Thanks for that great introduction, van. It's an honor
to be here and to stand here in front of you. Today at the
Sisters of the Spirit Conference. I have some
presenter jitters about technology, so please bear with
me.
And I also want to acknowledge thank you for being here in the
room. And I know that there are as many and more of you joining
us by zoom today, so welcome to my Zoomer friends as well.
I'm speaking today about the Reverend Bernice Gerard.
When I grew up as a teenager in the 1970s and 80s, I remember
why Bernice Gerard on TV with my dad.
My dad.
Who had long since abandoned any church involvement, but he
called her the lady preacher. Turn it up, he would say. I like
listening to her.
Gerard was often told that she preached like a man.
But did she?
I would argue she preached like a woman.
But like a woman with authority.
And that was confusing.
And intriguing for people.
I think the curiosity and the intrigue came because in the
20th century, binary gender constructions in society and
church cultures led people to expect that men were smart and
logical and in charge, and women should be emotive and soft.
And nurturing.
And Gerard's voice defied all those cultural constructs.
Because her authority was not borne out of her striving to be
like a man.
And.
She also had no time for church cultures that told women that
they should adopt some hyper feminine role dictated to them
by, oh, I don't know, things that dominated the last quarter
of the 20th century and evangelical and Pentecostal
circles. Things like love and respect. I ever heard of that
book wild at heart? Maybe some of the men have heard of that.
For ease, Gerard rejected those kinds of gendered prescriptions
that had seeped into church culture by the end of the 20th
century. And in rejecting all that, her voice was so unusual.
Bernice Gerard lived from 1923 to 2008 and she was a force.
She was well known as a Vancouver Pentecostal pastor,
but she was also a politician, a university chaplain and a media
personality.
And my current project which is just wrapping up.
Is writing an academic biography of her life?
I'm basing that book on her own life writing, including her
autobiographies. She wrote it more than once, 2 versions.
But also her sermon notes, her correspondence and her vast
personal archives. I am a historian and I study gender.
Gerard's life provides me with a very complex case of how one
individual negotiated with the gendered prescriptions that she
encountered.
My book is based on an exploration of Gerard's interior
world.
I've often asked myself what was she thinking.
Her interior world and her evolving faith because it did
evolve. And that evolution of her faith often found her in
conflict. Conflict with her own denominational authorities,
conflict with fellow believers in the wider evangelical and
ecumenical world.
And also in conflict with her secular associates.
At the same time, Gerrard was widely respected by her campus
colleagues, her brothers and sisters in Christ.
And her political peers.
People respected her for her determination and her influence,
even when they didn't always share her views.
The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada with which Bernice was
associated.
The POC holds up her memory as a model of ministry to be revered.
But I will argue in this paper this afternoon that while Gerard
shared some characteristics that were typical of other
Pentecostal women in ministry, there are multiple ways in which
she was not typical at all.
And I suggest that Bernice Gerrard was a product of her
times, whose model?
Just might not be transferable across time.
I also suggest that her ministry model was provocative.
And if her voice could be heard in the current debates in church
circles about gender, sexuality, gender and leadership.
It's debatable whether her position on these questions
would actually be welcomed by Canadian Pentecostals today.
She was called the Lady baritone, and I hope to be able
to demonstrate to you just why.
I'm so happy.
So the deepest voice that you hear in that recording, and if
we can stop the recording, there is that oh good, not up to me,
good.
The deepest voice you heard there was Bernice Gerrard, the
lady baritone.
After she concluded her education to become a teacher,
Bernice Gerard met the McCall Sisters in Rosslyn, BC, during
World War Two, where she was placed as a teacher.
And the three of them together formed a ministry trio.
The girls were warned that there would be limits to their
ministry reach, but Gerard was delighted to recount, after
traveling for 15 years internationally with Gene and
Velma McCall, that they're All Girl Act. Her words, not mine,
was not actually a liability after all. On the contrary,
they're unusual. Combination of musical and oratory skill opened
a lot of doors for them.
