A. B. Simpson summarized his movement's whole theology in four words he preached from its earliest days: Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. The Fourfold Gospel joined a Reformed understanding of salvation to the Higher Life and Keswick holiness teaching of Simpson's own era, which held that a definite, ongoing experience of sanctification was available to every believer beyond conversion; added a strong emphasis on divine healing, unusual among conservative Protestants of his time; and set the whole message inside an urgent, premillennial expectation of Christ's return that made world evangelization, in Simpson's view, a matter of real theological urgency rather than pious aspiration.
That missionary urgency shaped how the Alliance treated women in ministry for more than a century. Women served from the movement's founding as missionaries, evangelists and Bible teachers in large numbers, but the denomination licensed them only as consecrated workers, withholding formal ordination and the title of pastor even from women doing pastoral work in practice.
That distinction ended at the Alliance's June 2023 General Council, after four years of internal debate. Delegates voted 1,008 to 588 to merge the separate ordination and consecration tracks into one, so that both men and women serving in pastoral roles now receive the same designation, Consecrated and Ordained, and may be addressed as reverend. A second, closely related vote, however, reaffirmed by a similar margin that the office of elder, the Alliance's senior governing role, remains open to men only, leaving the 2023 change a substantial widening of women's ordination rather than a complete one.