21 Best Jarena Lee Quotes: Courageous Woman of Faith

1. “…I have not even doubted the power and goodness of God to keep me from falling, through the sanctification of the spirit and the belief in the truth.” – Jarena Lee, the first woman ordained to preach by the AME Church

2. “If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, seeing he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one, as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear?”

3. “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, humanitarian, and former slave

4. “Courage… it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.” – Marie M. Daly, the first female African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry

5. “The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us.” – Corrie ten Boom, Dutch watchmaker and writer who was persecuted for hiding Jews in her home during the Holocaust

6. “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.” – Rosa Parks, African-American civil rights activist

7. “If a man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also.”[2]

8. “Too often we have bartered away not only the land but the very air and water. Too often we have sacrificed human values to commercial values under the bright guise of progress. And in our unconcern, we have let a crisis gather which threatens health and even life itself.” – Claudia “Ladybird” Johnson, former First Lady of the United States; proponent of the Head Start program and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

9. “First Woman Preacher in the AME Church” History of American Women

10. “If a man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also.”

11. “At the reading of the Psalms, a ray of renewed conviction darted into my soul. These were the words, composing the first verse of the Psalms for the service:

12. “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” – Oprah Winfrey, American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

13. “He (Rev. Williams) entered the pulpit, gave out the hymn, which was sung, and then addressed the throne of grace; took his text, passed through the exordium, and commenced to expound it. The text he took is in Jonah, 2d chap. 9th verse, — ‘Salvation is of the Lord.’ But as he proceeded to explain, he seemed to have lost the spirit; when in the same instant, I sprang, as by an altogether supernatural impulse, to my feet, when I was aided from above to give an exhortation on the very text which my brother Williams had taken.

14. “Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.” – Sojourner Truth abolitionist, advocate for civil and women’s rights, and former slave

15. “Dr. Fowler has the will of a Napoleon, I have the will of a Queen Elizabeth.”

16. “Vanguard” includes a number of such iconic moments: Ida B. Wells marching with her Illinois state delegation in the 1913 suffragist parade, in defiance of white organizers who told Black women they would have to march in an all-Black assembly at the back; Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, recalling how a vicious beating in a Mississippi jail left her with permanent kidney damage and blindness in one eye.

17. “It is true we could not, many of us, conjugate a verb or parse a sentence, and murdered the King’s English almost every lick,” Cartwright later wrote about himself and his fellow circuit riders. “But there was a Divine unction attended the word preached, and thousands fell under the mighty power of God.”

18. “Great leaders never accept the world as it (is) and always work for the world as it should be.” – Condoleezza Rice, Former United States Secretary of State

19. “You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it’s important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.” – Michelle Obama, first African American First Lady of the United States

20. “Go preach the Gospel!”

21. “Did not Mary first preach the risen Saviour, and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity — hangs not all our hope on this, as argued by St. Paul? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? for she preached the resurrection of the crucified Son of God.