Across Europe, into the Holy Land, through South America and
back to North America. Back and forth across that continent. Up
and down across the border. Many, many times they sang, they
entertained, and they preached the word.
And as the right hand side of this slide shows, they also
marketed, they sold their records.
And they sold books, and they sold postcards they had a lot of
hitch to sell. In part, it's how they financed their itinerant
evangelism operation.
So Reese Gerard she then a voiced for women in ministry.
She is sometimes held up to be that.
Preaching was a controversial practice for women in post War
Canada. Pentecostals take pride in their heritage as
egalitarians, pointing to the prophecies as the other
traditions represented here today do as well. Prophecies in
the book of Joel who predicted that in the last days your sons
and daughters will prophecy Pentecostals were convinced that
they were the fulfillment of that.
Prophecy and the prophecy, of course, was reinforced in the
book of Acts.
The day the spirit fell.
But as Canadian Pentecostal women today could tell you,
debates about women's place in the pulpits are far from
settled. Indeed, the historical record offers evidence of
undeniable regression in that regard.
Today, the POC admits that within their denomination, the
number of women who serve as lead pastors hovers stubbornly
around a very low number, like maybe 5, maybe 6% of all lead
pastors are women.
And as recently as the 1990s, and then again just a few years
ago, the national denomination firmly declared women are
welcome, welcome in all levels of church leadership and
governance.
If you have to keep saying that, though, it makes me wonder.
And as some of us in this room could testify, that principled
women are welcome.
Is belied by a very chilly climate.
In many circles, and particularly in my experience in
church boardrooms.
Despite, or maybe because of those 21st century realities,
women like Bernice Gerrard are sometimes held up as models to
be emulated.
But as I will demonstrate, she was not typical.
And I'm convinced.
That districts full of Bernice Gerards? Whoa. They would prove
to be very difficult to manage, very difficult for male
gatekeepers, and I think even pretty difficult for some of
their sanctified traditional sisters to accept as well.
It was typical for Pentecostal women to be dispatched.
As it was for Wesleyans, as it was for Salvation Army women to
be dispatched as travelling evangelists, and this photograph
is a wonderful archival source that captures the scale and
appeal of tent meetings, Pentecostal tent meetings.
Meetings would be booked with a firm starting date, usually
spanning over several days, however, if the meetings were
particularly successful, if the spirit.
Well.
Well then it was very common for the dates to be expanded for a
longer run.
The meetings would include all kinds of components, musical
performances, in this case by the McCall Gerard Trio,
Congregational, singing, testimony, time and preaching.
And of course, it was typical for a tent meeting of
Pentecostals to include the practice of exuberant embodied
worship.
A central feature was time at the altar when people would come
forward for prayer. Success was measured in reports of
conversion, yes, but especially in the Pentecostal experience.
After the laying on of hands that might result in speaking in
tongues and reports of physical healing. Bernice Gerard herself
experienced a physical healing at a camp meeting. Her eyesight
improved so much that.
For many years of her life, she didn't even need eyeglasses
anymore. This photo is of a McCall Gerard Trio at a tent
meeting in Scranton, PA in 1952.
By this time, the women, the McCall Gerard women, were
traveling under the auspices of the Assemblies of God, the
largest classical Pentecostal denomination in the United
States.
The McCall Gerard Trio is just one example of many among
Pentecostal women who traveled as evangelists, musicians, and
preachers. Most commonly, women traveled in pairs, 2 by two,
partly to.
Feature their complementary gifts. One might be the musical
feature, the other the more gifted preacher.
But no doubt they travelled in pairs, partly for their own
safety as well, and, of course, to economize.
