Home Missionary Who Worked With Immigrant Women Alma Mathews helped found a home for immigrant women in New York and later worked as a greeter at Ellis Island. Photo courtesy of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History. They were strangers in a strange land. The story is as old as time, as biblical […]
Champion Of Social Justice Thelma Stevens, Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church , “Mission Photograph Album – Portraits #05 Page 162,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed November 8, 2017, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/items/show/60271. Thelma Stevens, 1902-1990, became a mission legend across the 28 years (1940-1968) she served as secretary for Christian social relations of the Woman’s Division […]
African-American Missionary Bishop For Liberia Alexander Priestly Camphor was an African American missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was born to slave parents in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. They died while he was a small child, and he was adopted and raised by Stephen Priestly, a white Methodist minister. Camphor was educated in Methodist Freedmen’s […]
Pioneering Medical Missionary In Zimbabwe Samuel Gurney was a pioneer Methodist medical missionary in Zimbabwe. He was born at Long Branch, New Jersey. After receiving his education for ministry at the New York Missionary Training School and Drew Theological Seminary, he was ordained in 1891 in the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal […]
Bishop Of Zimbabwe And National Leader Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa, Methodist bishop and nationalist leader, was prime minister of the coalition government called Zimbabwe Rhodesia, which failed in its attempt to create a biracial government to end the civil war in formerly white-controlled Rhodesia. In 1947, Muzorewa was appointed a lay preacher for five tiny […]
Medical Missionary To Korea In 1890 the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society sent Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall to Korea as a medical missionary. Ms. Hall became an educator as well when she began teaching a blind girl a form of Braille. She founded the Pyongyang School for the Deaf and Blind in 1909. Joining with a […]
Faithful Service In Hawaii: Susannah Wesley Community Center With a $500 grant from the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Ella Holbrook set out as a missionary with Japanese and Korean women immigrant laborers on plantations in Hawaii in 1899. Ms. Holbrook went house-to-house, visiting with the women and organizing English-language and […]
Educator Of Girls In Korea In 1885, Mary F. Scranton became the first woman missionary sent to Korea by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (North). Ms. Scranton established Korea’s first girls school, Ewha School for Girls, shared the Gospel message with Korean women and helped them organize for Christian service. More […]
Lynching Is An Indefensible Crime In 1930 Methodist woman Jessie Daniel Ames gathered a small group of daring women together in Atlanta, Georgia, to form the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. The protection of white women had been a common excuse for white mob lynchings of black men, and so the women were […]
Listening To The Voices Of Women From 1968 to 1988 Rose Catchings served as the first executive for international ministries with women and children for the General Board of Global Ministries, a position created to oversee United Methodist Women’s international work after The United Methodist Church was formed in 1968. In the World Division’s Oral […]