My favorite photo with Dr. George O. Wood (1941-2022) isn’t one from my college graduation but this screen grab from an iPhone video in 2015.
I worked that year at the AG fellowship’s biennial conference, in charge of engaging attendees with activities to spark conversations about service opportunities in Eurasia. I choreographed a very simplified version of a dance to the Russian song “Kalinka” (Калинка) easy enough that people watching could join in. No sooner had dancing started when someone said, “There’s General Superintendent Wood! Ask him to dance with us!” Up for anything, the nearly-74-year-old readily agreed, took my hand, and started learning the moves. A small crowd formed, and clapping erupted after all his arm-waves and leg-kicks.
I worked that year at the AG fellowship’s biennial conference, in charge of engaging attendees with activities to spark conversations about service opportunities in While this blurry photo evokes a fond and fun memory for me, it also serves as a symbol to me for the way that Dr. Wood stood alongside women in ministry. In her testimony today at Dr. Wood’s funeral regarding how he opened doors for women, Dr. Beth Grant recalled how he commissioned a task force for women in ministry when he saw that professional opportunities were opening for women in our country but not in our churches. He oversaw the AG’s first national conference for women ministers and, later, the creation of the Network for Women Ministers, which is thriving today. Before he took office as general superintendent, female credential holders made up 16% of the AG fellowship, and now they make up 27% — 10,208 women, and I am one of them. I’m grateful for his influence in ways I never had the chance to express to him, but in ways I will continue to live out.
Empowering women in ministry is just one of many aspects of Dr. Wood’s life for which he was honored today — not least the fact that the Fellowship became one of the most ethnically diverse denominations in America under his leadership, with 42.3% of adherents representing ethnic minorities — and all of these aspects taken together make Dr. Wood sound incredibly progressive for his age. But really, he was just playing by the book: the Book which says that the Spirit of God is for everyone.
I teared up during the closing hymn of his funeral (“When We All Get to Heaven” by Eliza Hewitt) because it was people like him who taught me that song as a child. It was people born in the 1930s and 1940s who you might think would impose traditional-church-culture prohibitions on a little girl who expressed a call to ministry, but they championed that, encouraged ministry and academia, and built my theology by teaching me the songs of their own growing-up years. I am grateful for people of the Book like Dr. Wood — and for the man himself. How many more people will know that God’s Spirit has been poured out equally on His sons AND daughters as a result of a life like this … only eternity will tell.