Examples of famous Canadian Pentecostal preaching pairs
abound. The 4C sisters from Newfoundland, the Davis Sisters
in New Brunswick, the argue sisters in Winnipeg, to name
just a few Canadian examples. And of course, the best known of
all the Canadian examples would be none other than sister Amy,
Amy Semple McPherson, who famously drove her car herself,
accompanied by her mother. So that's why I can count her as a
pair.
She drove that car across North America and is thought to be the
first woman ever to complete that motor vehicle travel.
She did it accompanied by her mum and her kids.
Bruce Gerard travelled with the McCall Sisters from 1945 to
1958.
When Gene McCall accepted a marriage proposal, well, Bernice
continued.
With Velma as her partner and this photograph shows the very
latest in Pentecostal tent meeting technology. That
structure is called the cloud tent, and it was inflatable.
Easier for the women to erect it. And also in the picture you
see the recreational vehicle where Velma and Bernice live
together and their car. I think it's a Chevy.
What was not typical about Bernice and Velma? They weren't
sisters biologically, and their partnership endured.
For the whole, their whole lives, the rest of their lives,
long after the travel had ended, they literally remained partners
until death did them part.
Bernice and Velma shared a church. Together, they Co
pastored a Vancouver church called the Fraser View.
And after Velma's husband died, Bernice and she continued their
shared ministry, remaining partners until the end. The end
for Velma in 2007, for Bernice in 2008.
They were partners before Velma got married, during the time
that Velma was married, and after the time that Velma was
had become a widow.
And in my book, I go there, I speculate about the nature of
their relationship.
Please ask me about that later.
When Pentecostal women like Gerard entered into formal
ministry, they needed the endorsement of male gatekeepers.
As the McCall Gerard Trio soon learned, they could not succeed
as freelancers.
Not without their orthodoxy being questioned.
Now, it was typical, as I've said, for these women to need
the endorsement of male gatekeepers. But in this
particular case, here's why. The McCall Sisters were from
Saskatchewan, and it was the 1940s, and Pentecostals among us
know that in the 1940s.
There was a big heresy. At least it was regarded as heresy by
some Pentecostals called Oneness Pentecostalism, and that's the
tradition that the McCall sisters hailed from in
Saskatchewan. Sometimes it's called the Jesus only movement,
so that big debate about Trinitarianism was a liability.
But I have other explanations for why I think these women
encountered resistance on the road. I think it's because they
were too good at what they did. I think the success they enjoyed
posed a threat of competition, tent meeting offerings.
Directed to these women meant those same dollars.
Were not. They were missing from the collection plates of local
pastors.
And rumors of heresy spread, and it drove the women to embrace an
organizational culture and seek approval from authorities so
they would have a kind of brand recognition.
Of a well known denomination that could open doors and
provide networks for their continued bookings and for that
very reason. 1 Canadian Pentecostal Authority, very well
known in Southern Ontario, the Reverend JH Blair. He vouched
for the McCall Gerard Trio and he wrote them letters of
introduction. Don't worry about them, he said. They are
Orthodox, solid Bible teachers and great musicians. They're a
delight. They will not challenge your authority.
Faster.
It's OK have them to your church or your community.
Reverend JH Blair also mentored these women and he advised them
you would be very wise, he said, to seek a formal ordination.
You should do it through the Assemblies of God. In the US
they're dating women, and pictured here is Bernice Gerard,
certificate of ordination for the year 194849.
That's not typical. Canadian POC did not ordain women before the
1980s.
But perhaps more atypical than that.
Is that?
Gerard continued.
To speak up at general conferences of the POC for the
next 4 decades, she was speaking up saying she was not pleased.
She was not pleased because of the delay. What is taking the
POC so long to recognize God's gifts in women's lives?
And when she spoke up, she faced resistance. She was heckled from
the conference floor. She stood.
Approached the microphone to speak her position about the
ordination of women and hecklers, other delegates, other
clergy, called out. Bernice, you need a man.
No one made any move to silence those hecklers.
Bernice faced all kinds of heckling. It was familiar to
her.
