” said Jefferson-Snorton.

Bishop Teresa Jefferson-Snorton of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church is shown at Moody Temple CME Church in Fairfield, Ala., on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. Jefferson-Snorton is the CME Church's first and only woman bishop. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)

Bishop Teresa Jefferson-Snorton of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church is shown at Moody Temple CME Church in Fairfield, Ala., on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. Jefferson-Snorton is the CME Church’s first and only woman bishop. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)

Despite opposition from some who said the denomination wasn’t ready for a woman bishop, she was elected the CME’s 59th bishop, overseeing 217 churches across Alabama and Florida.

Jefferson-Snorton said people there have come to accept her in the role — if awkwardly at times.

“I can’t tell you how many times people said, ‘Yes sir,’ to me,” she said. “I just remind them, ‘Yes ma’am’ is OK.”

Eleven years later, she remains the CME’s only woman bishop, a status made vivid in an official photo of the church’s college of bishops, where she sits among 16 men, all in purple and white vestments.

Most major Black Christian denominations in the U.S. have no doctrinal bar to ordained women leaders in the way that Catholicism and some other denominations do, and women have preached and been ordained in historically Black churches since at least the 19th century.

Yet denominational leadership remained all-male until the 21st century, and women are still the exception in the top rungs.