Cloud of Witnesses: Portraits of Women Ministers in the Wesleyan/ Holiness Movement is published in conjunction with the fourth international Wesleyan/Holiness Women Clergy Conference (Jacksonville, April 27-30, 2000). The idea for this booklet emerged from our first conference in 1994, when pictures of our foremothers surrounded us in the worship area. Wesleyan/Holiness women ministers are among the few who can look to women in our tradition who provide a “usable past.”

With such a rich heritage, it is not easy to select representatives from the “cloud of witnesses,” the women who led the way in ministry. The Planning Board member for each of the denominations supporting us selected one subject to represent her group. She also identified someone to write the biographical sketch and provide appropriate bibliographic information.

Thanks to those who wrote the sketches and a special thanks to Gloria Bell, who edited them.

For copies of this booklet or the bibliography please complete the order form

Rev. Dr. Susie C. Stanley
Series Editor

Exhorters, abolitionists, writers, preachers—the women featured in Cloud of Witnesses performed many different ministries.

Some were talented musicians; others were music lovers, with little musical ability of their own; at least one has been described as unable to carry a tune.

Some never married, some served as equal partners with a ministerial husband, and others served in ministry while the husband was employed in business or a non-ministerial profession.

The level of formal education varied, as well—from a few months in a schoolroom, to instruction by parents, to undergraduate and even graduate degrees. Consequently, some women produced reams of written witness—numerous pamphlets, sermons, books. In other cases, the extant record of their thinking relies heavily on second-hand records.

They were different in personality, too. Some appear to have spoken their minds as soon as they were old enough to have opinions and voice them. Others found their voice later in life, and in some settings still spoke with hesitance.

But these women share two significant characteristics: a hunger to know God and the courage to follow wherever God led—whatever the obstacles.

For most of these women, the search to know God in his fullness began early in life. If this search was not satisfied by the religious tradition of parents or the accepted religion of the community, they continued to seek until they found fulfillment.

Nor were these women particularly eager to be pioneers in ministry—several fought the call at first, others tried to find a satisfactory alternative, and some ended their days reluctant to use the term “sermon” to describe their messages. Yet, once convinced that God was calling them to a specific ministry and that no substitute would do, these women were not deterred by advice from friends, criticism from church leaders, or threats to their physical safety.

Their earnest quest and devout obedience place these women among the “cloud of witnesses” whose testimony challenges us, likewise, to be found faithful in the ministry to which we have been called.

Gloria J. Bell

Back to Contents

Few women have had as significant an impact on the church as Catherine Mumford Booth. She is remembered as a towering figure in a time when the place of a minister’s wife was considered to be working quietly among the congregation.

She inspired and co-founded The Salvation Army, in which women were equal partners; she strengthened a man whose religious and social work spanned the globe. She preached to thousands in London’s largest halls, meanwhile going among the poor and keeping individual souls constantly in mind.

Catherine Mumford was born frail and sickly. Although she was close to her father, a Methodist preacher, it was her mother who attended mostly to her education and spiritual training. Unfortunately, a tendency to drink made John Mumford less the ideal than he could have been; and almost from the start, Catherine was ardently against alcohol.

Kept at home through most of her childhood by poor health, Catherine turned to reading, savoring deep religious fare that provided the foundation of her faith. From her earliest days she was deeply concerned about cruelty to animals, sometimes dreading to go outside because of what she so often saw on the streets.

Catherine grew to be an attractive girl, whose health improved a little as she matured. At sixteen she gave her heart to God at the Wesleyan Chapel. Her thoughts leaned toward the reform movement, which pushed for more democracy among the members and a return to the original teachings of John Wesley. Because of these views, she was not invited to return, and she became a member of the Reformers.

One day at Binford Chapel, her attention was drawn by one of the speakers. Though not yet ordained, the young man, William Booth, spoke with fire and conviction. They soon became engaged—through a courtship mostly by letters—as he began traveling with the New Methodist Connexion. These letters were often about the equality of women. She disagreed with his view that men and women were both superior and inferior to each other in different ways. In time he came around to her views on this and on total abstinence from alcohol, and they were married in 1855.

As a traveling minister, William would stay in a town for a few weeks or (at most) a few months; consequently, the Booths knew no permanent home until their family grew to four children. However, William’s heart always drew him to London’s East End, where lived the most needy of God’s creatures.

At first, Catherine confined verbal expression of her faith to small prayer meetings and the publication of pamphlets. However, one day in 1860, in Bethesda Chapel, she felt that God was compelling her to speak. Though all were surprised—including William—the audience was profoundly moved by what she had to say. After that first victory, she never again drew back. Invitations came pouring in, and wherever she went, souls were saved and people sanctified. Despite the responsibilities of a large family, the writing of pamphlets and books, and her work with William, she broadened her public ministry and reached many thousands with her heartfelt messages.

By 1859 William Booth had become a superintendent minister, but he requested to be a traveling evangelist. At the Conference of 1861, he was assigned to a prosperous uptown parish but protested, “I am called of God to this work [evangelism].” When a compromise was suggested, Mrs. Booth’s voice was heard from her seat in the gallery, “Never!” Together they walked out to begin a new life.

It was an insecure new life. Though some of his former associates invited him to speak, others were uncomfortable with his lack of status. It remained for the Booths to think out their new path in life, to minister to the world in a new approach to religion, which was to become something entirely unlike any other denomination. Support for their work came from social-minded, prosperous citizens. Their family was supported by private donations, never from the funds of the organization.

By this time, Catherine had become an experienced preacher. People liked her way of speaking and came in large numbers to hear her. She had a particular spiritual force over the alcoholic, and she excelled in the slum work. Surprisingly, she always needed help with music, as she could not carry a tune.

By 1865, their services were so well received that the Booths made a home for themselves and their six children in Hammersmith, London. The first meeting there—conducted in a large tent at the Quaker burial ground at Mile End Waste, Whitechapel—was the real beginning of the East London Mission, later to be named the Christian Mission. Many who came to scoff at the meetings remained to become loyal workers. These meetings became the talk of London and attracted the donations of philanthropists, whose contributions made up for the lack of collections among the poor.

As invitations began to come in from the provinces, Mrs. Booth became a traveling evangelist while William attended to local converts. Her addresses were so eloquent and powerful that she, even when acting alone, was recognized as one of the most successful mission workers.

Converts were at first encouraged to join regular churches, but since they often wanted to stay and were not welcome in established churches anyway, the Booths saw the benefit of keeping converts together to help with saving others.

The Booths were invited to Scotland, where mission work had been started along similar lines. Catherine’s simple words made listeners shout and sob and sing in a manner no previous preacher in Scotland had seen. These Scots missions joined with the Booths, expanding the Army’s work.

George Scott Railton, a young man whose parents had died, joined the lively Booth household and became the mission secretary and right- hand man. Outside the Booth family, no one had more impact on the practices and policies of the mission than he. His influence helped lead to the omission of the sacraments of baptism and communion, as well as the requirement for total abstinence from tobacco and alcohol already favored by the Booths. He also added much-needed organization and edited the Christian Mission Magazine.

With the growing group of helpers, more missions were started; but things did not really come together until the name “Salvation Army” was adopted in 1879. Street music was introduced for its joyful spirit and its taming effect on the mobs. That year, Mrs. Booth designed the first flag and established the first simple, modest uniform. So that women’s headgear would be less varied, she designed the “hallelujah bonnet,” variations of which became a primary Army symbol. So that the converts could be taught Army principles, training schools were established, turning out a thousand a year in what were at first three-month courses.

