Pentecost in the Churches: Women in the Pentecostal League of Prayer

This article examines for the first time the magnitude, influence, and ministry of women in the Pentecostal League of Prayer, an organization within the British holiness movement, and by doing so extends exponentially the historiography of female ministry in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A detailed analysis of two decades of the League's monthly journal, Tongues of Fire, uncovers scores of women engaged in public preaching, biblical exposition, theological teaching, and quasi-pastoral activity through the League's auspices. This preponderance of women's public religious activity in the League stands in contrast to the declining trend in women's preaching in Britain after 1850.