Clergywomen

Did You Know?

There are 9,749 clergywomen out of the 44,091 clergy in The United Methodist Church. As of December 2006, about 27% of the 32,742 active clergy are women. As of May 2007, 1,051 of them are racial-ethnic minority women, and 128 (15%) of the elder clergywomen are serving as district superintendents. This is significantly higher than in 1995, when women represented 15.8%

Of the 26,152 pastors-in-charge, clergywomen serve in 21.5% of these. In churches with 1000+ members, only 1% (64) of all senior female clergy are appointed in churches with over 1,000 while almost 6% of all senior male clergy are appointed to those largest membership churches.

As of 2005, more than half of the Annual Conferences had 19% or more clergywomen among their total number of clergy. The top five are: West Ohio, Baltimore-Washington, New England, Western North Carolina, and Iowa.

To learn more, read the Clergywomen’s Local Church Appointments: 2006 study by Michelle Fugate (PDF, 160KB)

Women in Seminary

According to the Association of Theological Schools' 2002-2003 Fact Book on Theological Education, the number of women attending seminary for the M. Div, degree had increased from the total enrollment of 10, 070 in 2002 to the total enrollment of 31,994 in 2003, up from 7,602 in 1995. Women constituted 31% of all M.Div. students. Women enrolled in M.Div. programs in the 13 United Methodist-related theological schools for the Fall 2002 semester total 1,442 (52%) compared to 1,270 Men (48%).

Historical Documents

The report on the 1982 United Methodist Racial-Ethnic Clergywomen’s consultation is available from GBHEM. To obtain this document, which is of historic interest, e-mail your request to rstephens@gbhem.org.