Book Review: “Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church” by Nijay K. Gupta

Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta is a fascinating look at women in leadership throughout the early church.

Gupta first notes his own journey of coming to understand that women have often been “hidden figures” (alluding to the book/movie about black women in NASA who helped launch the space program) when it comes to the history of the church. The rest of the book is divided into the time before the early church and the time of the early church. The chapters in the first part highlight Deborah, the role of women in Genesis 1-3, women in the NT, and women during Jesus’s ministry. The second part focuses on women as leaders in the early church, featuring Junia, Prisca, Phoebe, and others.

Many of these stories will be familiar to those already interested the debate over women in the church. But Gupta does a fantastic job not only providing an introductory look at the women of that early church and how the Bible shows them to be leading and teaching but also of introducing some lesser known topics. For example, there’s an interesting section about women ministering to Jesus as well. He also highlights how women were following Jesus alongside the twelve and helping fund and support that ministry (62ff).

The book will likely not convince those already entrenched on “the other side” but serves as a solid introduction to the challenges that come with denying women positions of teaching and leading in the early church. It becomes more and more clear that complementarians must explain away rather than explain the presence of these women leaders.

Tell Her Story presents an excellent introductory read to help show that women were indeed leaders in the early church. I highly recommend it.

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SDG.

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