Pulpit Pioneers: They made history as some of Long Island's earliest women clergy

Before she became Long Island’s first female rabbi in 1979, Bonnie Steinberg said the most frequently asked question in job interviews was, “What does your husband do?”

And if the job was out of town, it was “why would your husband want to leave New York?” Steinberg, 74, recalled in a telephone interview from her home in Watertown, Massachusetts. She said she pushed through that “horrible” sexism and later served as the spiritual leader of Temple Isaiah of Great Neck from 1985 through her retirement in 2000.

Women now make up about half the students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, up from about a quarter when Steinberg was a student at the seminary’s Manhattan campus.

“Their courage — and that of the pioneering women who followed — reshaped our movement,” Andrew Rehfeld, the college’s president, wrote in an emailed statement.

Change has come more slowly for women clergy in Christian denominations but is making progress, clergy members said.

“There are more women pastors in pulpits now,” said the Rev. Phillip McDowell, moderator of the Eastern Baptist Association, which has six women pastors leading its approximately 100 historically Black churches on Long Island and in Brooklyn and Queens. That’s a higher percentage than 25 years ago, when there were 251 churches and the same number of female pastors, McDowell explained.

The Rev. Sue Hyosuk Yun said she has benefited “from a couple of female pastors before me” at the Community United Methodist Church in Massapequa. “I think the churches are able to see all the beautiful gifts women clergy are able to bring in,” Yun said. The church now has more female bishops (17) in the United States than male bishops (15).

In observance of Women’s History Month, here are the stories of three Long Island clergywomen who paved the way for future generations to proclaim, “I am woman, hear me preach.”

The Rev. Patricia J. Rickenbacker

Senior pastor of Living Hope Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in East Massapequa and vice moderator of the Nassau County Eastern Baptist Association 

When the Rev. Patricia J. Rickenbacker founded Living Hope Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church inside an East Massapequa home in 1991, she was among only a handful of women leading Baptist churches in the metro area.

In the decades since, Rickenbacker, 77, has drawn praise from her faith’s male clergy. “She’s someone who understands the importance of preparation for pastoring, and of education, and she always brings a challenging and insightful sermon,” McDowell said.

Rickenbacker grew up in Wyandanch, graduating from the public high school in 1966, and earned her master’s at C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville. She worked as a guidance counselor at her alma mater until her retirement from that role in 2017, and returned in January as a temporary counselor.

Meanwhile, Rickenbacker — the great-granddaughter of a Baptist minister — said she always believed she was called to serve in the ministry.

Her pursuit of ordination 40 years ago was met with what she calls “the big obstacle”: the belief in some Baptist circles “that women were not called to preach.”

Some friends and influential people called her intentions “crazy” and “blasphemous,” she recalled.

After Bible study and prayer with her pastor, and with the support of her husband, John, and her parents, Rickenbacker said “after much struggling . . . I said yes to God.” She received a master of divinity from Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan in 1986.

“The early years of my ministry were marked by usually being made to feel invisible, not being addressed by my proper title, not being welcomed or invited into rooms or groups designed for pastors because of being a female,” she said.

Living Hope has relocated several times over the decades since it was founded. Its most recent home — a former swingers’ club — was condemned and torn down along with a neighboring motel a little more than two years ago. As Rickenbacker seeks a new sanctuary, approximately 60 members meet on Sundays at the parsonage in a residential neighborhood.

Services are a family affair with her husband, assistant pastor and lead deacon John Rickenbacker Sr. The couple’s three children and seven grandchildren are involved. They also have a 3-year-old great-grandson.

“We’re known as ‘the church in the hood,’ ” Rickenbacker said, noting that they offer free monthly community events including an ongoing diaper drive, women’s empowerment fellowship and children’s movie showings.

Rickenbacker’s persistence was rewarded in 2022, when she became the first woman elected area vice moderator in the 105-year history of the Eastern Baptist Association, McDowell said.

Despite ongoing challenges, Rickenbacker said one of her favorite duties is preparing other women for ministry.

“By teaching and nurturing, mentoring and finally laying hands on these women, I pray in turn that they can fully receive and acknowledge God’s ‘yes’ for their ministries as well,” she said.

