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“When researchers interviewed the staff, pastors, and candidates of a certain church well known for producing ministers, they discovered that each ministry candidate (all male in this case) had been approached by the same elderly woman. She told each of them the same thing. ‘Young man, I think you have the gifts for ministry.’ Her ‘pastoral authority’ was such that they had ‘promptly enrolled in seminary.’ ”

—story told in “Called and sent out” by Lillian Daniel, Christian Century, Feb. 21, 2006