Why: Chapel Veils

One thing that set Bishop Lawson's new organization apart early on was the wearing of hats by women as a part of their participation in service. This practice is based on 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul taught that women should cover their heads (and that men should not cover theirs) when they pray or prophesy.

Lawson began his ministry in a time when men and women normally wore hats when they left home. Inside buildings, men showed respect by removing their hats, while women donned or doffed their hats according to context. Church services were traditionally times when men took off their hats. A good many established traditions, like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and many Protestant groups, taught that women should have some sort of covering on their heads in church.

Refuge Temple being situated in Manhattan, it would have been easy for Lawson and the people who joined his movement to observe the veiling traditions of other Christian communities. Of the churches that practiced veiling, the Roman Catholic would have been by far the largest and most pronounced in New York City. 

Veiling traditions from Europe included hats and cloth coverings. One covering in particular, the mantilla, found widespread usage in the Americas. Originally from Spain (and perhaps ultimately from the Middle East), the mantilla was a lace-trimmed, light-weight, often decorative headdress. It was used primarily for covering the head during worship, or even as a part of daily wear for the very religious or very traditional. The mantilla took many forms: it could be large or small; triangular, rectangular, or circular; and could cover just the top of the head or extend as far as the shoulders. Some women veiled themselves in lace scarves, wrapped loosely around the neck like a normal scarf and then pulled to conceal one's hair.

It is clear that, long before coming to New York, Lawson taught that women ought to cover their heads in church, be it a gathering for prayer or when in the church building itself. This was not a firm teaching in the Pentecostal movement, but the practice of women's headcovering has surfaced among several different Pentecostal groups. Moreover, precursors to Pentecostalism had also practiced women's headcovering, including segments of the Holiness movement, Methodism, and Anabaptist fellowships. Thus, the doctrine of women's headcovering was not an idiosyncrasy of Lawson's doctrine, but it did become characteristic of his movement.

Traditional Lawsonites women were hat-wearers. They did not feel that the head was truly covered with a veil. In some of the more traditional branches of the Lawsonite Apostolics, even little girls are expected to wear hats, not veils, in services. In Lawson's organization proper, chapel veils (also known as prayer scarves, prayer caps, prayer veils, or chaplets) are normally worn by girls as they come into their preteen years and are normally worn well into young adulthood (or beyond). Hats are associated with age, not altogether negatively; like reaching a marriageable age, young women are known to (avoid or) think carefully about hatwearing, finding the kind of hat that fits one's personality and compliments one's face.

The hat, with its sturdiness and fixed shape, becomes a symbol of maturity and authority, both socially and spiritually. Missionaries are supposed to wear hats, not veils, when in uniform; the same goes for the wives of ministers and deacons. Pastors' wives are presented with an assortment of hats at pastoral appreciation ceremonies; mothers of the church are blessed with hats for their birthdays. Moreover, even though early Pentecostals had strict rules about the plainness of hats (no feathers, no flowers), even in the Church of Lord Jesus Christ, in addition to their primary spiritual significance, hats have become (secondarily) fashion statements and (tertiarily) adumbrations of financial status.

That said, there was a less well known headcovering tradition in the African American community during Lawson's lifetime. Women of African descent practiced a variety of headcovering and hairwrapping practices that were only tangentially religious, if at all, but nonetheless widespread. The most pronounced one was probably the head kerchief (also known as a head scarf or head rag). It was common for tradition black Southern women to cover (or "tie up") their heads before going out. The practice, as the writer has read on it and observed it, seemed to center around modesty at times (mainly not showing the hair), but even then was optional, both in the home and abroad. (Read more about this tradition here.)

Lawson founded Refuge Temple near the beginning of the first wave of the Great Migration, when many women would have been bringing their Southern ways with them, including the head kerchief. Longtime Northerners abhorred the backward look of the kerchief, and it became both a bone of contention between them and the newcomers as well as a telltale sign of a Southerner just come up. The traditional headcovering would never thrive in Harlem, much less in a church like Lawson's. Author Cheryl Wills describes the Refuge Temple scene in her family memoirs Die Free:

Lawson's faithful members were not low-key rural folks... These were Southern-born, fast-paced city slickers, who had fled the oppressive South during the so-called Great Migration, and prided themselves on being one of Harlem's own. Many acted as though as they were born and bred New Yorkers, and the South no longer existed in their minds.(Die Free, 51)

Kerchiefs just did not fit in a "big-time city church with fancy pews, polished floors, bright lights, and sparkling silver communion serviceware" (Die Free, 51). In fact, the head kercheif eventually became associated with the occult: voodoo, hoodoo, root, and conjure. Traditional headcoverings--head kerchiefs, turbans, bandanas, straw hats--were acceptable where traditional culture thrived (i.e., the South), but were too exotic for the North. For this reason, traditional headcoverings never found a formal integration into Lawson's (nor most other) holiness praxis.

