Who’s Got Your Back? - Abigail Roberts

1791–1841

No matter what stage of life you’re in, there are people who will give you a hard time. It can happen in school, your neighborhood, the workplace, and sadly, even within the Christian community.

Abigail Roberts had this experience two hundred years ago. Brought up as a Quaker, she attended churches of several different denominations as a young adult. At some point in her twenties, after her marriage, she felt inspired to become a preacher. She joined the Christian Connection Church, a church that had ordained women since the early 1800s.

Dedicated to her ministry, Abigail preached throughout New York and New Jersey, often in churches she had helped to establish. Churches exist today in northwestern New Jersey that can claim Abigail Roberts as a church planter.

What problem could other Christians have with Abigail, who led many people to faith and helped establish churches? She was a woman. Christian denominations that did not approve of women preachers condemned her ministry.

Her son Philetus wrote in his Memoir of Mrs. Abigail Roberts that when attending a meeting of another denomination, she “would sometimes hear the professed minister of Christ denounce her, calling her a deceiver, and, at the same time, would unblushingly falsify and misrepresent her views.”

It must have been difficult to sit in a pew and listen to someone of her same faith call her names. How did she endure?

Certainly, she was devoted to God. She also clung to her calling as a preacher, committed to her belief that women had a right to exercise their gifts in the church. And she surrounded herself with people who encouraged her and, as we say today, “had her back.” Her husband, her friend Nancy Gove Cram (another female preacher), and the members of her church surely provided necessary encouragement.

Whether women should preach remains a contentious issue in many churches today, and we don’t mean to shrug it off. We would hope that the debates would be marked by Christian charity rather than name-calling. But Abigail Roberts does inspire a different question for us: When you’re doing what you believe God wants you to do but are getting a hard time from others, who helps you sort that out? Who will have your back?

Encourage each other and build each other up, just as you are already doing.

1 Thessalonians 5:11