But maybe even more atypical is that when Bernice Gerard argued
that women should be fully ordained and enter fully into
the ministry, baptizing, marrying, burying, you know,
offering the sacraments.
When she said that when she argued for it, she actually used
feminist rhetoric.
To do so.
That might surprise you, but Bernice was convinced Jesus was
a feminist, too.
Ask me about that later.
Gerard used her unusual voice as a radio host to reach a very
wide audience in British Columbia and up the Pacific
Northwest and into the northwestern U.S. states. In
1973, an adoring listener wrote to her to explain why he felt so
drawn to her programming quote. To be a radio open liner takes
an ability that is rare, and knowledge far more than a
professor needs very few men.
Can do it well.
For a lady to be so good at it is a far greater rarity, and in
this sense.
Bernice, you have double appeal.
The listener continued his letter, saying, quote, you bring
something desperately needed by mankind, the power of a fully
developed female mind.
And it's balance and it's invigoration and your
personality, while you have courage and wisdom and
experience as reflected in your voice.
Your steadfastness and your dedication. But it is the power
of your developed mind that seems to win.
End Quote.
By the 1970s, Gerard's broadcast had grown from a 5 minute
segment called ask the chaplain to more than four hours every
Sunday of live radio and a rebranded broadcast called
Sunday Line that featured invited guests.
And what a variety of guests. She invited hippies. She invited
recovered addicts. She invited politicians, guest preachers, ex
convicts. It was a lively show.
Gerard's demeanor with all those guests and listeners was
respectful and compassionate, but firm.
And unwavering in her convictions that every human
need, no matter what, it was an addiction.
Psychological problems. Every human need a fixation with sex.
Lots of her listeners called to talk about sex.
Bernice was convinced that every human need was evidence of a
spiritual void that needed to be filled, and she knew how to fill
it. There is joy in serving Jesus, she said. And the Holy
Spirit will fill your longings.
Unlike male radio preachers that we know quite a bit about from
Canadian history, Gerard did not preach Hellfire, brimstone, or
some new economic.
Scheme like the Social Credit preachers, she established
intimate pastoral relations with her listeners, who poured out
their hearts and their secrets to her, sometimes live on air,
but also in written correspondence.
When listeners wrote to Gerard, they bared their souls. Several
examples of those intimate exchanges are preserved in her
personal archives, including those who told her that her
voice on the radio had saved them from suicidal ideations.
That she was the only constant friend they had during time
served in prison. Others wrote to her when they were missing,
hearing her on the radio because their work had taken them to
remote resource camps in northern BC and they couldn't
get the broadcast signal up there.
One particularly heartbreaking letter discloses a secret. A big
secret. A secret about a back alley abortion.
The woman who wrote disclosed to Bernice that she had an abortion
on her honeymoon.
Because she and her fiance knew there was a baby coming, and it
wasn't going to be OK for that baby to arrive too soon after
the wedding. That was taboo. Taboo for their strict parents,
taboo in their conservative church family culture as well.
And Bernice was the first person she and her husband had ever
told about that.
Listeners wrote to challenge Bernice on what they said were
overly simplistic positions she took as well. One was intrigued
by Gerard's opposition to a new gay bar that was opening in
Vancouver, and the writer wrote to say she agreed drinking and
loose sexual morays were a very bad combination. Good job,
Bernice, for speaking out.
But the writer cautioned Gerard not to condemn the entire queer
community.
God loves everyone, the writer affirmed.
And the writer knew it first hand because she was a Christian
lesbian.
A Christian lesbian, and she told Bernice that's not an
oxymoron.
And I'm content.
And I'm confident because I know how God made me, so Bernice,
back off a little bit on your black and white positions, the
writer said.
Another Christian who had found some had adopted some eastern
religious practices, including Transcendental Meditation, told
Gerard that she needed to be more open minded about other
religions.