Deborah K. Bravo

Spiritual leader and founder of the Makom NY Jewish community in Bethpage

As the first woman to serve as a rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C., Rabbi Deborah K. Bravo found herself challenged — not over her sex, but because of her Sabbath wardrobe.

“In my first job, I wore a skirt,” Bravo, 56, of Woodbury, recalled of her assignment in a congregation she described as “very proper.” The first time Bravo wore slacks instead of a skirt, she was told she “couldn’t wear pants on the bimah,” the synagogue’s pulpit.

Despite that fashion faux pas, Bravo had been dressing for the role of rabbi since her teens.

“I knew I wanted to be a rabbi from the time I was a high school student,” said Bravo, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois. “When I became a bat mitzvah in 1982, I was the first girl to choose to wear a prayer shawl and a yarmulke,” religious garments at the time more often worn at boy’s bar mitzvahs, Bravo said. She taught Hebrew to bar and bat mitzvah students and traveled to Israel while in high school. By the time an associate rabbi at her synagogue asked Bravo whether she had considered the rabbinate, she said she told him that “yes, I had already been thinking about it.”

While studying at Washington University in St. Louis, Bravo said she taught Hebrew and Sunday School at local synagogues and even led a few religious services as a student.

Soon after graduating with a double major in education and Jewish and Near Eastern Studies, Bravo entered the seminary at Hebrew Union College’s campus in Cincinnati. “By the time I finished school and was ordained a rabbi in 1998 there had been women rabbis for 25 years,” she said. Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi in North America, was ordained in 1972. But growing acceptance of women rabbis didn’t open as many doors as Bravo had imagined. “There were jobs they were happy to have women in, like being assistant rabbi or educators, but not the senior rabbi,” she said

Eleven years ago, Bravo founded a congregation of her own — the Makom NY Jewish community, primarily geared to unaffiliated and disengaged Jews on Long Island. “One of the things we focused on was that Long Island has a large Jewish community but many people are not connected to it,” Bravo said. The community rents space at the Bethpage Worship Center, a church-owned building. Her Friday evening Sabbath service is traditional, she said, but begins by welcoming “people from all backgrounds.” Her husband, David, 73, is the congregation’s musical director.

To women contemplating a life in Jewish ministry, Bravo said, “I would highly recommend it — knowing it is very hard work, meaningful work and every day looks different.”

The Rev. Noel Koestline

Retired pastor of Bridgehampton and East Hampton United Methodist Churches now living in St. Petersburg, Florida

“Although I came from a long line of ministers, no one ever expected me to follow in that line. After all, I was a girl,” said the Rev. Noel Koestline, 81.

Koestline, who grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, went on to become one of the first clergywomen to serve in a Long Island congregation, working as an associate pastor of the Islip United Methodist Church from 1974 to 1978.

She said she first committed to church-related work at 16 while attending a summer youth camp when those “who wanted to dedicate their life to full-time Christian service” were invited to the altar.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in religion in 1966 from Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement. Koestline said college administrators warned she would be expelled if she joined demonstrations, so she instead worked behind the scenes to help desegregate the campus. She also earned a master of divinity degree in 1974 at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary.

Most of her family supported her decision to join the ministry, though her grandfather, a longtime Florida pastor, “had trouble getting used to the idea that I would be the one to carry the banner forward,” she recalled. He eventually accepted her decision and at age 85 made the trip to New York to join a bishop in the ritual laying on of hands at Koestline’s 1976 ordination.

In New York, Koestline said, male leaders were willing “to open doors for female clergy.” Still, she faced resistance on Long Island, where she served as pastor of the Bayport United Methodist Church from 1994 to 2004. “My female United Methodist colleagues and I were scrutinized, doubted, talked over . . . and held to a higher standard,” she recalled.

But Koestline said those doubts faded once a congregation got to know her. And her Spanish-language fluency came in handy during her last assignment, serving immigrant communities at Bridgehampton and East Hampton United Methodist Churches from 2004 to 2008.

Koestline retired to Southold before moving in 2014 to St. Petersburg with her husband, the Rev. W. Joel Warner, who died in 2022.

Koestline continues to play piano and sing in church choirs as well as fill in when she’s needed at a pulpit. She also is assisting in founding a congregation for Spanish-speakers in St. Petersburg. “I’m retired, but I keep my hand in,” she said.