By then, the Booth family included eight children. They had adopted a boy, George, and raised another, Harry Andrews, who was the orphaned son of missionaries. Their oldest son, Bramwell, had matured to become his father’s deputy, freeing Railton to begin the work in New York.

As the name was changed, it seemed natural to begin the use of ranks, which were bestowed in British Army fashion with some whimsical variations. Though Booth considered himself the general secretary, his followers began calling him “General.” Catherine was never ordained, nor was she called by a rank, save the loving term, “The Army Mother.”

Though there was always help in the household, Mrs. Booth could usually be seen sewing and completing other household tasks. She said many a sermon idea was worked out while patching clothing or nursing a baby. The children were all educated at home; and (except for one frail daughter) they early began lives as evangelists and mission workers. As they reached adulthood, some were sent to foreign service. Always there was their mother, encouraging them at home with letters reminding them of their duty to God.

Tragedy struck Catherine in 1888, with a diagnosis of cancer and the expectancy of only a short time to live. She continued preaching almost until the last and in her final days refused morphine to keep her mind clear so she could help her husband perfect his In Darkest England and the Way Out. This book laid out an ambitious social scheme for leading the hopeless urban poor into useful lives through farm colonies, job training, and emigration to Australia and Canada.

Catherine Booth’s funeral procession in October 1890 was the largest experienced since that for the Duke of Wellington, thirty-eight years before. Though thousands of Salvationists wanted to march, the procession had to be limited to officers only. Some of the throngs of people lining the streets from International Headquarters to Abney Park Cemetery might have come in curiosity, but most were there because in some way Catherine had blessed their souls. They could be seen mouthing, “God bless you,” as the General rode standing in the carriage for the entire distance.

Around her simple grave runs a gray stone, with an inscription ending, “Do you also follow Christ?” Salvationists visit it and bring their children. In the grass around her grave, a path has been worn by the tread of many feet from lands around the world.

Catherine Booth’s life and influence are still among us, her words are treasured, and Salvationists pray to be her worthy sons and daughters.

—Frances Dingman

Back to Contents

Hannah Frances Davidson grew up in a home strongly committed to the church. She was a brilliant child, open and forthright.

At about age sixteen, she began teaching at a school where there were a number of older boys. A mature hair style—and her strong will—allowed her to control the classroom. After several years of teaching, she began study at Ashland College, then completed her baccalaureate and master’s degrees at Kalamazoo College.

When her father became editor of the Evangelical Visitor, Frances assisted in producing the first issues: proofreading and mailing, rewriting articles, and writing several articles herself. A year later, Frances joined the faculty of McPherson College (Kansas). She enjoyed her teaching, but she began to sense that she was not yet serving God in the right place.

After teaching six years, she took a leave of absence to care for her dying mother. By midsummer of 1895, Frances became concerned for her future, noting that at age thirty-five, her life was now half spent. She sensed a call to mission work but resisted the thought, convinced that her father needed her financial support. Soon after returning to McPherson, however, she responded to an appeal for missionaries for foreign fields.

Frances spent the summer and fall of 1897 speaking in churches, always insisting that her address be preceded by a message from the resident minister. However, the success of her addresses caused second thoughts: “I sometimes felt,” she later observed, “that maybe I had not done my whole duty in being so loath to speak.”

On November 24, 1897, the team left New York, destined for Africa. Reverend Jesse Engle, the leader, gave to Frances tasks like buying tickets, checking luggage, and arranging for hotels. In discussing exactly where they would serve, Engle selected a place near the coast, but Frances successfully argued that the area was already Christianized and they should go into the interior where no missionaries had gone.

The team arrived at their designated site in July 1898, built permanent housing, and opened a school in a tent, with Frances in charge. By the end of the first month, the tent held forty scholars.

Her work was not limited to the schoolroom. The first missionary to learn the native language and the most fluent in it, Frances did most of the speaking in services. Diary entries depict the trauma of these occasions. Of one service she wrote, “I began to tremble until . . . my physical strength seemed to be removed. . . . Oh! how that burden rested upon me. It seemed that I had at least a faint glimpse of the burden endured in the garden when He bore the sins of the world.”

In addition to teaching and assisting in services, Frances shared in the household duties and still found energy on Saturdays for village work, a ministry that often required her to walk five or ten miles in one day.

When additional Brethren in Christ missionaries arrived, Frances became concerned: Why should she stay at Matopo, she asked herself, when there were so many Africans who had not seen even one missionary?

In 1900, two of the missionaries became seriously ill, and Frances added nursing to her schedule. She nursed one missionary back to health; the other died. Then Jesse Engle died from a “paralyzing stroke.” Frances spoke at his funeral with genuine affection for the man whom (despite their numerous differences of opinion) she had held in high esteem.

Frances was then given the charge to “see to things.” Just two days after Engle’s burial, his wife became seriously ill, and Frances resumed nursing—still continuing to teach, cook, and act as manager of the mission. Feeling that the African converts were being neglected, Frances conducted a series of meetings, which resulted in a spiritual awakening.

When Mrs. Engle returned to the United States and both of the remaining co-workers became ill with malarial fever, Frances carried on the work of the mission alone.

The Steigerwalds were sent to assume the leadership of the work, allowing Frances to take a short break. Soon, however, tension developed between the couple and Frances. It seems like a classic case of strong- willed people working closely together and not always finding the graces needed to master the inevitable differences of opinion. By July 1903, Frances considered the working arrangement no longer tolerable and resigned from Matopo Mission. She was becoming convinced that she should go into the interior, after first going home to “stir up” the church for support. There was no plan for furloughs, she had limited personal funds, and she could not bring herself to tell her brothers and sisters of her need; but she told herself that she surely could have faith that the Lord would provide.

Her diary records her heart-wrenching last day in Matopo: “To think of leaving these dear boys, yes, all these dear people has almost broken my heart.” The school boys, learning that she did not have enough money to travel, took up a collection among themselves, each giving about a month’s wages, to which the missionaries added a gift.

In Cape Town, she found third-class passage on a steamer, where she was placed in a cabin with six adults and four babies. On the trip to England, she earned a bit of money babysitting. She felt humiliated but accepted the experience as preparation for work in the interior.

From England she took even cheaper passage to the United States, traveling on a boat so crowded, she noted, that “one cannot escape the tobacco smoke, the drinking, coarse songs and revelry.” Arriving home, she discovered that her family had paid for first-class passage, but the funds had arrived at Matopo too late.

At General Conference her plea for the need in the interior of Africa produced many tears, an offering of five hundred dollars, and a request that she share her message throughout the United States and Canada. She was enthusiastically received, once speaking so powerfully that the local bishop asked her to “take part in the communion services and breaking of bread as a minister.” In her diary entry, she added, “Of course, I said not, but sometimes I wonder what it all means.”

In mid-1905, Frances returned to Africa; and on July 4, 1906, Frances and Adda Engle set out for the interior, accompanied by two African young men. Upon arriving in Macha, Northern Rhodesia, they immediately built crude but adequate housing—before word came that they should return to the established mission site before the rains set in. Frances responded that they would remain at their station because they had good buildings, they were getting along well with the natives, and the trip back was an experience to be dreaded. More privately, she confided to her diary that when the Lord speaks, she does not have to listen to any man.

