MECS Mission Board Leader W. W. Pinson, from Travis Park UMC, http://www.travispark.org/who-we-are/history Pinson was born in Cheathan County, Tennessee, in 1854. He joined the Tennessee Conference in 1878. After serving pastorates in Tennessee with great success, he transferred to the Texas Conference to serve pastorates in […]
First President Of The WFMS Of The MECS Julianna Gordon was born in 1813 in Northumberland County, Virginia. She married the Reverend Thomas C. Hayes, a member of the Baltimore Conference, in 1843. She became active in the Baltimore women’s missionary groups and was president of one of them, the Trinity Bible Mission, when the […]
First Single Woman Missionary Of MECS Lochie Rankin was the first unmarried woman to be sent abroad as a missionary by the MECS. She was also the first missionary supported by the Woman’s Foreign Mission Society of the church. She was born in Milan, Tennessee, in 1851. Upon reaching young womanhood, she volunteered herself for […]
Leaders Of Southern Methodist Women’s Mission Organizations Lucinda Helm Lucinda Helm was born in 1839, the daughter of John Larue Helm, a railroad president and governor of Kentucky. John Helm established the family seat near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where his daughters lived out their lives. A brother, Ben Hardin Helm, was killed in the Civil War […]
Kiowa Preacher The Kiowa preacher known as Kicking Bird was born in 1863 in western Oklahoma, son of Horn-On, a chieftan and priest. He was trained to succeed his father in those roles. He served as a scout for the U.S. Army, 1892-1895, mustering out with the rank of sergeant. Returning to his tribe, he […]
Leader Of Southern Methodist Missions John B. McFerrin, aside from bishops the most significant figure of the MECS in the nineteenth century, was born in 1807 near Nashville. Licensed to preach at age eighteen, he received appointment to be missionary to the Cherokees from 1826-1828. After pastoring several churches, he was named presiding elder in […]
Translators Of Methodism Into Croatian When Peter and Heidi Zunic followed God’s call to preach the gospel in Croatia, provide people with counseling and so play a part in building the kingdom of God, they could not possibly have envisaged that they would also be working on the production of Christian literature. But they very […]
Missionaries And Mission Supporters David Kelley was born in Tennessee to a prominent Methodist family in 1833. A precocious lad, he was graduated from college at eighteen, entered the Methodist ministry at nineteen, and received a medical degree at twenty. His mother, Margaret Lavinia Kelley, founded the first women’s missionary support group in her minister-husband’s […]
Founder Of Plantation Missions Capers was born in South Carolina in 1790, the son of a well-to-do rice plantation owner. Given a fine classical education in his youth, he became a Methodist preacher at the age of eighteen and accepted a charge in the South Carolina Conference. After several years of pastoral service, Capers was […]
Leader Of Southern Methodist Missions Edmund Sehon was a member of the Ohio Annual Conference at the time of the dissolution of the bonds between Northern and Southern Methodism in 1844 and probably intended to remain in that connection. But the manner of the Ohio Conference’s dealing with Bishop Joshua Soule in 1845 (it would […]