Eventually, even hats went out of fashion as daily wear. Today, hatwearing is a matter of personal preference. Also, it is not convenient to carry around a hat solely to accommodate headcovering practices. Enter the chapel veil: conveniently portable; nonostentatious for prayer in public (think street ministry or workplace prayer); inexpensive and simple to make; and a way of celebrating and affirming the disciplines of prayer and practical holiness.
The chapel veil as worn by Lawsonite women is normally circular, made of embroidered tulle, with lace trimming sewn around it.


Chapel veils are not doilies, though a doily could certainly serve as a headcovering if needed. Technically, anything could be a headcovering, if it reasonably covers the head. In the 1980s, young women wore pillbox hats, which only really covered a small section of the head. Some organizations use the most minimal headcoverings. Some have even adopted the teaching that the hair is the covering, or that women ought not cover. In the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, there has been an abrogation of this teaching in some, particularly urban, areas. Admittedly, some Lawsonites organizations, like the Progressive Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have never been extremely strict about this teaching. At any rate, chapel veils are a matter of religious discipline, not intended to suborn women in particular, but to instill a sense of decorum and obedience to scripture in the church at large.


This article will end with a little irony. The same scriptural passage that calls for women's headcovering also calls for men's uncovering. While men are expected to remove their hats indoors and during prayers, speeches, and special observances, there is little spiritual teaching about men not covering. Prayer outdoors may find men covered; graduation ceremonies indoors also finds men covered, sometimes even during prayer. After Bishop Smallwood Williams established the Bible Way Churches of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he adopted the biretta. In his old age, Bishop William L Bonner is known to wear a small skullcap in service, even while preaching (perhaps to guard against hypothermia). These small exceptions granted, rare would be the man caught preaching, teaching or praying with a hat on, indoors or out.

Women Preachers: Missionary Work

We, the women of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that God has called us into holiness and sobriety, and charity, to rescue the fallen and administer any and all help, as we have opportunity, whether spiritual or material to the glory of God and to the honor and majesty of His great Name, now take our place in the ranks of the workers of our Lord to do our part in harvesting souls for Jesus Christ, as our Lord is coming soon to gather the precious fruits of the early and latter rain.

So begins the Preamble to the "Constitution of the Department of Women's Missionary Work of [the] Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ," organized in September of 1923. In the organization's Discipline Book, just above the preamble, are three scriptural references: Romans 16:1 (or 16:1-2, a reference to Phoebe, a female collaborator of Paul); Philippians 4:2 (sic, should be 4:3, where Paul enjoins the saints to help the women that worked with him, Clement, and others); and Titus 2:3-6 (sic, should be 2:3-5, which describes the teaching duties of older women; vs. 6 concerns young men). Taken together, these scriptures give a fairly modest, but conveniently flexible, framework for the missionary work of called women. While male ministers were to give themselves primarily to pastoral duties and evangelism, women were to augment the men's preaching ministry by whatever means they could (short of preaching), and were also to teach and set an example for younger women, especially as wives and mothers.

Missionary work, of course, did not have its beginning in the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is likely that Bishop Lawson was influenced by Bishop C.H. Mason, the influential founder of the Church of God in Christ. Though they differed in doctrine (Mason was, at least nominally, a trinitarian), the two were friends. Mason was very ecumenical in his fellowship, and as the founder of the first incorporated Pentecostal church, he had given credentials to ministers throughout the Pentecostal movement. Lawson, fairly broadminded and ecumenical, had great respect for Mason's administration of the church. They both agreed that the scriptures gave women a place in ministry, but that teaching, not preaching, was the appropriate focus of women's speaking abilities.

Mason further established a women's department under Mother Lizzie Woods Roberson (or 'Robinson'), based on Titus 2:3-5 (women, not men, are best suited to teach other women). Lawson's missionaries were not self-governed, but were under the authority of their local pastor or state overseer, who was more or less answerable to Lawson himself, during his administration. In both the Church of God in Christ and the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, women were organized in high-functioning missionary bands whose operations are likely traceable to the women's missionary societies of the Baptist church, to whom both men had ties.