Frances and Adda were instrumental in beginning church services, establishing a school, and visiting in villages—despite language difficulties, battles with ants, the lingering fear the children had of white faces, and encounters with lions and other wild animals.

Two men were sent to assist in the work, but one announced that instead of being tied down to the mission he would pursue evangelism; the other was often too sick to work or too busy in the building program to help with other assignments.

Tension again became unbearable, and Frances resigned from her assignment. The basic problem, she thought, was that none of the men (including Bishop Steigerwald) wanted a woman in charge. The bishop came to deal with the issue, and the other missionaries went to meet him. During their absence, Frances suffered the only serious illness in her entire missionary career, with only her native helper there to assist her. Of her most troubling night, she wrote that she “longed for one sympathetic soul to pour out my heart to talk and talk until I was through.”

When the missionaries returned, Frances explained her resignation, reviewed her call to the interior, and ended by asking forgiveness. When she was sufficiently recovered (she noted in her diary), the bishop insisted the time had come for her to cease to take the place of a man and to place herself in “subjection.” Two weeks later, Frances wrote in her diary:

During her second furlough to the States, she wrote a 481-page account of Brethren in Christ mission work in Africa. Although her diary appears to have been her major source, the book contains no suggestion of her difficulties on the field. She returned to Africa in 1914, and for the next seven years, the mission followed much the same pattern as before, with continued development of the physical plant and a growing outreach among the Africans.

When new tensions arose in late 1922, the Foreign Mission Board did not again act in her defense. Frances agreed to teach at Messiah Bible School, still hoping for a chance to go back of Africa. “The pain of being separated from my dear dark children,” she wrote, “at times still overwhelms me.”

By the spring of 1932, Frances (diagnosed with tuberculosis) went to Abilene, Kansas, to live with her sister. There, she died on December 13, 1935. Among the last words in the diary (which ended in June, 1931) are these: “Lord I do want thy will in my life. Make that will very plain day after day. Live out Thy precious life through me and through me touch other lives, whether in school or out of it.”

—Janet Peifer

Back to Contents

Lou Agnes White Diffee, Nazarene pastor, evangelist, and radio speaker, once said, “I urge young women to keep an ear turned to Heaven for the call of God to preach the gospel.” Diffee provided a strong model of female church leadership for the thirty-five years she served as pastor, as she calmly and confidently asserted women’s right and duty to preach, and carried out her goal to reach the lost.

In the beginning, however, Agnes was resistant to answering the call to become a pastor. Lou Agnes White was saved at age fourteen and sanctified at fifteen. Soon after that, she held a revival meeting in Driftwood, Oklahoma, making her at sixteen the youngest evangelist in the country. But although she was involved in evangelism, she did not continue full-time with her preaching. “I tried to be excused from answering the call to the ministry because I was a woman. I would not have minded if I had been a man, but to be called a ?woman preacher’ was more than I could bear,” said Diffee in a later interview in the Arkansas Democrat.

Diffee went on to finish high school, take theological courses at Arkansas Holiness College, attend Peniel College in Texas, and finish at Oklahoma State Teachers’ College. She then taught school for eight years, doing only a small amount of evangelistic preaching on the side, “in order not to backslide.” She developed severe arthritis, which she considered to be the consequence of not devoting herself fully to her true vocation. She records the experience thus:

I lay on my back for forty days, not able to turn in bed. After praying night and day, and having others to pray, I yielded my future state to God, to live, to die, to stay on the bed, or to sit in a wheel chair, but if He spared me, I would preach as long as I could. God touched me that day, and I began to mend. I fully recovered in three months. I began preaching as a full time job, and have never quit, not even to take many vacations. God has blessed my ministry.

Diffee viewed the experience as a miracle and embraced it as a sign that she was to pursue full-time ministry. She said she never again had a relapse of the arthritic condition.

Like so many other men and women, from the time of the medieval mystics until the present day, Diffee was given a definite call to communicate the word of God, one which was incapable of being ignored or forgotten. Born in Greenbrier, Arkansas, in 1886 to a Presbyterian father and a Methodist mother, Lou Agnes White joined a holiness church as a girl, despite the disapproval of her mother. In one of her sermons, Diffee says that, because her family lived out in the country, they usually did not go to any church on Sunday. Through attending an evangelistic service, Agnes became saved. However, as she reports, she felt spiritually dead at the end of the next year because of lack of church fellowship and Bible reading. She attended another holiness service and was led into sanctification and what she calls the “second visitation,” the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and soon after that, began her evangelistic work. Agnes Diffee went on to be called by many “remarkable,” “unusual,” “special woman of God.”

In 1919, she was ordained in the Church of the Nazarene, and later that year she married LeRoy Diffee. Her first full-time ministerial work was as pastor of the Amity (Arkansas) church, where a new stone church was built and paid for under her leadership. Following that, in 1929 she became associate pastor for the Little Rock First Church of the Nazarene; after two years, she was appointed full pastor of the church.

Diffee’s years as pastor at First Church were a remarkable period for both her and the congregation. Nazarene records show a dramatic increase in members, from 297 in 1929 to 1163 twenty years later, when Diffee stepped down from that pulpit. The building and furnishings were largely paid off during her years of service.

Besides her popularity in the local community, Diffee reached others across Arkansas and adjoining states as the first female radio evangelist through the church’s radio station KGJF (later KARK), preaching one hour a day on week days and four hours on Sundays. She welcomed other ministers to speak at the radio station, including a young Rex Humbard, who credited her for getting him started. Her niece, Jane Kratz, reported that Diffee was the only woman to ever serve on the Little Rock Ministerial Alliance, and was “admired and loved by the governors, mayors, all leaders of the community. . . . She put the Nazarene church on the map in Arkansas. It is still spoken of as ?Sister Diffee’s church’ by old timers.”

In 1933, the general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene used Diffee as an example of a pastor who “makes a church grow and succeed,” using the following report from Diffee herself on her year’s activities:

During the past year I have preached 98 times in the regular Sunday services, 15 times in evangelistic services, held 12 outside services in the city, . . . made 700 pastoral calls . . . attended 12 executive meetings by different organizations, . . . attended six meetings of the Ministerial Alliance and two meetings held in behalf of moral issues in the city, have had an average of ten services a week in different institutions—jails, penitentiary, etc.—class meetings, prayer meetings, evangelistic services and radio services. . . . There have been 550 seekers at our altars, 149 have been received into the church and we have made a net gain of 138.

When Agnes Diffee left the pastorate of Little Rock First Church, the Arkansas Democrat wrote, “The First Church of the Nazarene has become one of the outstanding churches in the denomination under the leadership of the Reverend Agnes White Diffee.” The article goes on to say that “twenty-six young men and women have been influenced by her preaching to enter the ministry,” citing her as a role model to both genders.

After leaving Little Rock First Church, Diffee did some evangelistic work, became pastor of First Church of the Nazarene at Pine Bluff (Arkansas) in 1951, then returned in 1960 to Little Rock to pastor the Westwood Church of the Nazarene. She also served as a member of the board of regents of Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma, now Southern Nazarene University. She went into semi-retirement in 1967 but continued with counseling and evangelism. One of her retirement gifts from a group of friends was a trip to the Holy Land, fulfilling a life-long dream of hers.

