This year, we celebrate seventy years since women were granted full clergy rights in The United Methodist tradition. In 1956, when the Methodist Church gave women full clergy rights, it was not merely an institutional change. It was an act of grace in which the church publicly recognized the callings of women whom the Holy Spirit had already called and raised up.

As I prepare for the two Annual Conferences in Ohio, I do not want to remember this seventy-year legacy simply as one chapter in denominational history. For me, it is a genealogy of gratitude deeply inscribed in my own ministry. It is a spiritual inheritance that has shaped me, guided me, and strengthened me. The history of women’s ordination is not an abstract church history to me. It is a living story of grace that has held me, awakened me, and formed me at every significant turn in my life.

The first annual conference I entered as a candidate for ordination in The United Methodist Church was the California-Nevada Conference. I had come to the United States in 1982 and served as a church planter. By 1985, after becoming weary and facing a deep dark night of the soul, I recommitted myself to God with a renewed sense of surrender. It was at that very moment that one person came to me like a great light upon my vision for ministry: Bishop Leontine T. C. Kelly, the first African American women bishop in The United Methodist Church.

I first met her as a candidate for ordination on a campus near the Pacific University. Her sermon that day came to me with the power of thunder. It was not simply that she preached with strength. The very sight of a woman, an African American woman, a witness of the gospel standing at the center of the church with the authority of God, was itself a revelation to me. Through her preaching, I came to understand that ministry is not simply a matter of functioning within an institution. It is the work of witnessing, with one’s whole life, to the justice and grace of God.

The last time I saw Bishop Kelly was in 2002, when I was serving as a district superintendent. I had gone to the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to teach at the Western Jurisdiction School of Christian Mission. Bishop Kelly, then retired, had also come in my class. After many years, I called her name again and confessed the light she had left deep within my ministry. She showed me that women’s leadership is not an exception in the church. It is one of the ways the Holy Spirit renews the church.

The second woman bishop who left a deep mark on my ministerial life was Bishop Sharon Zimmerman Rader. Bishop Rader came to Wisconsin as the resident bishop, and I served for eight years on her cabinet as a district superintendent. From her, I learned the spirituality and rhythm of pastoral leadership. She was not only an administrative leader to me. She was like a spiritual mother.

Bishop Rader showed me what the office of bishop could be through the depth with which she engaged people, the prayerfulness with which she led meetings, the silence with which she made

difficult decisions, and the wide heart with which she embraced the church. From her, I learned that leadership is not first about speed, but depth; that authority does not come from the volume of one’s voice, but from the weight of one’s soul.

During the years when I served as a professor of religion and philosophy at Kangnam University in Korea and lived apart from my wife and children, Bishop Rader saw my weariness with compassion. She opened an important turning point in my life and ministry. Behind my consecration as a bishop of The United Methodist Church in 2004, the prayers, mentoring, and prophetic practice of Bishop Sharon Rader were present like breath itself. Even now in retirement, Bishop Sharon remains a companion in my ministerial journey and one of the foundational figures of my leadership. Her spirituality still works quietly within me.

When I returned in 2012 to my home conference of Wisconsin as the resident bishop, the memory of another remarkable woman bishop was alive in that land: Bishop Marjorie Swank Matthews. Bishop Matthews was elected in 1980 as the first woman bishop in the history of The United Methodist Church and served the Wisconsin Area. Her election was a significant event not only in United Methodist history, but also in the broader history of mainline Protestantism.

The Wisconsin Conference Center in Sun Prairie was a historic space made possible under Bishop Matthews’ leadership. During the twelve years I served there, sometimes as the bishop of my home conference and always as one who had inherited the spiritual legacy of that place, the stories of Bishop Matthews remained with me like a shadow of grace.

There is a story often told. At that time, the male-centered Council of Bishops had expected yet another male bishop to be elected and had prepared the episcopal vestments accordingly. But the one elected was Marjorie Matthews, a woman of small stature and strong spirit. The stole that had been prepared was far too large for her body. As she entered, it almost seemed to sweep the floor. Yet that image remained as a powerful symbol of a new era entering the church. Upon the body of one small woman, God placed the future of the church.

These three women bishops became important pillars in my own ministry. Bishop Kelly showed me prophetic preaching and the courage of justice. Bishop Rader taught me the depth of spirituality, relationship, and leadership. Bishop Matthews showed me the courage of obedience that changes history. All three bore witness, through their lives, to the sacred and powerful grace of the legacy of women’s ordination.

Yet the seventy-year legacy of women’s ordination has come closest to me through the life and ministry of my wife, Rev. Im-Hyon Jung.

