Where Are All the Women? A Church Unrecognizable to Nicaea

The Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council would not recognize the Church today because of the absence of women leaders. Seventeen hundred years ago, the bishops who made their way to Nicaea carried with them the memories of the great martyrs like Saint Barbara and Saint Katherine and the 20,000 martyrs of Nicomedia. They would have been shepherds of flocks gathered together by great women preachers like Saint Irene. They would have left their churches in the care of ordained men and women: deacons and deaconesses, men and women exorcists, porters, lectors, librarians, chanters, virgins, and widows. Their flocks would have been fed by holy women who read and interpreted the scriptures alongside their male counterparts[i]. The churches where they met were made beautiful and kept in abundance by women patrons and leaders. Their sacred books were written in the beautiful handwriting of teenaged Christian girls who copied out the lines written by their faithful grandmothers before them. On feasts, the noblewomen brought lovely clothes to the shrines, and the servant women brought flowers. All the streets in the neighborhoods of the house churches rang with Christian hymns sung by women and children. The baths and laundries and bakeries and scriptoriums and halls and markets of the Fathers’ towns were peopled by sober women telling the Good News each day as had the reliable Myrrh-bearers before them.

Because of the testimony and servant leadership of Christian women, thousands of pagans each year were converting. They had shrines in their cities of the great women martyrs and wonderworkers like Saint Agatha, venerated by Christians and pagans alike. While the venerable Fathers were meeting, St. Nino was evangelizing Georgia. While they argued and prayed for the Orthodox faith, the women back home sang songs, copied out and taught the scriptures, fed the poor, tended and healed the sick, and proclaimed Christ as the true Son of God. Women and children made up most of the Fathers’ flocks, and they had lived their lives and faced persecutions because they believed the testimony of women, as had the Apostles before them. Theirs was not a faith enmeshed in grabs for power; rather they imitated the humility of God Himself Who became human by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. Ordinations were to specific service to specific communities and included men and women dedicated to steadfastness in the places where they lived and stayed.

We live in a time far removed, centuries after ordination was redefined in the 13^th Century to exclude women in the Catholic West[ii] and women’s diaconal service was largely lost to the accidents of wars and oppressive regimes in most of the Orthodox East. We live in a time when American Christianity is overrun with male authoritarianism and the complementarian view of women as lesser beings that has allowed Arianism to once again fester among us—as soon as you embrace the idea that women are lesser beings, you reject the Incarnation of God by a woman and the Holy Spirit, for if God did not assume flesh from a fully human woman, humanity could not be saved. We live in a time when, for the first time in recorded history, women are leaving organized religion. Men now outnumber women in the Orthodox churches in the United States by a huge margin, with men at 61% and women only 36%, according to the 2025 Pew Religious Landscape Study. This lack of women would be astonishing to the Holy Fathers gathered at Nicaea. What shepherd would rejoice to have a flock diminished of its ewes? They would see the dearth of women and lack of women in leadership as an evil portent, for what terrible abuses could drive faithful women from the Church of their Lord? If God established and the whole church embraced the ministry of deaconesses for 1,200 years, how would these venerable fathers not weep for their absence, they who had served alongside so many holy women and even borne witness to the martyrdom of many?

Dear Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, we women have continually taken up your cause. When Saint Ephraim the Syrian wrote hymns for women to combat Arianism, we women sang them in every home and church and street until the Orthodox faith was restored. When Saint Macrina learned from her grandmother of the Incarnate God, she clung to God until He gave her wisdom, then taught her brothers Saints Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste and her own mother Saint Emmelia and her sister Saint Theodosia the Deaconess and the many holy women she gathered in her monastic community, and the many men and women she welcomed and healed by her holy teaching and hospitality. When Saint Anthousa heard the faith and kept it, she along with her sister-in-law Saint Sabiniana the Deaconess formed her children in the Orthodox faith, giving us one of the Orthodoxy’s great preachers and defenders, Saint John Chrysostom. Saint Brigid believed your words and embraced Christ and His Mother and like a daughter of God shone forth the light of the Orthodox faith across Ireland. Saint Hilda guided the church at Whitby in the faith you Fathers established, spreading Orthodox worship throughout England with the many saints and bishops she helped to form by her faithful teaching and wise leadership. So with the Ammas of the Desert and the faithful women in all places and times since. Pray for us, dear Fathers, that we hidden women today will be restored to our places in the Church, so that a people sitting in darkness will hear our witness and come to the holy Orthodox Church saying, “We have heard from the women that you have a God among you Who will be found if sought.”

[i] See for example the complex teaching undertaken by a deaconess evident in Brooks, E.W. “The Letter of the Holy Mar Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, to Anastasia the Deaconess.” Patrologia Orientalis 14 (1920): 75–118.

[ii] Macy, Gary. 2008. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination : Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.