Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 23:3 (Summer 2009)
Article: Book Review Saving Women: Retrieving Evangelistic Theology and Practice
Author: John Lommel

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Book Review
Saving Women: Retrieving Evangelistic Theology and Practice

Laceye C. Warner

(Baylor University Press, 2007)

Reviewed by

John Lommel

JOHN LOMMEL is the Academic Vice President at Alaska Christian College, a school focused on Native Alaskan young people. He received his M.Div. and Th.M. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston. He is blessed to be married to Kristen, to have Lydia as his daughter, and to have another child coming in August.

The church’s patriarchal past (and present) is notorious for hiding and diluting the work of women for the kingdom of God. Laceye C. Warner removes the shadow from the evangelistic work of seven women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in her book Saving Women: Retrieving Evangelistic Theology and Practice. Dr. Warner is the associate dean for academic formation and associate professor of the practice of evangelism and Methodist studies at Duke Divinity School. Her purpose in writing this book is that, “by retrieving historical precedents for evangelistic practices broadly conceived, significant models may be cultivated for a contemporary church that often struggles with its identity and purpose” (5), while also providing an “historical theology of women’s contributions to evangelistic ministries” (6). Warner summarizes the lives and ministries of Dorothy Ripley, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Julia A. J. Foote, Frances E. Willard, Helen Barrett Montgomery, and Mary McLeod Bethune in such a flowing narrative that one feels intimately engaged with each woman.

Ripley followed the itinerant evangelistic ministry model of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also attacked slavery in the United States and preached to the enslaved Africans. She received approbation from President Jefferson to preach to the slaves in order to legitimize her work among them. Ripley considered all peoples to be from one blood, and thus believed all needed to hear the gospel. Warner observes, “Ripley’s example legitimates an evangelistic theology that subverts the tradition of limited atonement by offering the gospel to all” (268).

The Grimké sisters worked hard for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, but also added important evangelistic theological contributions. The Grimkés developed an idea of sin that included a lack of self rather than an excess of pride. This lack of self then penetrates every aspect of society. Such an expansion of the definition of sin to include social and institutional dimensions also expands the realm of evangelism. Salvation, then, becomes empowerment to become all that God has designed a person to be, which includes education for women and slaves. This empowerment then breaks institutionalized sin. Although not all m...

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