Zachariah’s Mission
Zachariah Taft and women evangelists. Five women to encourage and inspire.
Part 1 by Catherine Coffey
Zachariah Taft was a man on a mission. After decades of women’s public ministry in the 1780s and 1790s alongside the evangelist John Wesley, the English Methodist Connection of 1803 passed a motion prohibiting women from speaking publicly to mixed groups and Taft was determined to fight this development.
Methodism in the late eighteenth century was an engine of evangelical revivalism, and brothers John and Charles Wesley’s influence spread across continents. The proliferation of Methodist churches in Britain meant that by John Wesley’s death in 1791 there were 71,000 Methodist members, and the spread of Methodism in the second Great Awakening created thousands more American converts. In our own time, the enduring popularity of hymns such as ‘And can it be’ or ‘O for a thousand tongues’ attest to the power and appeal of those revivals and the network of preachers and evangelists that were associated with them.
Women had been a central part of evangelical revival both as converts and as preachers. When asked why he encouraged females in preaching, Wesley replied that ‘God owns them in the conversion of sinners and who am I that I should withstand God’. The celebrated author George Elliot immortalised her aunt, preacher Elizabeth Evans as ‘Dinah Morris’ in her novel ‘Adam Bede’, and at least seventy-seven women preachers are recorded- forty-five of them as part of Taft’s campaign. However, the metamorphosis of a revivalist movement into a respectable denomination, saw female preaching come under attack.
The catalyst for the change in 1803 was none other than Taft’s own wife, Mary Barritt Taft. The Tafts operated as a husband and wife ministry team and their tour of Canterbury in 1802 drew the attention and disapproval of Joseph Benson who wrote to Taft to complain. At the Manchester Conference the next year, a groundswell of disapproval developed and the resolution restricting women’s preaching was passed. Taft was galvanised into action and began a protracted (if ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to get the motion reversed, writing pamphlets and then books dedicated to making the case for the value of the women’s ministries.
His work culminated in the publication of the two volume ‘Biographical Sketches of Holy Women’ in 1825 and 1828 in which he gathered as much evidence as he could to persuade his fellow ministers that the motion was wrongheaded. In his preface to the first volume he noted that ‘many females, whose praise was in all the churches while they lived, have suffered to drop into oblivion … though they never existed’. Two hundred years after Taft’s campaign, the role of women in establishing and developing evangelicalism is still a matter of some ignorance. The historian, Tim Larsen, has argued that women’s preaching ministry was an evangelical characteristic, something that distinguished evangelicals from high church and liberal Protestants. But when was the last time you heard about Mary Barritt, Elizabeth Collett or Dorothy Ripley? Taft’s purpose in publishing was ‘to offer a little encouragement’ to women evangelists who felt the call of God on their lives to preach and win souls for Christ. His biographical sketches of their lives and ministries have lost none of their power to inspire and encourage. First on his list was none other than Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley.
A bit more about Catherine Coffey
Catherine encountered the women evangelists described by Taft as an undergraduate and has been fascinated by them ever since. She loves hearing about the way women (past and present) have practiced faith in Christ, and the forgotten ministries of women who challenge modern believers with their energy and determination.