Throughout their marriage, LeRoy Diffee proved a faithful helpmate, supporting Agnes, working in visitation ministries at the churches she pastored, and standing as a strong Christian example in his own right. One informational article given to visitors of the Little Rock First Church during the time of Agnes Diffee’s pastoral service praised LeRoy as a “Good Samaritan,” always ready to help out even those at the margins of society. The couple had no children, and LeRoy died in 1955.

Agnes Diffee passed away in 1970, at approximately eighty-three years of age. Her actual age was a well-kept secret, says her niece. After a day of visiting the sick, Diffee succumbed to a massive heart attack. Newspapers carried detailed obituaries honoring Diffee, and her funeral service was taped and played Easter Sunday over an Arkansas radio station.

Agnes White Diffee did not let being a woman stop her from carrying out the work to which she felt called. She was the youngest person to be an evangelist, the first woman to preach on the radio, and the pastor of one of the largest Nazarene Churches of her time. When Diffee was questioned about being a female pastor, she had much to say, again, as strongly and assuredly as she preached her sermons. Diffee said that problems arose from people’s misunderstanding of Pauline passages about women’s role in the Church, particularly I Corinthians 14:34-35 and I Timothy 2:11-12. The February 8, 1964 Arkansas Democrat recorded her interpretation of these scriptures:

In the first scripture, it is evident that the church at Corinth was having confusion. Paul’s admonition was to this one church. To apply this to all churches would be a contradiction of what Christ taught, that men and women are equal before God. . . .

Paul did not deny the women the privilege of an active part in church work, for his first sermon preached in Europe was preached to Lydia and to other women. If they had kept silent, the Christian gospel would not have spread so rapidly over Europe.

Paul found in Priscilla (Acts 18:26) a woman of great ability and fine intellect. She became a leader in the church at Corinth and later in the church of Ephesus. Paul did not silence her. Also, he did not silence Phoebe, servant of the church at Cenchrea (Romans 16:1).

Jesus said, “Let him that is great among you be the servant of all,” so Phoebe must have been the pastor. Also, Paul exhorted the brethren at Philippi to help those women who labored with him in the gospel (Phil. 4:3).

The article notes that Diffee was of the opinion that I Timothy 2:11- 12 (concerning teaching and usurping authority over the man) could not have anything to do with preaching, “for no one is trying to take any church privileges from the men, nor trying to rule over them.” “Their object,” she said, “is to stand by and assist the men in any way they can.”

Diffee is quoted as having suggested that “perhaps the reason God has called women to the ministry is that many men have rejected the

call. . . . Jesus is no respecter of persons. He saw our poor fallen world, pitied our sorrows; He poured out His life for us, and lo, the nations of the earth are longing for it.”

Agnes White Diffee accepted the call of Jesus to become a reaper of souls; she worked faithfully and brought in a harvest that no doubt warranted a “Well done, good and faithful servant,” from her Lord.

—Carol Blessing

Back to Contents

Margaret Askew Fell Fox, who came to be known as “The Mother of Quakerism,” lived in northern England in the seventeenth century. The gifted leadership she demonstrated with her husband George Fox led to her being considered the most influential woman of the new movement.

Margaret was committed to obeying God, to ministering to seekers longing to know God, and to defending the right of those wrongly persecuted. Drawing strength from this commitment, she courageously pled her cause before kings and lesser authorities, even though it meant imprisonment and hardship.

For the first thirty-eight years of her life, Margaret Askew did what was expected of her. Born in 1614, she spent most of her life in Lancashire, the county of her birth. Her childhood home, (Marsh Grange, near Furness) was a stone manor house, indicating that her family was relatively well-to-do, in a county Kunze identifies as being known for its poverty (27).

At the age of eighteen, Margaret married Thomas Fell of Swarthmoor Hall. Fell was a lawyer, judge, and trainer of militia—with responsibilities that often took him away from home. Margaret apparently had responsibility for managing the household and even (during her husband’s absence) the entire estate.

Thomas and Margaret Fell had nine children, of whom seven daughters and one son survived to adulthood. It was not customary, in those days, for girls to attend school, but Margaret taught her daughters reading and writing. By her example, she also taught them how to manage a household.

A spiritually sensitive woman, Margaret attended St. Mary’s Anglican Church and frequently offered the hospitality of Swarthmoor to itinerant ministers. Yet, later in life, she admitted that in adulthood she was still a seeker.

In 1652 George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, came to Swarthmoor Hall. “When he came among us,” Margaret reported, “[he] opened the book that we had never read in . . . to wit, the Light of Christ in our consciences. [He asked us] ?What thou speakest, is it inwardly of God?’”

Margaret Fell was suddenly and profoundly awakened to a sense of her individual responsibility to God. She saw that the truth regarding God and Christ and God’s human creation was something that could be known inwardly to anyone whose heart and mind were open. That day, she opened her heart and became deeply convinced of the Truth.

Judge Fell was away during Fox’s visit. On his way home, dissenters met him to admonish him to bring his wife into line. According to Margaret’s 1694 Testimony, Fell was told that Fox and his followers were all “witches.” The judge listened not only to the dissenters, but also to his wife and George Fox. The result was that George Fox continued to hold meetings in Swarthmoor—Quaker meetings continued there every week from 1652-1690.

Judge Fell never became a Quaker himself, but on occasion he used his influence on behalf of Quakers under persecution. Margaret herself was put into jail three times—for a total of nearly six years. She also lost much of her property in the persecution.

Later, Margaret Fell Fox wrote the following description of the persecution of Quakers:

Friends in London were much troubled with soldiers pulling them out of their Meetings and beating them with their muskets and swords, insomuch that several were wounded and bruised by them. Many were cast into prison, through which many lost their lives. And all this being done to a peaceable people, only for worshiping God as they in conscience were persuaded.

In August of 1658, Judge Fell died, after a period of illness. In a memoir entitled “Relation,” Margaret later reported that Judge Fell had been “a merciful Man to the Lord’s People,” adding that she “and many other Friends were well satisfy’d the Lord in mercy receiv’d him to himself.”

At the time of Thomas Fell’s death, Margaret had already become one who gave answers for Friends and who provided funds to those who ministered or who were in prison. She declared, “I was but young in the Truth, yet I had a perfect and pure Testimony of God in my heart for God and his Truth, and I believe I could at this day have laid down my life for it.”

While at Swarthmoor in May of 1660, George Fox was arrested and then imprisoned in Lancaster Castle. In June, Margaret traveled to London, where she presented to King Charles II “a declaration and an information of our principles.” She pled for right treatment of Quakers and (successfully) for the release of Fox. Hundreds of Quakers were in prison in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

“I spoke often with the King, and writ many letters and papers to him and many books were given by our Friends to Parliament,” Margaret reported; “they were fully informed of our peaceable principles and practice.” She kept up this campaign for fifteen months—until she got a General Proclamation from the King and Council for setting Quakers free.

This was the first, but not the last, of her trips to London to work for the right of Quakers to speak the truth. All in all, she pled with kings and rulers on ten different trips, the last in her seventies.

