Female pastoral leaders--especially women of color--can use scripture and history to overcome obstacles to achieving legitimacy as pastoral caregivers. Two issues immediately arise: (a) locating the position of a caregiver whose identity may be unconventional in the scheme of religious culture and (b) identifying attributes of such culture that limit effectiveness of such a caregiver. One need not be an advocate of female priesthood to see that a black female is uniquely positioned to speak to these issues. That status arises from analysis of the "engendered" quality of religious history.
There is evidence in the biblical and historical record that women--even, or especially, marginalized women--have been accepted and valued as religious ministers. Structuring the highest ministerial and clerical offices along patriarchal lines was an innovation of Western ecclesiastical history. McKenzie cites accounts of female spiritual leadership that appear in both the Old and New Testaments, though she explains that, as a product of a patriarchal culture whose values were largely uninterrogated well into the modern period, "the Bible has been antagonistic to modern female identity" (55).
But the Bible reveals more about female spiritual potential than traditional interpreters may think. With examples of such role models as Deborah, Naomi, and Miriam in the Old Testament and Mary, Mary Magdalen, and Phoebe in the New, McKenzie develops the idea that contemporary women can strengthen their religious voice via biblical sanction. Modern bias against including women in the full ecclesiastical range is a social and/or institutional construction, not a matter of biblical authority. Institutional biases have systematically (but not always successfully) ignored women's spiritual contributions. Arnold's statement that "theology clarifies the authority under which [ministers] operate" (77) implies that if religious institutions endorse cultural norms ...