Pentecostal Honour Must Reach the Women Who Carry the Work

Pentecostal churches know how to honour women with words. We celebrate the praying mother, the sacrificial pastor's wife, the faithful women's fellowship leader, the intercessor who arrives before everyone and the volunteer who remains after the congregation has left. We testify that women sustained the revival, raised the children, visited the sick, fed the gathering, financed the mission and kept the church together through crisis.

Yet honour can become a spiritual language for making work invisible. The same woman may be praised publicly while excluded from the meeting where budgets, appointments, property, doctrine and strategy are decided. A task may be called a calling when compensation is discussed, but treated as professional work when performance is demanded. Faithfulness may be expected without a job description, protection, leave, development, reimbursement or a safe way to question authority.

This contradiction is not resolved by importing a corporate equality slogan into the Church. It requires Pentecostal discernment. What work is being done? Who bears its cost? Which roles are genuinely voluntary? Which have become employment in substance? Whose gifts are recognised, trained and authorised? Who controls the resources? Whose voice changes a consequential decision? The Spirit who gives gifts also exposes arrangements that receive women's labour while withholding institutional trust.

The United Nations observes International Equal Pay Day on 18 September. The observance draws attention to persistent differences…