Collect Their Stories: What Women in PAOC Leadership Are Teaching Us
In 2020, as I drifted toward sleep thinking about a class assignment on women in ministry, I heard a whisper. “Collect Their Stories.”
There was no thunder. No vision. Just a quiet, unmistakable prompting of the Holy Spirit. And I knew what it meant. I was to gather the stories of women in leadership in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC).
That prompting became a three-year research journey and ultimately a doctoral thesis titled Collect Their Stories: Lived Experiences of Women in Leadership in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
This research asks a simple but searching question: What are the lived experiences of women in leadership credentialed by the PAOC?
The Ideal and the Real
The PAOC formally affirms an egalitarian theology. Women and men are equally called, equally gifted, and equally authorized to lead. In 1998, formal barriers to leadership were removed.
And yet, the numbers tell a different story.
Women represent 29% of credentialed ministers but only about 7% of lead pastors.1 More than two decades after formal equality was declared, senior leadership remains overwhelmingly male.
This study explores that gap — the distance between the ideal (policy) and the real (practice).
Listening Before Concluding
Using Constructivist Grounded Theory, I interviewed 24 credentialed women from across Canada. I asked them to tell me their stories. And then I listened.
I knew that women in Pentecostal settings have often been marginalized, restricted, or overlooked.
During the interviews, I held space. Sometimes that meant sitting quietly while tears formed. Sometimes it meant resisting the urge to fill awkward silence. Sometimes it meant noticing body language, tone shifts, or sudden hesitations that signaled something deeper was unfolding.
Research, in this case, became an act of witnessing — holding pain, recognizing injustice, and affirming calling. These were testimonies of perseverance.
Despite barriers, every woman interviewed remained in ministry. That alone is remarkable.
Three social processes emerged:
- Affirmation: Women flourished when someone named their calling, saw their gifts, and publicly affirmed their identity.
- Making Space: Leadership doors opened when environments intentionally created room for women to teach, preach, and govern.
- Mentoring: Mentors — both male and female — were pivotal in helping women interpret setbacks, navigate institutional barriers, and sustain calling.
If women flourish where affirmation and intentional space-making exist and stall where they do not, then organizational structure and leaders are not neutral actors. They are culture formers.
The social processes are the starting pieces for the theoretical model.
The Lived Experience Cycle
A theoretical model emerged from the narratives: The Lived Experience Cycle (LEC).
This five-step cycle traces how women navigate their experiences:
- Calling – A conviction of divine vocation.
- Confer – An encounter with institutional authority that produces cognitive dissonance, typically arising through one of the three social processes.
- Response – Emotional and theological processing.
- Formation – Spiritual and personal transformation.
- Resilience – Renewed commitment to ministry.
At each stage, five determinants influence the outcome:
- Theological anthropology
- Hermeneutics
- Organizational culture
- Agency
- Mentoring
Women repeatedly described a pattern where they are marginalized, but they return to God in prayer, disentangling emotion from calling. In that encounter, resilience is formed.
The cycle is intensely spiritual.
A Final Reflection
This research is about ecclesiology, discipleship, and spiritual integrity within the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada.
If 28 years of formal inclusion have yielded minimal structural shift, leaders must ask whether informal norms are more powerful than official statements.
These women are not asking for preference. They are asking for coherence — that orthodoxy, orthopathy, and orthopraxis align.
Their stories are not fringe narratives. They are a mirror. And perhaps the Spirit is still whispering:
Collect Their Stories.
[1] PAOC, “2025 Fellowship Statistics,” March 11, 2025, paoc.org/docs/default-source/fellowship-services-documents/fellowship-stats-2025-at-11-mar-2025.pdf?sfvrsn=15a5c46a_1
Collect Their Stories will be published this summer as part of Brill’s Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies series.
Susan J. Tam
Honorary Postdoctoral Associate, Alphacrucis University College
