When Bishop Vashti McKenzie took the podium last night at "Women in the Pursuit of Truth," the congregation at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, stood in respect.

	Post-Gazette file photo Bishop Vashti McKenzie twice has been called one of America's most influential black ministers by Ebony magazine. Click photo for larger image.

The poised clergywoman in the simple black suit had come to deliver a word on being "Strong at the Wounded Places." As opening speaker for a three-day conference on women in the church, McKenzie, the first female bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had come to stir their souls.

Her arms outstretched, her message folksy and sure, she talked about her God.

For McKenzie, who Ebony magazine has twice deemed one of America's most influential black ministers, God is a redeemer, a healer and a mighty force that humans cloak with traits both masculine and feminine.

Sacred literature calls him Father, and talks about the hand of God, seeing His face. But it also describes the Holy Spirit as the mother hen who gathers in the chicks. His body, the church, is lovingly referred to as a her, and is called the bride of Christ.

It's a unifying message for this polished, educated and trailblazing minister who five years ago went where no woman had ever gone in the 200-year history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: She became a bishop.

"God did it," she said.

There are 3 million members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and 84 percent of them are female. There are 21 bishops in the hierarchy and three are female.

"We're making progress," said McKenzie, who was the first to break the stained-glass ceiling, doing so without bitterness.

The church is not a vacuum, she said, but reflects a society where roles for men and women were strictly defined.

"People used Scriptures, patriarchy, whatever was at hand to say this is it," she said.

She survived -- with hope -- by guarding her heart, accepting the reality of gender bias and understanding that God made her a woman, validated her and gave her "everything I need" to be a bishop.

McKenzie considers herself a womanist biblicist, a female who affirms the divinity of females but believes her Bible tells her not to exclude males. Some womanists, a theological view that gained favor in the 1980s, challenge male-centered interpretations of the Bible and seek to purposely offer hope to women.

Not so for McKenzie.

"When called to pastor," she said, "I knew I'd have to honor men and women based on the Scripture we hold sacred. As a preacher of the gospel, I have to use everything God gave me to use for everybody."

Still, like many female clergy, her journey wasn't an easy road.

In most black churches, women still do most of the Sunday school teaching, lead the Bible study and sing in the choir, but the power has been elusive.

When they've come, female ministers have complained they've been assigned dead churches, those struggling with membership and physical decay, and have been asked to bring the bones back to life.

More than a decade ago, she inherited Payne Memorial AME in inner-city Baltimore and worked what many consider to be a miracle. She turned a congregation of little more than 100 into a 1,700-member church.

In pushing for positive change, McKenzie said she learned early from an influential clergy mentor that "it's not what you find, it's what you leave that counts."

A former model and a trained print and broadcast journalist, McKenzie earned a master's degree in divinity from Howard University and a doctorate of ministry from Union Theological Seminary. She was fully ordained in 1985.