In March (1663 or 1664), Margaret was arrested and taken before the local justices, where she was asked to take the oath of allegiance. Upon her refusal, she was imprisoned at Lancaster Castle until her trial in August 1664. She was found guilty of failing to take the oath and of holding Quaker meetings in her home. Margaret responded that her allegiance to the King of Kings took priority over allegiance to King of England. Later, she reported that “the great God of Heaven and Earth supported my spirit under the severe sentence [so] that I was not terrified.” She was not released until June 1668. Her daughters remained at Swarthmoor, managing the estate.

Margaret used her time in prison for writing in support of Quaker principles. In 1666, she wrote a tract (probably the first of its kind by a woman) in which she asserted that women should be recognized as equal to men both in receiving the direct leading of the Holy Spirit and in speaking by the Spirit and power of the Lord Jesus. She supported her assertion by pointing out that women—sent out by Christ’s own command—were the first that preached the tidings of the resurrection of Jesus.

After being a widow for eleven years, Margaret Fell married George Fox in 1669. In less than a year, they were both back in prison.

Released in 1671, she continued her ministry: visiting meetings and prisons, corresponding widely with scattered and persecuted friends, and receiving reports of the traveling preachers. She was responsible, with her husband, for setting up the women’s meeting in London.

Neither she nor George Fox lessened in their work. He was often in prison, and when not, he traveled much in the southern part of England, while Margaret was an important leader of Quakers in the north.

Early in the movement, Quakers recognized the equality of men and women before God, and Margaret Fell Fox was a pioneer defender of women in Christian ministry. Quakers became widely noted for their women preachers. (In fact, during the years of 1647-1650, Elizabeth Hooten was as important as George Fox in the first stirrings of the Quaker movement.)

When widowed a second time in 1691, Margaret had been married to George Fox for twenty-two years. Travels and imprisonment, however, meant a great deal of separation; in those years, she had actually spent only six years with him.

In the last two decades of her life, Margaret wrote twenty-seven epistles and sixteen books. The many epistles became guidebooks for early Friends in organizing and maintaining discipline in faith and practice.

Margaret’s personal correspondence was huge. Friends wrote to her at Swarthmoor Hall to report their successes, needs, and imprisonment. In replying to these letters, she expressed Christian love and concern, including deep insights from the Scriptures to help the reader—especially in times of despair and persecution.

In her letters she wrote of the freshness of the message George Fox preached. She recognized that Truth is not merely theological truth but something that can be known inwardly and intimately by anyone in surrender to God. She warned Quakers not to put too much stress on the outward and to avoid a separatist attitude: “They say that we must look at no colors. . . . This is a silly poor Gospel. It is more fit for us to be covered with God’s eternal Spirit, and clothed with his eternal light.”

In a tract on women speaking, she found no problem in Paul’s teachings, for she felt that—in the context of his writing—the submission and order were expectations for all humanity, whether men or women, and that these qualities made openings for God’s power.

When Margaret died in April, 1702, she was nearly eighty-eight years old. Margaret Fell Fox was a woman truly liberated to look within and accept the responsibility of following Truth revealed to her by the Spirit of God. Her life was a blessing to thousands who knew her personally, and her example of courage, faith, and dedicated service, continues to inspire us today.

—Lucy M. (Clark) Anderson

Back to Contents

“But, Mother, if the world is round, why don’t we fall off when we are upside down?” and “How old does a child have to be before they will go to Hell for their sins unless they are saved?” Six-year-old Laura Smith had an inquisitive mind. She asked many difficult questions about God and the Bible, and her parents, alarmed and frustrated, could only answer, “Wait until you are older.”

A very tiny and unassuming woman and not particularly attractive in appearance, Laura Smith Haviland became a fierce, courageous fighter for the freedom and rehabilitation of blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Undaunted by the fact that she was a woman and was supposed to attend only to home and family, she ventured into uncharted territories to become an outstanding and fearless defender of those who could not help themselves.

Laura was born in Leeds County, Ontario, December 20, 1808, the daughter of Daniel and Sene Blancher Smith, who were farmers and devout Quakers. In 1815 they moved to Cambria, Niagara County, in western New York state, then a wilderness. Laura’s education came through her mother and a neighboring lady, and she became an insatiable reader, borrowing all the books in the neighborhood. In particular, she was intrigued by books having to do with slave trading. She became deeply sympathetic with the treatment of the few Negroes living in her community.

One night her father found her absorbed in a book describing the horrors of the seizure of Africans and the harsh conditions on the slave ships which brought them as prisoners to America. She read of the many who died enroute and of the bodies that were thrown overboard. She was very disturbed, and her father calmed her down by telling her that slavery had been outlawed.

When she was thirteen, she was allowed to attend a Methodist prayer meeting with some neighborhood friends. There she heard a young lady about her age tell of her conversion and of the joy and peace she enjoyed as a result. Laura was very impressed, and she resolved to seek the Lord until she knew she had that kind of experience, even if it “takes as long as I live.” When her parents heard of her keen interest in the music and joyful ways of the Methodists, they forbade her to ever attend again. Once, however, while visiting a Methodist uncle’s family, she attended with them but determined never to tell her parents. So she prayed privately and struggled greatly with spiritual issues throughout her early teen years.

In 1825, when she was seventeen, Laura married Charles Haviland, Jr., a local farmer and Quaker, whose parents both were Quaker ministers. She felt that this situation continued her deprivation of seeking the kind of spiritual experience for which still she longed.

In 1826, Laura’s parents moved to southeastern Michigan, near Adrian, and three years later Charles and Laura followed with their two children. They built a log cabin, sixteen by eighteen feet, and Laura continued to raise the family, giving birth to eight children.

Despite her family responsibilities, she found time to help every ill neighbor and continued her childhood obsession regarding slavery. She helped organize the first anti-slavery society in Michigan; then she and Charles established the first station in the Underground Railroad in Michigan, helping escaping slaves slip through to Canada and freedom.

Though the Quakers opposed slavery, they saw the activity to help them to escape as “worldly political agitation” and were embarrassed by the actions of Charles and Laura. As a result, the couple withdrew from the Friends church and joined in the organization of Wolf Creek, the first Wesleyan Methodist church in that area. At last Laura was free to enjoy the music and warm spiritual atmosphere she had longed for so many years, as well as the freedom to fight slavery in every way she could.

Laura became the school teacher for her children, as well as for the orphans in the county. This led to the establishment of the River Raisin Institute in 1837—the first Michigan school to admit African-Americans. This school eventually became an orphanage supported by the state of Michigan. The orphanage was later moved to Coldwater.

In 1845, Laura faced the darkest period of her life. Within a six- week period, an epidemic of erysipelas (an acute infectious skin disease caused by a streptococcus germ) killed both of her parents, her husband, her youngest daughter Lavina, her closest sister Phoebe, and many of her community. She herself barely survived.

Through prophetic dreams, Scripture readings, and the sudden appearance of a fugitive slave at her door, Laura was convinced that God now was calling her to greater activity. Shocking the community, she took over the management of the farm, hired the escaped slave, and, in time, cleared up a seven-hundred dollar debt against her property.

She soon entrusted her farm and the younger children to her grown children and began more than a decade of itinerant service, moving from place to place concealing escaped slaves from Southern slave catchers and helping them pass through Detroit to Canada. During this time, she also ministered to the souls and bodies of blacks, and (while serving as a sick nurse) guided some white patients to salvation. At the same time, she taught in schools for black children.