You should try it, he said. It's really improved my devotional
life and I recommend it to you.
So when her listeners wrote to tell her that she was not
typical because of her gender and her on air style, that
fostered these intimate, pastoral relationships of trust.
Well, she wasn't typical with her appeal to other listeners,
either. Listeners from the campus campuses of public
universities.
Gerard was exposed to other faiths on campus, and she chose
her own courses of study to learn more about other belief
systems.
In fact, it was her campus colleagues who first led her to
an appreciation of ecumenism.
Gerard returned to UBC as a mature student in 1958 after the
trio broke up when First Gene and then a few years later,
Velma had accepted marriage proposals.
Bernie said cut her own education a bit short because in
World War Two there was a teacher shortage. And it meant
that Bernice was dispatched to become a teacher in Roslyn, BC,
before she had actually finished all of her degree. So now she
decided.
Well, I guess I'll go back and finish my BA.
At the UBC she finished that, and then she stayed and she did
a Masters of Arts in English literature.
Bernice approached the campus with some trepidation. As many
evangelicals do, she was well aware that the influence of
secular professors could challenge her faith, stealing
herself.
To face the ridicule of being labeled as an anti intellectual,
Gerard came to embrace campus life in every regard. She loved
it all.
After several weeks of study, she mustered the courage to
respectfully point out to a particularly popular and witty
philosophy professor that his logic.
Was faulty when he dismissed the existence of God as irrational.
Now Pentecostals and somebody else already said this earlier
today in a session where I was kind of costals often get
associated with anti intellectualism.
Well, not produce. She was not typical because she became a
campus insider.
And getting a graduate degree, not in theology, but in
humanities in English literature. That was unusual,
atypical. She enjoyed the classes. She entered fully into
the delight and privilege that student life offered her,
without slipping into a tone of arrogance or sarcastic
disrespect for secular scholarship. That a more
immature student might naively adopt her graduate thesis on
Milton's Paradise Lost was on the question of whether or not.
Milton was orthodox.
And she concluded, despite what other Christian theologians had
declared.
Milton is Orthodox, she said.
Well, OK, maybe not on every fine point, but but what she
found in Milton was a model.
A model for creatively communicating the good news of
the gospel to any and all who would receive it by any means.
Gerard was not a systematic theologian.
She was a literature scholar, and she worked hard, really
hard, and seriously to understand the intellectual
culture in which she was immersed. She was convinced,
after all, that God had called her to that campus.
Both campuses, actually.
Gerard embraced this campus life. She loved the classes. She
loved her fellow students. And when she observed that other
Christian churches all had chaplains on campus, she asked,
why doesn't the POC have one?
She was surprised and delighted when the POC said right back at
you, Bernice, why don't you become a chaplain? And so she
did.
Bernice became a chaplain, the first Pentecostal chaplain at a
public university in Canada. Now to the Newfoundlanders on this
screen and in the room. I know you could debate that, right,
because Munn has long had Pentecostal chaplains, but let's
check the record. Certainly with the P AOC, there's no debating
that Bernice was the first she served as campus Champus
chaplain at UBC from 1963 to 1985.
That's a really long run, and she also served at Simon Fraser
University from its founding in 1965 for 20 years, Simon Fraser
the most radical campus in the entire country.
In her role as chaplain, she sat on university Senate committees,
and in 1972, she was the first woman ever to preside over a UBC
convocation ceremony. So here she is, as this photograph
underlines a female chaplain. That's kind of rare, not really
typical, and she took the role very seriously.
She was. She became a student of student culture.
She took the role seriously. She read widely about campus
ministry strategy. She thought deeply about sociological
studies of young adults. She conducted campus surveys to tap
into the existential realities of her students, lives, her
findings. It's all there in her archive, and these are of
interest in the ongoing scholarship about faith and your
religion, especially in the Pacific Northwest that is
emerging. These were tumultuous decades of social change.