She had lived as an immigrant in the United States since her high school years. At that time, the community of faith that nurtured her was a Southern Baptist church, where she also served as a Sunday school teacher. It became the soil in which the stump of her faith took root and grew. Yet God called her to another path. As the mother of two children, she traveled from Madison, Wisconsin, to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, carrying tears, faith, and determination. Eventually, she was ordained as a pastor and appointed to Trinity

Church in Madison, a congregation more than one hundred years old, where she became its first woman pastor as an ethnic woman.

Her ministry changed, in the most direct and personal way, my conventional understanding of the church. I did not learn the calling of a woman pastor only from books or church meetings. I saw it at the family table. I saw it in the tears of a mother raising two children. I saw it in the pulpit, in hospital rooms, in committee meetings, and in the quiet places of prayer. As a clergy couple, we have placed our joys and sufferings, our hardships and challenges, together upon the altar of gratitude.

One part of her ministry that remains especially moving to me is her pastoral service in the Oneida Native American United Methodist Church. To serve as a pastor among the Oneida people, an American Indian community with a deep matrilineal tribal tradition, was no ordinary ministry. She did not serve that community as an outsider looking in. She served through respect, listening, persistent love, and spiritual trust, living with the people and among the people.

I cannot fully describe the impact she had upon the Oneida tribal community. She had a particular gift for calling people into ministry, raising them up as partners, and helping the community stand on its own feet. I sometimes say, half in humor and half in truth, that “she had the ability to twist people’s arms in such a way that they could not even say it hurt.” It was not coercion. It was loving persuasion. It was a holy persistence that called people into their own gifts.

Most of all, because she herself had always lived as a racial minority, she understood deeply the pain and dignity of other minority communities. In the Oneida community, she became a friend, a partner in ministry, and at times an advocate. Her ministry showed me that the leadership of women clergy is not revealed only in the pulpit. It is revealed when one enters the culture, wounds, history, and memory of a community, and learns to weep with them, laugh with them, and rise with them.

She has been my closest soul friend and partner in ministry. She served faithfully for fifteen years in local church ministry. Later, through The Upper Room ministries of Disciple Ministries, she carried responsibility for spiritual formation ministries in Asia and other regions for another fifteen years. Now, newly retired as a seasoned spiritual leader, her life remains for me one of the most moving testimonies I can offer as we celebrate seventy years of women’s ordination.

Through all these encounters, I have learned how deeply God loves the church and the world. God has raised women as leaders of the church, and through their wisdom, strength, spirituality, compassion, prophetic courage, and transformative leadership, God has made the church more authentic and more beautiful. This history is not only the history of women. It is the history of the church becoming more fully the body of Christ.

Women’s ordination was not a reluctant institutional concession by the church. It was an act of recognition. The church finally recognized those whom God had already called. The Holy Spirit had long been at work in the tears, prayers, preaching, care, and prophetic courage of women. The church simply learned to acknowledge that grace and obey that calling.

Therefore, as we celebrate seventy years of women’s ordination, I want to give thanks together with the two Annual Conferences of Ohio. Remembering Bishop Leontine Kelly’s thunderous preaching, Bishop Sharon Rader’s motherly spirituality and leadership, the legendary oversized stole placed upon the small body of Bishop Marjorie Matthews, and the tears and faithfulness of Rev. Im-Hyon Jung, who has walked the way of the gospel closest to my own life, I make this confession:

The calling of women is not at the margins of the church, but at its heart. The ordination of women is not a concession of the church, but a gift of the Holy Spirit. The leadership of women is God’s gracious promise for the future of the church.

The strength of women and the midwife-like, life-bearing tradition of nurturing and apprenticeship were already deeply imprinted upon me through my grandmother and my mother—living embodiments of the traditional image of Korean womanhood.

Today we celebrate seventy years. But more deeply, we rise again in gratitude and responsibility for the next seventy years, and for the next seven hundred years of the church. Until all God’s daughters and sons who are called by God proclaim the gospel together, build up the church together, heal the world together, and bear witness to the kingdom of God together, we will carry this holy legacy with joy.

And in this place of gratitude, I confess once more from the depth of my heart: the women leaders who shaped my ministry, the woman pastor who has sustained my life, and the countless unnamed women whose faithfulness has renewed the church are living sacraments of how God’s grace works among us.

I carry a deep gratitude for the many women clergy who have devoted themselves to ministry with such faithfulness, sacrifice, and love. Their humble journeys and prophetic dreams of transformation continue to enrich and reshape the ecology of the church and the world.

I am also profoundly grateful for the journeys of many women clergy leadership with whom I now serve closely. As a fellow partner in ministry, I give thanks for their courage, wisdom, perseverance, and faithful witness.

May that grace continue to bloom in the churches of Ohio, in the callings of the next generation, and in the future of a church that is more just, more compassionate, and more courageous.