Unlike most who secretly sheltered fleeing slaves, she was publicly vocal in her denunciations of slavery as an evil that no true Christian would allow to exist. Laura went daringly into slave states in order to rescue illegally-held free blacks. At one time, she thwarted the efforts of men from the South to return slaves to bondage, and in their rage, the men placed a three-thousand-dollar price on her head—dead or alive. They publicized her as a “nigger-stealer, whose portion would be an inner temple of Hell.” She ignored the threat and defied attempts to stop her, including men drawing their pistols to capture her. Once she even stared down a pack of bloodhounds sent out to kill her.

In 1863, armed with letters from Michigan political leaders, a railroad pass, and fifteen dollars, Laura went south with a load of medical supplies to offer “tender nursing” to wounded Union soldiers. She traveled down the Mississippi River, bringing blankets and supplies, as well as religious instruction to the freedmen who sought refuge behind Union lines, inspecting military hospitals and prisons, and exposing injustice and cruelty—usually by complaining immediately to the highest military commander in the area. From 1864 to 1866, she was a paid agent of the Michigan Freedmen’s Aid Commission, working especially with destitute refugees in Kansas, “seeing unfaithful officers dismissed, prisoners released, and the suffering and dying relieved.”

In 1867 she investigated relief work in the middle South on behalf of the American Missionary Association. Ill health then prevented her efforts to revive the Raisin Institute as an orphan asylum, but she lobbied successfully for the founding in 1871 of a State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she worked for two years as a nurse and seamstress.

In 1872 Laura rejoined the Quaker church and returned to Kansas with a Quaker reformer, Elizabeth Comstock, to play a role in founding welfare institutions for black migrants there. A Quaker village in that state was named “Haviland” in her honor. However, she continued to teach her Wesleyan beliefs.

In her middle 70s, at the urging of many of her colleagues, she wrote her autobiography, A Woman’s Life Work. The book includes detailed accounts of her personal spiritual struggles as a young person; individual stories of black-white relationships under slavery; a slave narrative from a man called “Uncle Philip,” transcribed in his own words; graphic descriptions of punishment meted out to slaves; and eyewitness reports of wartime prisons, hospitals, soup kitchens, and refugee camps.

Some time after the Civil War began, a woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, used a chain to keep her slave in the barn. The slave escaped and walked to the camp of the 23rd Michigan Infantry. Soldiers took the man to a blacksmith who removed the chain. A photograph of Laura Smith Haviland appears in the Michigan Historical Museum’s Civil War Gallery with that chain next to her.

She died in April, 1898, in Grand Rapids. Her several funeral services brought an outpouring of public acclaim, and a statue was erected in front of the City Hall in Adrian. She was buried in the cemetery of the Raisin Valley Friends Church in Adrian, where her father had been the first pastor.

Laura Smith Haviland lived a long and fruitful life. Her public role did not conform to the expectations for females of her era, nor did her efforts in helping to free slaves fall within the organizational patterns of the leadership of the Underground Railroad, but her labors were remarkable and worth great notice and honor.

Above a drinking fountain at the foot of the life-sized statue in Adrian are the appropriate words to describe her mission: “I was thirsty and ye gave me drink.”

—Billie Faye Harvey

Back to Contents

Adell P. Carpenter said of Ellen Stowe Roberts, “I was never acquainted with anyone who kept the Holy Spirit so constantly and so consciously.” No higher compliment could be paid anyone who seeks to follow Jesus.

Ellen Lois Stowe was born at Windsor, New York, March 4, 1825, to Stoddard and Dorcas Lane Stowe. Her father was not religious, and her mother was not public in her faith.

Moving at age fourteen to the home of her uncle, Reverend George Lane, in New York City created a different atmosphere in which her soul could blossom. As Ellen watched her uncle spend much of his time in secret prayer, she felt convicted of her need of religion. She was especially seeking heart holiness, partly under the influence of evangelist and hymn-writer Phoebe Palmer.

During a meeting at the Methodist church, Ellen went to the altar, thinking that if she could get religion, she would. She understood later that saying “if” interfered with her finding Christ. Being shy, Ellen feared talking to anyone, so she did not receive the help she needed.

Her own testimony explains what happened a few months later at another Methodist church:

I was led to see I must be determined and all in earnest or I should finally lose my soul. I then said, I will have religion. I found my way to the altar and besought the Lord with tears and entreaties to save me. The next day, while alone in my room, after consecrating myself to God, I was enabled to believe He does now for Jesus’ sake forgive my sins.

From this time Ellen felt the load lifted, her heart filled with joy. She loved what she formerly hated, including difficult people she previously found disagreeable. She especially loved the class meeting, a means of grace that proved a life-long affection—she continued to lead a class meeting into her last years.

Ellen struggled while attending a fashionable school, making her feel that she had lost her acceptance with God. Reclaiming that right the next summer at camp meeting, she sought the blessing of entire sanctification. Reading and praying led to the day that (with the encouragement of her class meeting leader) she yielded and experienced a washing of the inbred corruption of her soul.

Ellen testified concerning her excitement in her new-found calm. When a minister’s wife criticized her, making Ellen feel that she was too forward, she decided not to share God’s blessings unless required to by the Lord.

Hiding in this way, Ellen experienced a wandering in the wilderness. Again she did not share her struggles with anyone, but instead continued to feel a void. She did long to serve God.

In 1848, Ellen Stowe visited her cousin Professor Harvey B. Lane at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Here she met graduating Benjamin Titus (B.T.) Roberts. She remarked of him, “I like the tone of his mind.” At Roberts’ request, they corresponded by letter, not seeing each other again until their wedding day, May 3, 1849.

After visiting Mr. Roberts’ family, the newly married couple traveled to Caryville, New York, where Ellen began the life of a minister’s wife. When someone later commented on B.T. Roberts’ spirituality, he replied, “My wife keeps an altar up all the time. If I need to be prayed for, it is there and she is ready.”

There followed a succession of appointments to different churches in New York, with revival following Roberts wherever he was appointed. Their first child, William Titus, lived only eleven months. Their second son, George Lane, was born while they pastored in Rushford.

While in Buffalo, Roberts invited Dr. Redfield to come and preach. Ellen writes that, still a wanderer, she experienced an irresistible power in Redfield’s words. She decided to live a totally consecrated life and believe by faith without wavering.

Ellen learned to walk by faith in absence of emotion. She also was shown that beyond caring for her own family, souls were perishing and needed her care. She later commented, “There is no joy like saving souls. No one can take it away from us. We cannot lose it.”

While at Buffalo, Roberts felt troubled that the church charged for its seats. He offered to pay off the church’s debt if they would have free seating, but they would not consent.

During their two years in Brockport, Roberts’ best revival blessed the work. Here, their third son (Benson Howard) and only daughter (Sarah) were born.

Ellen’s testimony tells of the events of August of 1855:

I suffered much from poor health again and began to feel an intense longing after God. . . . For the benefit of soul and body, I left my house to spend two days at a camp meeting not far off. I was conscious what I needed was something I never had possessed—a power to reach souls—a love for them. As I began to pray for it, the Lord by His Spirit asked me if I would take it with suffering. I had always shrunk from suffering for Christ; especially I felt I could not endure to lose another of my children (we then had three). But I felt I cannot live without this power—and my hungering was so intense it seemed to me I could not live thus. I said I would take it with suffering if I can have it no other way. Then it was said to me, “I may take one of your children.” I hesitated a moment, and thought they will be safe; this world is full of unsaved souls—I must have more power to reach them. I said, “any way.” I confessed publicly my want—began to look up and believe for all I needed—the power began to come. . . . I saw a little what Jesus suffered for sinners. . . . Then my soul was filled with a love for them. . . .