Gerard worked closely with her own church, but she also began.
So, OK, it's not typical for Pentecostal to have chaplains #1
#2. It's not typical for them to choose a woman, and her
university chaplaincy coincided very directly with her very
early embrace of the charismatic movement.
She did work with the POC, but she also embraced ecumenical
initiatives, and she learned to appreciate the historic churches
and their traditions. But perhaps the biggest, biggest one
of all is that she embraced the charismatic movement when the
POC was not ready to do so.
Bernice worked with Catholics.
That was a big no no for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
and other evangelicals in this.
Her association with Catholics took her to all kinds of places
like this.
Appreciating charismatic experiences was a process for
Gerard. She was cautious and curious when she first learned
the spirit might be moving among the historic denominations. But
in short order, and after she attended one of the earliest
gatherings of charismatics at Notre Dame University, she came
to embrace the reported experiences as a genuine move of
the spirit.
Someone who was at one of these charismatic gatherings wrote to
her national Superintendent of the POC and said congratulations
on, you know, appointing such an intelligent and well spoken
woman to represent you at these gatherings.
And the national Superintendent, Roback said Bernice is an
exceptional individual. That's true. We did not appoint her. We
don't work with Catholics. That's in the record, too. Check
out the POC archives.
This appreciation that she gained for and for Roman
Catholics and for cooperating with them meant she was
sometimes at odds with her own denominational authorities. But
she was convinced, no, God is moving and I'm there. Wherever
the spirit's moving, that's where I'm going. So one cause
that some Pentecostals, not all, some Pentecostals and many
evangelicals could embrace and share with their Catholic
siblings was activism around anti abortion.
So here she is. Isn't that a lovely picture? And she's at an
abortion protest.
As secular feminists worked hard to push for greater access to
abortion as a main pillar of the second wave women's movement, my
body, my choice. That's where that phrase originally came
from, by the way, not where you've heard it recently. But
that was a main pillar of the second wave women's movement.
And many conservative Christians doubled down in their opposition
to all kinds of liberalization trends that were happening in
Canadian society with Prime Minister Trudeau won.
And while the so-called pro-life movement began by asserting that
life begins at conception, the movement turned to focus on the
rights of the unborn.
That wasn't Gerard's focus.
Her position on abortion was more complicated and more
nuanced. And her position on abortion?
Was based on a personal story.
So yes, it was typical for some to come and begin to cooperate
across ecumenical lines, but no, it was not typical for the POC
to cooperate with Catholics, and it was not typical. Don't miss
the second part of that last line.
For Pentecostals to argue from personal stories, it's not that
Bernie Gerard had ever had an abortion.
But it was rather that her own disabled birth mother did not
have one.
George's birth mother, when she finally found her a little later
in life.
She learned was a long term patient in a mental health
facility in British Columbia, and Gerard appreciated that
abortion had not been forced upon her mother.
Not just because, as she countered some of her critics,
right, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't know the difference.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is, she said I'm happy
that abortion was not forced on a woman like my mother because
abortion isn't always about women's rights.
Sometimes it's about eugenics and I can't go for that.
That was Gerard's position on abortion.
Well, OK, protesting abortion is one thing.
And not all Pentecostals even agreed on that. So ask me about
that later. But actually becoming political, like, I
mean, becoming a politician. That was a whole other level.
And while evangelicals in this. Were organizing themselves to
lobby governments, the POC was doing it through something they
created called the Social Concerns Committee and the
fledgling Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the EFC that
tindell's very own Brian Stiller was a leader of.
By the way, when I interviewed Brian Stiller for my book, he
said Bernice mentored me. She showed me how to do it. Do what
I asked how to lead an organization, how to create the
mailing list, how to be systematic for donors, how to
organize events. Brian Stiller has huge regard for Bernice
Gerard.
