A life of Grace: Trail-blazing clergywoman to be honored by UMC

By Mary Garrigan, Journal Staff Writer | Thursday, June 29, 2006

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SPEARFISH -- “Amazing Grace” is the title of one of the most beloved hymns of all time, but it is also a pretty good description of the Rev. Grace Huck.

Huck, who celebrates her 90th birthday today at a party in Spearfish, will be honored in August as the first woman in America to be given full clerical membership in an Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Huck and a handful of other pioneering clergywomen will be on hand for the 50th anniversary celebration of the full inclusion for women during the 2006 International United Methodist Clergywomen’s Consultation Aug. 13-17 in Chicago. She is also one of 280 clergywomen whose first-person accounts are featured in the book, “Courageous Past — Bold Future,” which chronicles the history of women clergy in the UMC.

Huck recounts the story of her life and ministry in her own book, “God’s Amazing Grace.” The self-published memoir covers her childhood on a northwestern South Dakota homestead, her call to ministry as a young woman and the blessings and battles of a long career that took her from the Dakota prairies to missionary work in the Philippines and back again to the pulpits of several South Dakota churches.

Huck began her ministry career in 1941 as a lay supply preacher in Methodist churches in North Dakota. She was ordained a deacon in 1945 and an elder in 1949, after a five-year, conference-approved Course of Study.

Women have been ordained in the United Methodist Church since 1924, but it was not until 1956 — 50 years ago this year — that she and about 25 other women nationwide gained full membership after a vote of the General Conference. As soon as full clergy rights for women became official, annual conferences throughout the nation rushed to become the first to receive one. Huck’s conference membership is sometimes listed as the second because Maud Jensen, a missionary in Korea, was received in absentia by the Western Pennsylvania Annual Conference.

Before 1956, a female Methodist minister had little in the way of job security and no control over her career.

“If a district superintendent believed in women, I could get an appointment; if not, I couldn’t,” Huck said.

Women ministers were often replaced by a congregation as soon as a male candidate for the job came along.

“I always had the church that nobody else wanted or those churches that couldn’t afford to pay for a minister with a family,” Huck said.

Her first job after the 1956 vote was in Velva, N.D. When her appointment was announced to the congregation, one of the church’s leaders stood up in church and announced “There’ll be no skirts in this pulpit while I’m alive!”

Huck eventually won the respect of that reluctant congregant, who later praised her for her preaching talents and her pastoral skills.

“I never went in as a woman minister, but as a minister who happens to be a woman,” she said. “Just go in as a person.”

Today, about 9,500, or one in five clergy in the UMC are women, and 16 women are active bishops. But in the early years of her ministry, Huck got used to being mistaken for the minister’s wife instead of the minister.

“I would often be introduced as Miss Huck, and people would say, ‘You must be the minister’s wife,’” Huck recalled. “That was one of the things that bothered me all my ministry, that people were reluctant to use the title of Reverend for women.”

Although the diminutive Methodist minister never married, it wasn’t for lack of looking, she said.

“I looked for a pastor to marry,” she said. “Never found one.”

Sometimes, she did encounter resistance to her gender among ministers of other faiths.

Huck recalled one letter she received from a fundamentalist Protestant pastor who told her he could not join her on an ecumenical church project because her ordination showed they did not share a common faith.

“I wrote back to him and told him that I believe in Jesus Christ and that I’m sorry if you don’t.”

She also believes that the Bible makes it clear that women have long been called to ordained ministry, citing Romans 16 in which Phoebe is recommended as a minister of the church by Paul.

Saint Paul, she said, often gets a bad rap as being anti-woman. Paul affirmed women as ministers, and Jesus, she believes, was a real feminist.

“Women have a very real place in ministry. They often have different skills than men,” she said. “God has always been calling women to the church, but they couldn’t always answer.”

Her own call to ministry was a bit surprising for a child who didn’t set foot inside a church until the age of 8. That was not a reflection on her parents’ lack of religion, but rather the reality of the geographic remoteness of their Harding County homestead. The nearest town was Bowman, N.D., 32 miles away on dirt roads.

The family returned to Bowman one Sunday for a Fourth of July celebration and decided to attend a church service at the Congregational Church, where they had buried her baby brother a few months earlier. The Congregational Church was closed, but the Methodist Church was open for services. The Huck family attended and kept returning on a regular basis.

“I guess I would have become a Congregational pastor if the Congregational Church had been open that day,” she said.

As a teenager, Huck began to feel a call on her life to preach.

“I proved to have a gift for preaching,” Huck said. “I like to say that when I preach, I teach, and when I teach, I preach.”

Before she was a minister, she was a schoolteacher, and she combined the two from 1960 to 1971, when she served as a Christian missionary and a professor at Harris Memorial College, a women’s college in Manila, Philippines.

She tried to retire from the ministry six times but kept finding herself in the pulpit of small towns such as Marcus, Faith, Buffalo and Camp Crook and in larger ones such as Mitchell. She even returned to the Philippines for a two-year volunteer stint in the 1980s.

The Rev. Jeanne Higgins, campus minister at Black Hills State University, will accompany Huck to Chicago. The two UMC ministers have been friends for many years, and Higgins said Huck was not only a great clergywoman, but also a mentor and an inspiration for her own ministry.

“To know one of the pioneers is to know that anything is possible,” Higgins said. “She doesn’t look at anything as impossible. She always accepted challenges and did well with them.”

Heading into her 91st year, Huck is still spry and active as a member of Spearfish United Methodist Church. Most weeks she still attends all three Sunday services, riding to church in nice weather on her electric-powered scooter from her Hickory House apartment. “Everybody refers to her as our amazing Grace,” church secretary Orvette Stepper said.

The church will host her 90th birthday party today after the 10:30 a.m. service.

On the Net:

For copies of Grace Huck’s book, “God’s Amazing Grace,” go to www.gracepublisher.com