Religion

407

The First One Hundred Years, Ordained women Preachers in The Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Inc., and The East Coast Dispensation of the Holy Spirit.

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   The history of the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Inc. is diverse and multifaceted.  It is more than the history of the search of a woman for a proverbial "voice."  It is more than the struggle of an individual to find a place for all females in a world that has systematically enshrouded their abilities.  It is more than an Apollonian effort to uplife a race.  Yet, it is all of these and more.  While the Western Seaboard basked luxuriously in and profited from the "Gold Coast" phenomenon, much of the Eastern Seaboard, and especially the South, remained hardnosed, uncompromising, and yet enshrouded in the aftermath of slavery and the very present impact of segregation and Jim Crow.  
   Mary Lena Lewis Tate, "The first woman known to organize an internationally recognized church and be elevated to the ecclesiastical rank of bishop", courageously entered the sacrosanct halls of organized religion and thrust open the doors for prepared women to ascend the ecclesiastical ladders of the clergy to become elders, bishops, and chief leaders of myriad religious organizations.  In her stride, she had successfully compassed many barriers of social and religious prejudice and bias, envy, and hatred.  She had surmounted the hurdles of education, communication, and transportation (walking, using barges, steamships, mule-drawn wagons, decrepit automobiles, and Jim Cros trains) and prevailed.  In her wake, thousands of eager women would don the coloful regalia of official ordination and, with authority, flood the formerly verboten podiums, pulpits, and rostrums of chapels and churches throughout the world.