The next morning I started for home, and when near there met a messenger who told me one of my children was just alive. . . . I fell on my knees at the conveyance, realizing God had taken me at my word. I had thought it was only a test. I reached home, and found my youngest, our only daughter, a corpse. I could only groan, and for a few moments the anguish of soul and body was all I could endure. . . I looked to Jesus, and instantly the calmness of heaven came over me, and in that hour I seemed permitted to talk with Him as with a friend. I saw my little Sarah an angel in heaven, for six hours, by an eye of faith, as plainly as I ever saw her living with my natural eye. While I looked to Jesus and saw her forever safe, and nothing for me here but the work of saving souls, I was powerfully blessed, and not only comforted, but my soul triumphed in Jesus.

Ellen Roberts maintained a healthy balance of ministry and family. The above testimony reveals her deep longing to save souls. On another occasion at a camp meeting, she found herself confined to caring for one of her babies. Yet she was able to submit to this task in lieu of leading others to Christ. She exhorts mothers, “You have just as good a right to feel blessed in soul as though you were on you knees pointing sinners to Christ, and pleading with Him to save them.”

Another son (Charles Stowe) was born during the Roberts’ next appointment, in Albion. Here, B.T. wrote “New School Methodism,” an article promoting holiness. Roberts’ bishop reproved him at the next conference and sent him to Pekin.

When someone republished Roberts’ article without his consent, he was brought on trial before the Genessee Conference, and on October 21,

1858, he and others were expelled from membership. One pastor was cleared because they got him to confess a little. Ellen commented, “O how I wanted to then be in his place. I’d have stood up like a man and died before I yielded a hair’s breadth.”

For a time the Roberts were unsure where to serve, being pilgrims without a home. They settled in Buffalo, where they were blessed with Samuel and Benjamin T. Roberts, Jr.

In August of 1860, the Free Methodist Church was organized ,with B.T. as the first General Superintendent. Next B.T. decided to establish a school. They sold their Buffalo home and purchased a farm in North Chili, New York. Chili Seminary (present-day Roberts Wesleyan College) served as their home for the rest of their lives.

Ellen Roberts’ chief responsibility at the school lay in leading the Tuesday evening class meeting. The students looked forward to her class meetings. She discerned each one’s need and personality and used either encouragement or rebuke as needed.

Ellen Roberts’ severest trial visited in the death of her husband in 1893. On the day of his death, Ellen read of the death of Moses, who died apart from friends, alone with God. Her husband died away from his family, and she felt God gave her this passage as an encouragement.

Ellen responded to his death by exclaiming, “I thought I could not live, until I remembered the Seminary. Then I felt that I could live for the school.” Despite her loneliness, she served the rest of her life, nurturing the teachers and students entrusted to her care. As she aged, she forgot many details; but her pithy sayings were never more apt and witty than during her last year, her interest in God’s cause was never greater, nor her prayers more mighty.

Her message to the members of the last General Conference before her death was, “I send my love and exhort you to live and to preach holiness. Live it, then it will be easy to preach it. It will preach itself. Personally, in this journey to the home above, there is no gloom, no sorrow. The prospect to me is glorious.”

Ellen Roberts rejoined her husband on January 28, 1908. Her service had been long and faithful. Though never formally ordained, she served as an exhorter in class meetings and public services. Perhaps her greatest tribute comes from her granddaughter coming home from her graveside, “What an inheritance I have.”

—Kathy Callahan-Howell

Back to Contents

Mother Sarah Smith was born Sarah Sauer in 1822 in Summit County, Ohio. She received no formal education until she was twelve years old, when she attended first a German and then an English school for a total of a few months. By this time, she could read a little. She spoke with a German accent. Sarah said of herself that she was naturally shy and bashful. At the age of fourteen, she was taken into the Lutheran Church.

A terrifying windstorm passed through the area in 1842. Sarah feared for her life, afraid that she would be killed and doomed to Hell. That night, she cried out to God for mercy. The next day, she went to see a brother who was dying. A minister and other Christians were there praying and urging her brother to repent. She began to wish they would pray for her.

After several days, too weak to do more than whisper, her brother suddenly leaped from his bed, rejoicing in his salvation in Christ. Embracing Sarah, he called on her to repent, too. She knelt right there, prayed, and received a wonderful joy and peace.

Sarah endured some early struggles: friends turned against her and she also experienced opposition from the Lutheran Church. Daily she would go out to the woods to pray. She was persecuted at home and forbidden to go to prayer meeting or to pray in secret. She was even locked out of the house at times. She was determined to stay true to Jesus. Disturbingly, though, there seemed to be an element within her heart that resisted the Spirit of God.

For seventeen years as a Christian, she had never heard the teaching about sanctification. She longed for the perfect love mentioned in 1 John 4:18, but didn’t know how to obtain it. In August 1859, at her prayer altar in the woods, she felt God asking her to give up all for Christ, requesting finally, “Are you willing to work for me?” As she agreed, Sarah was consecrated by the Spirit in a glorious experience. She was filled with a boldness that lasted the rest of her life. She no longer feared man or the devil. When she later testified at a prayer meeting or camp meeting, listeners would say her words were like “thunder and lightning.”

In 1861, three of her sons went to war. The second oldest was captured and put in prison. Sarah spent many sleepless nights and lost weight. A note arrived from her son saying he could get no letters there. For three days, Sarah went to her prayer place but could not pray. On the third day as the sun was setting, Sarah cried to the Lord to deliver her from her agony. It seemed that Heaven came down as the Lord comforted her.

In 1879 a local saloon keeper began to trouble a revival meeting. He would invite about two dozen young men every night to his saloon and get them drunk. Every night after mocking the church meeting, he would lead these men to the meeting and break up the meeting with their devilish actions. On Friday of the second week, the preacher asked Sarah what to do. She advised him to let the Lord lead. Just as they were kneeling to pray and close the meeting, the saloon keeper came with the young men. Sarah had already been praying for these men. She named the saloon keeper in her prayer and asked the Lord to save him now if he could be saved. If not, she asked Him to remove the man in His own time and way so he would not take all the young men to Hell with him. On Monday the saloon keeper died of a fit. His death made a big impact in the area. In the same church four weeks later, there was a revival meeting and sixty- five people claimed salvation.

Four years after her sanctifying experience, Sarah heard her first sermon on sanctification as a second work of grace. She delighted in this doctrine. She loved to do gospel work at revival meetings and encourage sinners to repent and Christians to commit their lives to God. She worked with various church groups, such as the United Brethren and the Methodist Episcopal, and disliked the division and rivalry she saw among the churches. She felt that in Heaven Christians would not use the denominational tags. She became the leader of a holiness association in Jerry City, Ohio. The group grew to thirty-five members, meeting four times a week in her home. Many in the group hoped the holiness association would bring all Christians into one church. As the group studied the scriptures, Sarah felt a word from God that the light was coming. She began to encourage the group with this word.