But Bernice Gerard took the bold step to become a politician. Her
supporters encouraged her to run for the Vancouver City Council
because they recognized, Ohh, that voice. She would be such an
effective voice of conservative views in a very progressive
city. And so she ran. And she won. And she served as an
Alderman in Vancouver from 1977 to 1981. Not a typical
Pentecostal.
Pentecostals don't usually do that well. Political cartoonists
had a heyday, as you can see from the screen, they found her
so easy to caricature, they mocked her opposition to all
kinds of causes, including the time she famously walked on a
nude beach in Vancouver.
To protest that.
And here she wasn't protesting public nudity. She was
protesting that the nude community clothing optional
community felt they had the right to every beach in
Vancouver. And she said, no, this is your beach and these are
the boundaries.
Don't take license.
Closer examination of the archival record in the Vancouver
city of the City of Vancouver Archives, where I've been on
this issue, reveals that.
Bernice Gerard was actually quite moderate on a number of
issues, but of course nuance is not what political cartoonists
are looking for, and that gets lost in that visual record.
Gerard Rachael for entering politics sounds an awful lot
like Walter Bruggeman.
And his classic book The Prophetic imagination.
The thing is, though, Bergman wrote that book in 1978, right
in this.
But Bernice had arrived at her convictions about being in
politics in 1973, five years before that book came out,
Bernice Gerard preached a sermon series at her own church in
Vancouver.
And she actually says, I preached myself into politics.
While she was preaching that series, the Holy Spirit
convicted her that she was to become involved in public life.
She was convicted. She said that this was her calling.
To put concrete action to her prophetic gifting.
What was the sermon series about, you might ask?
Moses, the greatest prophet of them all, and just like Moses
had stood up to Pharaoh.
That's what Bernice Girard intended to do.
So, not typical.
To explain public engagement as an extension of your prophetic
calling you you start doing that in the City Council chambers,
you're going to be misunderstood.
Here she is protesting in 1981.
Do we have audio on this one?
OK, maybe we don't.
Because it is the first ******** **** film to run in a commercial
theater in Vancouver, it's our chance to ask the government why
they don't keep the law. We are addressing the attorney general
in particular. We are also getting to our political
representatives at the provincial level as well as.
Our Crown Council and those that have the involvement with the
law, we're claiming that ******** *********** dumped on
us. By God. Bob Guccione, the fellow with the Penthouse
magazine and his millions. It's something Vancouver doesn't
need. We have community standards. So that's Bernice
Gerard. In 1981 in downtown Vancouver, she's protesting
against a film that was screening called Caligula.
She was protesting publicly, as the clip says. And if you want
to hear more of that's on YouTube, just Google for news.
Gerard Caligula up it comes. She was protesting that public
entertainment should violate community standards, and that is
the actual language from the legislation. Community standards
of decency. Her voice on that occasion was angry. She was
outraged. This was the Prophet speaking out.
Now, it was typical for some conservative Christians to
object to the changing social and sexual mores in Canadian
society during the Trudeau years.
1968 to 79 and then his big comeback 1980 to 84.
But it was not typical.
For Pentecostals.
To speak about and act upon their own testimonies of abuse.
This is Bernice Gerrard at the age of 13.
Gerard realized that some of her fellow believers did not
understand her outspoken ways. They told her she was making all
conservatives look ridiculous, ridiculously out of step with
the changing social morays of 1980s Vancouver. Calmed down,
hush up Bernice. They were shocked when she revealed to
them. Yeah, she said. I went to the film, I watched the whole
thing. I did it so I could speak with authority about the
disgusting content.
Just like Moses, lots of her followers did not understand.
So it's the angry Prophet, is it? After several years in her
archives, I actually hear something else in that outraged
voice. I do hear the prophet.
When she turned 65 years of age, though, Gerard wrote her
autobiography for the second time, and this time she spoke
about the sexual abuse that she had endured as a child.
She revealed that at the age of 65, she was still experiencing
night terrors.
