(RNS) — In a news release Wednesday (March 18), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced women can now be Sunday school presidency members in their local wards, or congregations.

“The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles have determined that, effective immediately, the bishop may call a man or a woman to serve as ward Sunday School president,” the letter stated. 

It went on to say that if the president is a woman, the two counselors who advise the president, and the secretary who keeps records, must also be women. If it’s a man, those positions have to be filled by men who hold the Melchizedek priesthood.

As a Latter-day Saint woman who served for years as a Gospel Doctrine teacher (adult Sunday school teacher), this is a welcome development. I’ve written before about how few leadership positions are available to women in the church. There are almost no situations in which a woman “outranks” a man in church leadership. In this case, the change means that potentially, a woman could be the ward’s Sunday school president, and the teachers, including male teachers, would report to her; that’s a big deal.

On the other hand, the Sunday school president — to say nothing of the counselors and secretary who make up the Sunday school presidency — is often totally invisible to other people in the ward. This morning, I realized I wasn’t sure who our congregation’s Sunday school president was at the moment, so I looked it up in the ward directory to jog my memory. It’s someone I know personally, and he also has a counselor, who is also someone I know. But I didn’t realize either guy had a Sunday school calling because it’s all so behind the scenes. 

In this way, I think calling women to the Sunday school presidency is a rather strategic trial balloon of sorts for the church. It may not change much. Local bishops still have the option of continuing with the all-male Sunday school presidencies of the past if they wish to (and it will be interesting to see how long it takes for women to actually be called in more conservative areas, if it happens at all). 

Women who do serve will do so quietly, because this is a quiet sort of calling. It’s nonthreatening. (This is a calling that is almost never “out front” unless a Sunday school teacher realizes his or her laptop isn’t connecting to the church’s portable television monitor and calls for help.)

This change has been a long time coming. More than a decade ago, Latter-day Saint author Neylan McBaine suggested in her book “Women at Church” that there were all sorts of callings women ought to be able to have in the church — callings that weren’t dependent on specific functions of the priesthood. The Sunday school presidency was on that list.

In fact, in a 10th-anniversary update to the book, McBaine celebrated the small wins for women and girls since 2014 but also reflected on how little had changed. In particular, her daughter was caught in the headwinds of change and resistance to change: 

I have been personally heartbroken over the past ten years by the stories of local leaders — men and women — who have tried things, specific things I advocated for in my book, such as letting the ward’s female leaders sit on the stand in sacrament meeting or calling a woman to plan the sacrament meeting programs — and I have watched these things be shut down from higher level leadership. My own daughter was called to be a co-Sunday school president in her ward, only to have the title later revoked by a stake president. While the bishop’s impulse to call her to this role and his communication around the calling was done with the utmost care and consideration, she was crushed. Not because she coveted a title, but because she recognized the larger significance of this single small instance of change. I mourned with her and I have mourned with all of you.

So, a shoutout to McBaine, her daughter and all the other women who have advocated for this change — not because they want power, but because they want their gifts to be celebrated by the church they love rather than prohibited by its antiquated stances on gender.

About that. I’m celebrating today’s announcement and the potential for women’s expanded service in the church, but I’m also frustrated by the continued single-sex focus of the policy. The church has its own version of the Billy Graham Rule — the evangelist’s famous dictate that he never be alone in a room with a woman who wasn’t a family member. Graham saw this as a way of preserving sexual purity and resisting temptation. Critics pointed out it also prevented women from serving in any meaningful leadership capacities within the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, because the logistics were impossible.

The new Latter-day Saint policy wants to similarly avoid even a hint of impropriety by having only women serve together, or only men. Never both together. I can see the wisdom of this because we are a people who regard any nonmarital sexual relation as a sin. I also see the value in single-sex spaces in some areas of our lives (and I am a proud graduate of a single-sex college). What I object to, though, is the assumption that women and men in 2026 can’t work together without the specter of sex always being present. We do this in the workplace all the time. Is the churchplace that different? And if it is, are there other solutions (e.g., two women and two men) that could overcome the all-or-nothing approach of the Billy Graham Rule?

At any rate, today’s announcement is one more step forward for both women and men in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I hope we see it implemented far and wide in short order.