At this point, an evangelist named D. S. Warner came to Jerry City. Publisher of a newspaper called The Gospel Trumpet, Warner had been active in planting churches and preaching at revival meetings in the Midwest. He and several others began to preach on the doctrine of sanctification, the unity of the church, and the evils of denominationalism. In Sarah’s home, he preached a number of times to the holiness association. Some were dismayed by his message, but twenty members stood with Warner along with Sarah. She heard that one preacher had said of her at this time, “What a pity that Sister Smith left the church; she has lost her usefulness.” She laughed, for she now knew she was in God’s church the moment she became His child.

Now Sarah faced a new crisis. She was sixty-one. Yet she felt God was leading her to leave her husband and her home and enter gospel work. In her dreams and prayer time, the message was clear. She dreaded telling her family, but faced them with it. Ten days later, she left her oldest son and his wife to care for the farm and her husband. She didn’t know how long she would be absent. The year was 1884. She was old enough to be the mother of each person in the evangelistic team, including the leader, D. S. Warner.

The next four years were exciting and challenging. The evangelistic team included Warner (who was middle aged), two young women, and one young man, all singers. They traveled from meeting to meeting where they had been invited, in ten states and Canada. Some meetings were held in halls, schoolhouses, or church buildings; others were held in groves or woods or tents. The group attracted listeners with their wonderful singing. Mother Sarah supplied a high tenor. Both Warner and the younger man, Barney Warren, wrote interesting new songs to go along with familiar ones. The group would often ride into town in a wagon, singing. Sometimes they would be in a train depot or hotel parlor. A crowd would collect and come to the preaching services to hear more of the harmonious singing.

But more than music was blessing people. Amazing things happened by the power of God. Miraculous healings occurred, even of blind or crippled people. Many sought salvation in Christ, and many more sanctification. People’s lives were changed in dramatic ways. The evangelistic team prayed for rain in drought-stricken areas, and it rained. They prayed for rain to be stayed while the preaching commenced, and it waited until the listeners arrived at home. At one public meeting, Sarah prayed for rain to end the local drought, and though there had been no signs of rain earlier, a great deal of rain fell before an hour passed.

God supplied the needs of the traveling band. Mobs came against them in various places, yet they were protected, many times without a scratch, or even a rotten egg hitting them. Often they prayed for their attackers and found them kneeling a few days later, seeking forgiveness at the very meetings they had sought to end. The evangelists never took up a collection, but always had funds supplied to them. Once in Missouri after their train tickets were purchased, they had only seven cents left. Then they opened a letter waiting for them and found five dollars inside. They endured storms, hail, and floods; and they were transported by wagon, train, steamboat, and even a lumber wagon.

On their trip from Denver, Colorado, on a train, a terrible windstorm began. Their train collided with a freight train and damaged the engine. They waited four hours while the wind seemed about to blow their cars off the tracks. The group prayed earnestly and put their trust in God. Later, they received a letter from the assistant running the publishing work in Michigan for Warner, who mentioned that on the very afternoon of the day of the collision, he had been so burdened for them, he stopped his work and spent some time praying for their safety. Warner was quick to let him know how much God had honored his prayers, though a thousand miles away!

Throughout their travels, congregations were planted by their efforts. They stayed ten weeks in Denver and left a congregation of forty when they returned to the Midwest. Various preachers and gospel workers joined them at grove meetings and camp meetings as they traveled. The Gospel Trumpet kept the network of preachers and workers in touch with each other as they worked in different areas. Sarah occasionally wrote a testimony of the latest victories for the Lord for all to read.

Mother Sarah was respected and active in the group. She sang, testified, and sometimes preached. She prayed earnestly with seekers at the meetings, counseled with them, and guided them to be delivered from various bonds. She encouraged the preachers with hearty Amen’s or Hallelujah’s as they preached. She stood to pray with those seeking to be ordained as ministers of the gospel. One young woman evangelist recorded several instances when Sarah helped her in confusing and depressing times, standing against the works of the devil, and encouraging her to use her gifts.

In her later years, Sarah Smith still traveled to camp meetings and encouraged all around her to trust the Lord in every circumstance. She shared her testimony of having been healed of various serious ailments. She had attended many on their deathbeds. She had experienced dreams and visions and miraculous occurrences. She had seen God at work in many incredible ways. She was quick to rejoice in the Lord. The final words of her testimony are a challenge: “Good-by; meet me in Heaven.”

—Betty Ruth Tippin

Back to Contents

Bramwell-Booth, Catherine. Catherine Booth: The Story of Her Loves. London: Hodder, 1970.

Duff, Mildred. Catherine Booth. 1907. Reprinted Salem, OH: Schmul, 1980.

Green, Roger Joseph. Catherine Booth: a Biography of the Co-Founder of the Salvation Army. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.

Hattersley, Roy. Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.

Davidson, Hannah Frances. South and South Central Africa: A Record of Fifteen Years Missionary Labors Among Primitive Peoples. 1914.

Sider, E. Morris. “Hannah Frances Davidson,” in Nine Portraits. Nappanee, IN: Evangel, 1979.

Barbour, Hugh. Margaret Fell Speaking. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 206. March 1976.

Edwards, Patricia. Friends Women in Ministry. Richmond, IN: Friends United, 1990.

Kunze, Bonnelyn Young. Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. Stanford UP, 1994.

Ross, Isabel. Margaret Fell, Mother of Quakerism. London: Longman, 1949.

Haines, Lee. Laura Smith Haviland: A Woman’s Life Work. Pamphlet. Marion, IN: The Wesleyan Church, n.d.

Haviland, Laura Smith. A Woman’s Life Work: Labours and Experiences of Laura S. Haviland. Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1882. Text available online at http://memory.loc.gov/.

Carpenter, Adella P. Ellen Lois Roberts. Chicago: Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926.

Roberts, Ellen Lois. Extracts from the Writings of Mrs. Ellen Lois Roberts. Chicago: S.K.J. Chesbro, c.1908.

Brown, Charles Ewing. When the Trumpet Sounded: A History of the Church of God Reformation Movement. Anderson, IN: Warner Press, 1951.

Byers, A. L. Birth of a Reformation: Life and Labors of D. S. Warner. Anderson, IN: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1921 (reprinted by, Guthrie, OK: Faith Publishing House, 1966).

Byrum, N. H. Familiar Names and Faces. Moundsville, WV: Gospel Trumpet, 1902. Includes a lengthy testimony by Mother Sarah Smith.

Cole, Mary. Trials and Triumphs of Faith. Anderson, IN: Gospel Trumpet, 1914.

Smith, John W. V. The Quest for Holiness and Unity: A Centennial History of the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana). Anderson, IN: Warner Press, 1980.

Lucy Anderson, is a recorded minister with the Evangelical Friends.

Dr. Gloria J. Bell serves as academic vice president and dean at Southern Wesleyan University, where she is also professor of English.

Dr. Carol A. Blessing serves as associate professor of literature at Point Loma Nazarene University, where she also teaches in the Women’s Studies program.

Rev. Kathy Callahan-Howell is founding pastor of Winton Community Free Methodist Church.

Mrs. Frances C. Dingman serves as museum coordinator, Western Territory, The Salvation Army.

Mrs. Billie Faye Harvey, retired from her service as alumni director at Southern Wesleyan University, continues a ministry of writing.

Rev. Dr. Janet M. Peifer, serves as director of pastoral care at Messiah Village, a continuing care retirement community near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Rev. Betty Ruth Tippin is a minister in the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana).