c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEWARK _ On the wall of the Rev. Frances Murray-Williams’ cluttered basement office, a poster of the 91 bishops who have led the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church since 1796 gives silent witness to the obstacle she must overcome.

They are all men.

In fact, no predominantly black denomination in America has ever elected a female bishop. Five of the eight denominations don’t even have official policies permitting women to be ordained, and women pastors in the other churches have trouble winning major congregational assignments.

There are subtle signs, however, that the so-called stained-glass ceiling is starting to crack _ and Murray-Williams’ plum preaching assignment is one of them. Nevertheless, church rules and tradition still stand in her way.

Murray-Williams was named last year as pastor of Clinton Memorial AME Zion Church in Newark, the first woman appointed to a major pulpit in her denomination’s history. She said the congregation welcomed her with open arms, but both the bishop who appointed her and others in the church conceded the appointment raised eyebrows.

“Of course there were the subtle innuendoes and question marks,” said Bishop Marshall Hayward Strickland, one of 12 active bishops in the 1.2 million-member denomination. “There are people sitting back waiting for that assignment to fail.”

Murray-Williams, 47, said she has not been immune to the pressure her appointment has brought, but she refuses to dwell upon it.

“There has been opposition, and it has been uncomfortable,” she conceded. “There has been pressure from my colleagues, but nothing I can’t handle, and nothing I didn’t expect. Not everyone has congratulated me, and some people have done quite the contrary.”

Experts on the black church said such pressure is not uncommon.

“For the black man, the pulpit is the last bastion of authority,” the Rev. Susan Newman, a community outreach minister at West Oakland Baptist Church in Atlanta, said last year during a seminar on women in the black church.

Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia and director of the Center for African American History and Culture, said this tradition developed in the days when educated black men were denied any vocational opportunities except the pulpit or the classroom.

Other church observers said the greatest resistance to female preachers these days comes from female members of congregations. Roughly 75 percent of the people attending black churches are women.

At times in its history, the AME Zion Church has been one of the most progressive denominations in America in terms of women’s rights. In 1897, it ordained the nation’s first woman preacher _ more than six decades ahead of white Methodists and other mainline Protestant churches.

“They shook up many men, white and black,” said Collier-Thomas, whose book, “Daughters of Thunder,” introduced some of America’s unsung black women preachers. “They moved women closer to the seat of power.”

The Rev. James David Armstrong, secretary of the AME Zion Historical Society and editor of its Quarterly Review, said any difficulties women have in the black church are a reflection of problems in the greater society.

Throughout much of the 20th century, however, the denomination failed to appoint women to major churches. Women were largely used in mission churches, building them up only to be replaced when the pulpit turned into a plum, Strickland said. “I think that for the most part the black church has maintained the myopic view of a patriarchal society,” Strickland added. “The male image is still highly praised.”

Strickland said Murray-Williams is the first woman in the denomination to receive a”front-line appointment,”a position he defined as high-profile, historic and located in a major metropolitan area. He said about 10 percent of the AME Zion’s 2,400 appointments fall into that category.

Clinton Memorial is the oldest AME Zion Church in New Jersey, founded in 1822 by one of the six original missionaries of the church. The denomination was founded when black members of a white Methodist church in New York split over racism, much as Philadelphia church members split to form the 3.5 million-member AME church.

Murray-Williams inherits a formidable task. Located in a tough North Ward neighborhood, the church has seen its membership dip, and Sunday services attract between 150 and 175 people. Murray-Williams said about 30 people have joined the congregation since she arrived.

John Banks, a retired Army recruiter and lay leader at Clinton Memorial, praised Murray-Williams for energizing the congregation.

“She’s a dynamic preacher, and she’s a very down-to-earth person,” said Banks, who lives in Belleville. “She can get down to where the rubber meets the road. She talks to you on your level, and she doesn’t act like she’s higher than anyone else.”

Murray-Williams was raised in the North Carolina Pentecostal church of her father, Bishop Millus Williams Sr., and six of her nine siblings eventually were called to the pulpit. In 1989, she joined the AME Zion church at the urging of her then-husband, the Rev. Clifton Murray. When the couple divorced after a 25-year marriage, Murray-Williams left her teaching job and entered Hood Theological Seminary in Salisbury, N.C.

Church rules require candidates to have served 20 years in a pulpit before being considered for bishop. Murray-Williams has only been a pastor three years.

But, asked about the historical absence of female bishops in her church, Murray-Williams said, “You are looking at one woman who will be aspiring.”

DEA END CHAMBERS