About her adoptive father's assaults.
So when Gerard spoke in anger about sexual violence against
women.
She spoke from experience, I'm sorry to say, childhood
experience.
And while the political cartoonist looked at her and saw
comical hyper moralist from born in the wrong century, this
biographer looks at these two faces.
And what I see and what I hear, I hear the outrage of an abuse
survivor.
When she spoke on that sidewalk to protest pornographic
entertainment, she spoke.
With the voice she first found at the age of 13, when she
didn't sound so prophetic or courageous or loud. But at the
age of 13, she revealed her terrible secret to a school
teacher and a preacher woman.
Who acted swiftly to take her out of that adoptive home and
into the care of the Child Protection Agency. Bernice grew
up in foster care.
And let me tell you, Bernice knew first hand all about
hashtag. Me too.
Among Canadian Pentecostals, Bernice Girard was an unusual
voice. Yes, she was a lady baritone, and yes, she was a
powerful preacher. But that's not all. In the year 2000, the
Vancouver Sun named her as the most significant spiritual
influencer of the 20th century in British Columbia. Now, to get
a title like that, you can't be typical.
She was atypical. She was ordained in the 1940s, and four
decades later she was still speaking up to challenge the
patriarchal culture of her denomination that denied women's
ordination and governance roles.
Oh, and by the way, she was the lifelong partner of another
woman.
In ministry and in life.
That's not typical.
She made her arguments about women's ordination using
feminist rhetoric. Jesus was a feminist.
That's what she said. That's not typical. She hosted a very
popular radio open line show. She engaged with listeners with
compassion and intelligence. She was a campus insider. She
challenged faulty logic among professors. She earned a
graduate degree defending Milton as Orthodox.
And inspiring as a model of ministry, she served as a campus
chaplain among her male peers from the historic denominations.
And that led her to embrace a humanism.
And to be a very early adopter of the charismatic movement.
That's not typical.
She joined Catholic colleagues.
That's not typical. She prayed with them every week. She
protested abortion with them. She spoke out on behalf of
women.
And she expressed it as opposition to women and sexual
violence because she was an abuse survivor.
Maybe that's more typical than I'd like to admit.
So if Bernice Gerard is a good model for women in ministry, is
she a good model for 21st century Pentecostal women? Well,
I'll say to the women in the room and on zoom it should you
decide to emulate her.
Get ready. Brace yourself. There will be consequences.
Consequences for invoking a Gerard Esque voice.
Your nostalgic members longing for a return of the good old
days of 10th meeting revivals might not understand you, your
governance gatekeepers who remind you of how it's always
been done around here.
Might seek to put you in your place.
And even leaders who think they are defenders of women in
leadership might not recognize what it is you're proposing,
exactly.
But maybe she does have something to say. Maybe, maybe
if we could put away some of the tired debates about gender and
leadership, about theological puzzles and angels dancing on
the heads of pins, and if we could set aside some invented
moral panics, maybe voices like gerards could provide traction.
And some new ministry models. She wasn't very typical, but she
was very effective. She was not anti intellectual.
And there was no man standing by her side. She wasn't in a
heteronormative relationship.
He had no time for liberalism, literalism, literalism
weaponized to reinforce the patriarchy or even to support
complementarianism. She didn't.
She was deeply moved by abused women because she understood she
had survived abuse too.
So I will say in closing, post pandemic leaders who sincerely
wish to hear Pentecostal women's voices from the past.
Need to move on beyond nostalgia and make way for some
complicated and difficult stories? Imagine.
Claiming to welcome women into leadership, but then putting
limits on their gifts.
Claiming to welcome women in governance and then blocking
them.
Blocking their ministry careers.
Or here's one for the pandemic times, claiming to want to hear
women but never turning off the mute button.
That's a recipe for cognitive dissonance, my friends, and it's
a far more problematic situation than something as confusing as a
lady baritone.
Thank you.