Again and again in research, one encounters the confession that women who became missionaries in the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ had expressed some sort of calling to mission work. The most common work that one finds in reading biographies in COOLJC's The Contender for the Faith, in the International Missionary Department's Beacon, or in special publications (e.g., the IMD's Outstanding Women series), is work that characterizes what women do in general. Women sewed baptismal garments; cooked for the community; conducted prayer services; assisted with communion and church maintenance; taught life skills to girls and young women; counseled younger congregants and new converts; and helped the church meet its financial obligations. Examples include the late Mother Marie Robbins Dunlap, who zealously passed her baking skills on to the young women in her circle; Mother Clarissa Brown, who with her local missionaries supplied and maintained window treatments and altar cloths for their church; and of course, the late Mother Carrie Lawson, the consummate mother, homemaker, spiritual advisor, hostess, prayer warrior, cook, and first lady, who raised and trained the late Mother Grace Spellman beside her own four sons.

Here and there, however, there would appear women of unusual spiritual depth and gifting. Mother Lawson we have already discussed; yet there were many like her, women that chose to complement rather than compete, to supplement rather than supplant, and to transform Pauline limitations on female ministers into scriptural grounding for an expressly feminine brand of apostolic mission work. Let's examine the lives of a few such women.

Women Preachers: Mother Lawson

Although Bishop Lawson as not in favor of women preachers, he was not wholly unsympathetic to the fact that women's efforts were essential to the success of the ministry. Unknown to many, for instance, is the fact that his closest and most trusted advisor was a one-time woman preacher: Evangelist Carrie Fields, later to become Mother Carrie Lawson. Lawson met his soon-to-be wife during his evangelistic work in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. She was at the time an evangelist, a female minister, from Leavenworth, Kansas. As Elder Lawson's views on church polity began to develop, to the exclusion of female pastoral duties, Mrs. Lawson apparently adjusted her ministry, phasing out her preaching ministry and concentrating on marriage and home life. Bishop Lawson suggested this when he responds to criticism from Bishop Smallwood Williams in the sermon "Ten Mistake Refuted":

As to my marrying a woman preacher, it is a poor argument for men to criticize a man's family relationship. I do not believe in women preachers or pastors. I never did, and I never will. However, I do not see where there is anything against me for marrying a woman who called herself a preacher, whom I understood would devote herself after marriage to home and husband rather than to the ministry. If such is not the case now, that was my conviction and mistake, and what I looked forward to when I married. (For the Defense, p. 274, par. 3)

Mother Lawson died 10 years before this sermon was delievered, but all written and oral accounts of her behavior support what her husband said. When they began to have children, Mother Lawson was known to sit in the back of the church during the services. Though an early participant in the Pentecostal movement, she was more active as a homemaker and hostess to Bishop Lawson's guests than as a church worker. Refuge Temple's annual picnic at the Lawson estate in Peekskills, N.Y., featured meals prepared with vegetables grown in Mother Lawson's garden.

There was one aspect of ministry in which Mother Lawson remained active: prayer. To the post-modern mind, this may seem of little importance. However, the whole of the Pentecostal movement, from Azusa Street to the birthing of Refuge Temple, began by prayer. Prayer was not considered something that just anyone did; indeed, speaking to God on behalf of others was a revered occupation, part of the mystique of becoming a cleric. Whatever Bishop Lawson may have thought of women preachers, he had tremendous respect for women who prayed. He had been saved and healed of tuberculosis through the prayers of an old woman, and though he expected the former evangelist to give up her preaching ministry, he encouraged her prayers.

Known in her time as "the praying mother of the air," Mother Lawson was the featured prayer during Refuge Temple's Sunday night live radio broadcasts. She would stand at the foot of the pulpit when the broadcast opened and wait to be escorted to the microphone by her husband or another minister. While Mother Lawson prayed, it is said that business in certain areas of Harlem would come to a halt. Drink orders dipped, and pool games paused: Mother was praying. She prayed for soldiers at war, for those in hospitals, for all that concerned WWII America. After prayer, she would step down from the pulpit and return to her seat.

Mother Lawson was an anomaly. She was obviously deeply spiritual, and can be viewed as an antecedent of the Department of Women's Missionary Work. However, she shunned the attention that came to so many other "mothers" throughout the Pentecostal movement. Sitting in the back of the church, she would clench her head with both hands, as though in pain. When once asked if she was sick, she answered, "I'm all right; I'm just praying that the message gets through." It is quite inconceivable that Bishop Lawson could have been successfully married to a woman who was not of such a high spiritual caliber.

All told, Bishop Lawson's relationship with his wife was unique. His dealing with other female ministers both within and outside of his organization is more revealing of his outlook on the woman's place in ministry, which is what we will examine next.