The Role of Women in the Early Church

(This is continuing a series of post started Sept. 13)

Women were an active, important part of the church in the very beginning.  

At the birth of the church, women were engaged in prayer along with the disciples and others.

Act 1:13 -14 And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James.  All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

 In Romans 16, Paul speaks of Phoebe as a deacon  (the word translated servant is diakonos, usually translated deacon), of  Prisca and Aquila as fellow workers in Christ Jesus, and of Junia as “of note among the apostles”.

Euodia and Syntyche are called his fellow-workers in the gospel in Philippians 4:2-3.

Paul tells of women who were the leaders of such house churches (Apphia in Philemon 2; Prisca in I Corinthians 16:19),  Nympha of Laodicea (Colossians 4:15).

Lydia in Acts 16, was first convert in Phillipi The four daughters of Philip appear in Acts 21:9 as prophetesses.

Women were active in service, in speaking, and in leadership in the church.

God designed men and women to be one in Christ. Sin violated this design and made us competitors instead of teammates. But when Jesus died on the cross, He took the whole mass of alienated men and women and brought all of us together.  We are now members of one Body, as Paul said, and there should be no division in the body (1Cor12, Romans 12).
Jesus prayed that we would all be one, and share a fellowship like He had with the Father.

We get a glimpse of this in Acts 1 as the men and women who were followers of Jesus “continued with one accord in prayer and supplication”.  As this group of men and women in “one accord” prayed together, God did an amazing thing. The Holy Spirit came upon them— all of them—“and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”(Acts 2: 4). The Holy Spirit didn’t just bounce around to the men and skip over the women. He filled them all! As Peter explained to the onlookers, this outpouring was God’s fulfillment of Joel 2: 28-29: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.

As God poured out His Spirit, He ended the divisions among us. We are one in Christ.
As members of one body, we are all part of a whole, and we must work together to stay alive. We are each different, have different gifts and functions, but we are a team, a unit. We value each other and are connected and we need one another.

Just as we understand that in this body, there can no longer be a hierarchy based on race, economics, or social status, neither can there be based on gender.

Gal_3:28  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.