Linda Ambrose

Linda Ambrose, Pentecostal Preacher Woman: The Faith and Feminism of Bernice Gerard. UBC Press, 2024.

Bernice Gerard was familiar to most British Columbians during the 1970s and 1980s. Her public campaigns against facets of the “permissive society” led media in Vancouver to portray her as Lotus Land’s leading “square” or killjoy. Members of BC’s small but fast-growing Pentecostal community knew her differently: as a media-savvy pastor who helped spread their faith and advance the evangelical movement. Yet as Linda Ambrose demonstrates in this intellectual biography of a significant woman religious leader, it would be a mistake to characterize Gerard as a closed-minded moral crusader or dogmatic proselytizer. While she was by no means a liberal or “progressive” figure, a childhood shaped by neglect and abuse inspired her sympathy for marginalized people and curiosity about cultural differences. She embraced higher education when few other Pentecostals did so, and undertook ecumenical outreach despite it being frowned on by church authorities. Most of all, Ambrose shows that Gerard espoused a kind of feminism that viewed women as just as capable as men. Ambrose analyzed Gerard’s extensive personal records to trace her activities and understand her inner formation. Ambrose is particularly successful in showing how Gerard’s life experience shaped her outlook, attitude, and responses: the significance of lived history is highlighted throughout. Ambrose also takes a nuanced, sensitive approach to the unanswerable question of Gerard’s sexuality. Pentecostal Preacher Woman complicates our understanding of religion in a time and place largely characterized by secularization, and draws our attention to overlooked varieties of feminism. By showing how right-wing politics and evangelical churches interacted, it provides an early example of what would become a wider pattern in Canada. In doing so, it tells us a lot about our divided present.