The Genealogy at the Foot of the Cross: Seven Bishops and the Women Who Were Always Already There

The first thing the gospels do at the crucifixion is take attendance.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — all four linger over the list. Mary Magdalene was there. Mary the mother of James and Joses was there. Salome was there. Mary the mother of Jesus was there. Joanna and Susanna were there. The women who had followed him from Galilee were there. The disciples ran. The women stayed. The list is the doctrine. Whoever stayed at the cross is who the resurrection witnesses are. The empty tomb account begins with women because the cross account ends with women, and the church is only ever the body that traces that thread back.

So when Religion News Service reported this April that for the first time in United Methodist history, seven Black women bishops shared a Good Friday pulpit and preached the Seven Last Words of Christ in a single service — Bishops Kennetha J. Bingham-Thai, Robin Dease, LaTrelle Easterling, Cynthia Moore-Koikoi, Sharma D. Lewis Logan, Tracy Smith Malone, and Delores J. Williamston — mapping the tapestry asks a different question than the headline. The headline asks: what changed? Mapping the tapestry asks: what was already there?

Jarena Lee was already there. In 1817 she walked up into Mother Bethel AME and finished a man's sermon when his anointing failed mid-pulpit. Richard Allen, who had refused her a license to preach, watched the spirit fall on her in front of his congregation and could not in good conscience deny what he had just witnessed. He did not give her a title. He gave her permission. The title would take another century and a half.

Julia Foote was already there. Pauli Murray was already there — Episcopal, yes, but the line is not denominationally fenced. Vashti Murphy McKenzie was already there. By the time she became the first woman bishop in the 200-year history of the AME Church in 2000, she had already pastored Payne Memorial in Baltimore, already chaired every committee that mattered, already written the books, already done the work. The election was the formality. The ministry had been continuous.

The women's missionary societies built the first denominational treasuries. The deaconess movements ran the actual social services. The church mothers governed the moral discipline of every congregation Robert Franklin and Henry Mitchell would later canonize. The Sunday School superintendents shaped the theological imagination of generations of preachers — preachers who would then ascend pulpits the superintendents themselves were not allowed to occupy. Tracing the tapestry means refusing the founder narrative that hands the church to a single great man and noticing instead the dense, distributed, mostly-feminine labor that has carried the institution from its inception to this Friday's service.

What is new about Good Friday 2026 is not the women preaching the cross. The women have always preached the cross — to children, in basements, at women's days, at funerals where everyone present knew the truth that the official preacher was performing. What is new is denominational acknowledgment. Seven titled women, on the holiest preaching day of the Christian year, with their authority unambiguous. The institution caught up to the witness.

Mapping the tapestry refuses to treat that catching-up as the event. The event was always the witness. What changed in April is institutional recognition, and recognition is not the same as origin. When you trace the thread, the women were always already there. What broke loose this week is not access to the pulpit but the institution's last excuse for pretending otherwise.

This matters for how we tell the next story too. Bishop Williamston preaching the third word — "Woman, behold thy son" — is going to live in the historical record. The next girl in the pew watching the livestream of seven Black women preach the cross will not have to wonder whether the call she feels is real. But the genealogy that runs from the Marys at Calvary through Jarena Lee through the women's missionary society at Mt. Zion AME in 1923 through the church mothers who taught Vashti McKenzie how to pray — that genealogy was already there. The institution is just now learning to read its own tapestry.

The Anancy Webwork lesson here: do not let the headline tell you what the lineage is. The lineage tells you what the headline missed. The cross has been a women's pulpit the whole time. We are simply, finally, calling it by its name.