Mapuranga, ... The Politics of Pentecostalism and Women’s Ministries in ZimbabwePolitics has often been assumed to belong to the ‘public sphere’. What is
‘private’ is not political. According to Holmes,
The division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is artificial; the terms only make
sense through opposition to each other. The public is that which is not pri-
vate and vice versa(Pateman 1988).For feminists, ‘the private’ usually re-
ferred to the domestic sphere, but there were other usages of the term
which refer to civil society...The public, in other words, was the non-domes-
tic...The slogan, ‘the personal is political’...Some feminists took it as an in-
sistence on the need to see women’s everyday experiences put on the politi-
cal agenda... However, they did not always agree on which ‘personal’ issues
were in need of political attention, or in what form that attention should
take...Feminist challenge the point at which, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills
(1959), personal troubles became political issues. By seeing everyday aspects
of women’s lives as being political, feminists were challenging representa-
tions of the ‘personal’ in patriarchal society.(Holmes 2007: 113).
From the above quotation therefore, women’s issues, which may be
considered ‘private’, can be political as well. If concepts such as child-
care, menstruation and abortion and reproduction (Holmes 2007:114-
116), were not ‘personal troubles, but public issues’, then why not would
less personal and more public issues like leadership in the church not be
political? It is from this argument that this study on the role of women
in the church finds space in a discussion of politics.
In its basic form, politics implies the contestation for power between
individuals and groups. Within Pentecostal churches, politics is played
out around the question of ordination. In this contestation, the Bible
plays an important role. As I shall illustrate below, despite the fact that
the Bible has been used to justify the non ordination of women in many
other churches, in Pentecostalism, the same Bible is appealed when
justifying their ordination. As such, movements such as Pentecostalism
in Christianity have thus brought with them ‘problems with women’s
empowerment’ (Soothill 2010), which are categorised as political in this
chapter.
Having illuminated how women’s space in the Church can be defined as
politics, the next section highlights some of the historical and colonial
influences that have contributed to the debate around women participat-
ing in the church with high positions such as being preachers or pastors.
No women pastors in the church: Historical influences
The status of women in the ‘public’ sphere has been highly compro-
mised in contemporary society and this has been attributed to history